Hepcat thinks Steven Johnson is a very, very interesting. And he lives in Park Slope, too. There was something in the Times’ about him on Monday.

From the Times: In his recent book, “The Ghost Map: The Story of London’s Most
Terrifying Epidemic — and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the
Modern World” (Riverhead), Mr. Johnson explains how the mystery behind
the rapid spread of disease in the Golden Square area of London was
solved, largely by a local clergyman, Henry Whitehead, and a doctor,
John Snow. Through Whitehead’s knowledge of the residents and Snow’s
maps connecting the location of cholera deaths with street pumps in the
neighborhood, the disease was ultimately traced to a sick baby’s
diapers that contaminated a well on Broad Street.

Mr. Johnson,
38, brings this same street-level awareness to his latest Web site,
outside.in, which collects and displays information based on ZIP codes,
from a real-estate open house to a police report to a parent’s
impassioned opinion of a neighborhood school.

“Intuitively, we
make a huge number of decisions about what’s relevant to us based on
geography,” Mr. Johnson said during a recent interview in his home
office in Brooklyn. “All the time we think about, ‘I’m interested in
this restaurant or this school or this park because it’s near me.’ But
the Web traditionally has not been organized around geography. It’s
been organized around information space.”

Mr. Johnson did not
start writing “The Ghost Map” with a related Web site in mind;
outside.in took shape as he was finishing the book. Nor is this the
first time he has developed Web sites linked — in his own mind at least
— to books he was writing.

While working on “Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software” (Scribner, 2001) Mr. Johnson developed plastic.com,
a Web site where people could discuss pop culture, politics and
technology; it became among the first sites to feature content
generated by users.

His book “Interface Culture: How New
Technology Transforms the Way We Create and Communicate”
(HarperSanFrancisco, 1997) coincided with his Web site, Feed, which
offered news and commentary. (Plastic is still online, but Feed is
not.) Mr. Johnson’s other books are “Everything Bad Is Good for You”
(Riverhead Books, 2005) and “Mind Wide Open: Your Brain and the
Neuroscience of Everyday Life” (Scribner, 2004). He also teaches at New York University’s
journalism school, has written for Wired, Discover, and The New York
Times Magazine and is currently spending a month writing for
TimesSelect, an online commentary service of The Times.