ApacheCon NA 2010
Dana Blankenhorn
Sessions
Dana will be speaking in the following sessions:
Dana Blankenhorn is, like Stormy Peters of Gnome, Jim Whitehurst of Red Hat, and John Doerr of Kleiner Perkins, a graduate of Rice University. That and $2 will get you on MARTA.
He began covering technology in 1982 with the Atlanta Business Chronicle. A year later he was laid off and went to Spring Comdex with business cards reading "Have Modem, Will Travel."
He achieved that goal in 1985, joining the staff of Newsbytes, the pioneering online news service. In 1994 he was fired by Newsbytes and joined Interactive Age, where his daily coverage of the Internet convinced management to change the magazine's focus from two-way cable to the online world. The magazine folded three months later. (But the staff did get to have dinner at a table with Scott Adams.)
Since then he has been mainly unemployable. He launched a newsletter on e-commerce called a-clue.com in 1997, started blogging about The Internet of Things in 2003, and was asked to join ZDNet in 2005 on a new beat for him called open source. There he is usually called either a crazy idealist or a corporate shill. He has also added a healthcare beat for ZDNet and SmartPlanet, where he is usually called an Obama socialist.
Dana still lives in Atlanta, near the East Lake MARTA station, because his dear wife Jenni heeded the call of his first journalism teacher that "if you want a good living get a spouse with a good job." She knows Cobol, assembler, and how to get along well with other developers. Unlike her husband she is a successful Rice graduate.
His two kids have graduated the Atlanta public schools and now struggle in college.
Last month his dog died. He's a cat person.
