Cory Doctorow is the co-editor of Boing Boing, a very popular weblog about technology, culture, and politics. He has written three science-fiction novels, all published by Tor Books (Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, 2003, Eastern Standard Tribe, 2004, Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town, 2005), and a short story collection published by Avalon (A Place So Foreign and Eight More, 2003). He has also written for various publications including Wired, Popular Science and Salon. Doctorow, a visiting professor to USC's Center on Public Diplomacy and Canadian Fulbright Chair in Public Diplomacy for 2006-2007, is an activist, a writer, a blogger, a public speaker, and a technology person. Born in Toronto, Canada, on July 17, 1971 to Trotskyist schoolteachers, Doctorow was exposed to both science-fiction and computers at an early age and has spent most of his life behind a keyboard. Doctorow serves on a number of boards of directors and advisory boards, including those of the Participatory Culture Foundation, the Open Rights Group, the MetaBrainz Foundation, Technorati, Inc, Onion Networks, and others; as well as the confernece committee for the O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference. He co-founded the open source P2P technology company OpenCola, which was sold to OpenText in 2003.