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Alexis Madrigal

Alexis Madrigal - Alexis Madrigal is a senior editor at The Atlantic. He's the author of Powering the Dream: The History and Promise of Green Technology.
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The New York Observer calls him, "for all intents and purposes, the perfect modern reporter." Madrigal co-founded Longshot magazine, a high-speed media experiment that garnered attention from The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and the BBC. While at Wired.com, he built Wired Science into one of the most popular blogs in the world. The site was nominated for best magazine blog by the MPA and best science Web site in the 2009 Webby Awards. He also co-founded Haiti ReWired, a groundbreaking community dedicated to the discussion of technology, infrastructure, and the future of Haiti.

He's spoken at Stanford, CalTech, Berkeley, SXSW, E3, and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, and his writing was anthologized in Best Technology Writing 2010 (Yale University Press).

Madrigal is a visiting scholar at the University of California at Berkeley's Office for the History of Science and Technology. Born in Mexico City, he grew up in the exurbs north of Portland, Oregon, and now lives in Oakland.
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@MayorEmanuel's Creator, Dan Sinker, at the Personal Democracy Forum

By Alexis Madrigal

Jun 6 2011, 6:00 PM ET Comment

What a profane Twitter novel has taught Sinker about how information flows on the Web

Our old friend Dan Sinker, who outed himself as the author of the @MayorEmanuel Twitter account here on TheAtlantic.com, gave a talk today at the Personal Democracy Forum in New York about what happened after our story.

"Just an hour and forty-five minutes after the news broke, the real-time Web had delivered newsmen onto my front stoop," Sinker said. It's true, too. I remember his stunned emails from that time, which could probably be distilled into three letters: WTF.

In this talk, he uses that experience as a jumping off point for looking at real-time information distribution at web-scale.

Oh, and in other Sinker news, the @MayorEmanuel saga is coming out in book form on September 13.



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