The following email was sent today to the MIT community by President L. Rafael Reif.

Joi Ito (previously) is the Director of MIT's Media Lab, an appointment that raised a few eyebrows because Joi never got an undergrad degree, much less a doctorate.

I first started writing about the remarkable Joi Ito in 2002, and over the decade and a half since, I've marvelled at his polymath abilities -- running international Creative Commons, starting and investing in remarkable tech businesses, getting Timothy Leary's ashes shot into space, backing Mondo 2000, using a sprawling Warcraft raiding guild to experiment with leadership and team structures, and now, running MIT's storied Media Lab -- and I've watched with excitement as he's distilled his seemingly impossible-to-characterize approach to life in a set of 9 compact principles, which he and Jeff Howe have turned into Whiplash, a voraciously readable, extremely exciting, and eminently sensible book.

Joi Ito (previously) — director of MIT Media Lab, former Creative Commons chief, investor, entrepreneur, and happy mutant — interviewed Barack Obama for a special, Obama-edited issue of Wired.

Joi Ito, director of the MIT Media Lab and former CEO of Creative Commons, founder of the first ISP in Japan, has penned an outstanding editorial describing the ways in which narrow corporate interests and legislative capture produce bad tech policies that threaten the net.

Congratulations to our pal Joi Ito who has just been named the new director of the MIT Media Lab! I can't wait to see how Joi's incredible vision, creativity, curiosity, and kindness impact the place. From John Markoff's article in the New York Times:

Mr.

Joi Ito: I change my bag depending on whether it's likely I'll be riding a bike, snowmobile, etc. I also sometimes carry an iPad. The amount and type of dive gear and camera(s) changes with where I'm traveling to as well. However, this is a pretty good sample of what is typically in my bag these days.

I've finally dug far enough through my pile of must-read books to have a proper look at Joi Ito's wonderful book of freely licensed photography, FreeSouls. For years, Joi has travelled the world, photographing the activists, creators, inventors, hackers and entrepreneurs he's met. — Read the rest

(Image: Joi Ito). Blogger, photographer, tech investor, WoW guild overlord, Creative Commons CEO, and periodic Boing Boing Video guest star Joi Ito recently became a part-time resident of Dubai. I've followed his explorations of that city-state with much interest, and have been wondering what he thinks about the current flood of negative news coverage of Dubai amid the econopocalypse. — Read the rest

I hope you are sitting down when you hit "play." Joi Ito, the host of today's special Boing Boing tv episode from Tokyo, explains what you're about to witness:

This year, the Digital Garage New Context Conference and Ellen Levy's Silicon Valley Connect worked together on a program for visitors from Silicon Valley to Tokyo.

The Boing Boing tv crew is taking this end-of-summer week off from production, so we're revisiting some of our favorite episodes from the last couple of months — fun stuff you may have missed. Today, one of my personal all-time favorites: takenoko (竹の子), young bamboo shoots, with Joi Ito and original music by Ryuichi Sakamoto. — Read the rest

Joi Ito's got a new book coming out — a collection of photos of people he knows through the free culture/copyfight movements. They're lovely portrait shots and they're all CC Attribution licensed for a broad range of uses, creating a pool of good stock photos of people from the movement. — Read the rest

(Update: our video host experienced a service outage today, here's the YouTube video link in case you're unable to view the video as embedded above.)

Boing Boing tv passes the 150th episode mark today, and we're celebrating by cooking up some delicious takenoko (竹の子­), young bamboo shoots, with Joi Ito — and original music by Ryuichi Sakamoto. — Read the rest

Joi Ito's talk at the 23rd Chaos Communications Congress in Berlin last week aimed to explain his obsession with World of Warcraft and MMOs in general. I saw Joi give a version of this talk once before — he's basically working on the idea that these tools are an amazing way to learn leadership, teamwork, project management, planning and so forth (and he notes that blue-collar construction workers are generally better leaders than MBAs). — Read the rest

To mark the tenth anniversary of Timothy Leary's death, Joi Ito has posted a long remembrance of his relationship with the man — physchedelic guru and cyber-enthusiast. Joi was Leary's godson and the executor of his estate.

In LA, I spent a lot of time with Tim working on a book and producing a TV show in Japan called "The New Breed" based on our conversations.

Snip from Joi Ito's blog:

In the middle of my slightly insane two sleepless days at OSCON, I got an email from the New York Times asking me to write an op ed. They wanted me to write about my thoughts about the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki for the occasion of the 60th anniversary of the bombing.

An insightful series of travelogue posts from Joi Ito, who is presently geeking out among bloggers in SoKo.

Korea is reported by the OECD to have the highest high-speed Internet penetration of any nation. Korea has an extremely vibrant gaming, blogging, mobile phone and youth culture scene and I was eager to find out more about what was going on.

Joi Ito has posted a neat photo set documenting the process of hunting, unearthing, prepping, and cooking bamboo shoots. They're called takenoko in Japanese, and they're mighty delicioso. "It's nearing the end of the season," he says, "but there were still enough in our backyard for a few meals' worth." — Read the rest

Joi Ito tried out a crappy service called SMS.ac that immediately spammed his whole address book. So he quit the service and posted a public apology on his blog. Now the company that makes SMS.ac is threatening to sue him for libel and for infringing their trademark (e.g., — Read the rest

Joi Ito says:

I've just been nominated to the board of ICANN (Internet Corporation For Assigned Names and Numbers) and will be officially joining already seated members at the conclusion of the ICANN Meeting in Cape Town, South Africa, December 1 – 5.