Off the clock

Clients hire me to read crawl data, but it helps to know the fellow reading it. I've been curious about nearly everything for as long as I can remember, and I've never been very good at picking just one thing. Here's the rest of the story, told plainly and with as little bragging as I can manage.

A Honolulu boyhood

I grew up in Honolulu, in Salt Lake, the neighborhood next to the airport (not the one in Utah, whatever the AI summaries say). I went to Aliamanu Elementary, right there in the neighborhood, from kindergarten through sixth grade, then to Saint Louis School for seventh through twelfth grade, where I somehow ended up student body president while also doing JROTC, the Ranger Club, wrestling, the newspaper, the yearbook, the photography club, and the Bullseye Club. I ran out of high school courses before I ran out of high school, so I took philosophy classes at Chaminade University, which shared the school's campus.

My father was a photographer, and my mother had traveled through Europe and the United States before I came along, so hopping on a plane was simply normal in the Abraham household. Once, when an eruption was announced, my dad pulled me out of elementary school to fly to the Big Island and see it. Tramping around on lava flows at nine years old makes a lasting impression on a kid.

College, crew, and a year abroad

Washington got me first through Close Up, a summer program on politics for high school students. Then a GW catalog arrived at home in Honolulu with a photo of the crew rowing across a glassy, misty Potomac at dawn, and that was that. I came to Washington for The George Washington University. I started in political science, switched to American literature, and minored in creative writing; I'm told mine was one of the last American literature degrees GW ever granted. I'd never rowed a stroke, but I'd seen Oxford Blues in high school, so naturally I rowed heavyweight crew, was a founding father of the Phi Kappa Psi chapter on campus, hosted a weekly house music and comedy show on WRGW radio, interned in the Washington bureau of The Baltimore Sun, and edited the English department's newsletter.

My adviser, the English professor Robert Combs, steered me toward a year abroad, so midway through I spent a year at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, England, reading postwar American literature. I rowed for UEA too, worked the door as a bouncer at the student nightclub, spent weekends in Paris whenever the budget allowed, and once left class for two weeks to trek the Kathmandu Valley. Then I took a year off before my senior year and went home to Honolulu to work as a commercial photographer, studying French at the University of Hawaiʻi on the side. Later I sold my work as a stock photographer through an agency in New York.

GW Today, the university's news site, once wrote up some of this story, and I'll admit I still think of old buff and blue every time I get all the cartoons in The New Yorker.

Languages, mostly attempted

French in Hawaii, German at the Goethe-Institut in Washington and again in Berlin. My German is solidly A2, which is enough to order lunch with confidence and apologize for it fluently. Abraham Harrison, the firm I co-founded, ran for a time from Washington, Portland, and Berlin, so the lessons got real use.

Online before it was a career

Back when getting online meant a modem and patience, I joined ArtsWire, then The Meta Network, one of Washington's first online communities, then Brainstorms, and The WELL, where I've kept a home ever since; that's why my email ends in well.com. None of it would have happened without my first job out of college: administering the image center at PNI, Picture Network International, part of SRA in Arlington. Down in the basement of the same building worked Metasystems Design Group, which ran The Meta Network at tmn.com and doubled as an internet service provider. That basement is where I met my true mentors, a father and son: Frank Burns and his son Scott Burns. Frank was a retired Army lieutenant colonel with a Silver Star from Vietnam, widely credited with the "Be All That You Can Be" slogan, and the director of the Army's Task Force Delta, the unconventional brain trust Jon Ronson later wrote about in The Men Who Stare at Goats. In retirement Frank led Metasystems Design Group, known for the Caucus conferencing software, with Scott beside him building tools for people to think together online, and I later worked in a support role on Frank's New MetaNet. Between the two of them I learned most of what I believe about online community, and a great deal about everything else.

I built websites by hand for anyone who'd let me, including sites for a consulting firm, a production company, the Shadow Conventions, and the Treasury Department, and I worked as a Linux system administrator at Caucus Systems, hosting professional virtual events on its conferencing software.

I also co-taught, with Ginny Little, one of the first fully accredited online high school courses: creative writing for EFA, a magnet program of the Kalamazoo Public Schools in Michigan, with more than sixty students logging in from around the area. The lesson I took from it, and later wrote a column about, is that children naturally want to show what they know. And I became an associate of Howard Rheingold, the author of The Virtual Community, at Rheingold Associates; my old team bio is still up, which delights me more than it should.

I published a memetic lexicon at Memes.org, founded MemeSpace, a free online community of more than 800 "memebers" that The New York Times once wrote about, running its first version on Caucus, which its creator, Charles Roth, generously let me use for free, and ran a little online publication called The Caffeinated Magazine. Caucus deserves its own footnote in internet history: Charles Roth conceived and built it at Wayne State University in the early 1980s, then formed Camber-Roth to distribute it, and it went on to power web-based learning, collaborative forums, and a good many of the first virtual communities. I'm happy to be one of the people carrying that story forward. These days I'm the founding moderator of r/slowjogging, a Reddit community of more than 16,000 people practicing the gentle, smile-while-you-run method of the late Japanese exercise physiologist Hiroaki Tanaka. After nine years it still has nothing to sell: no coaching funnel, no membership tier, no merchandise. Watching ideas spread and mutate online for as long as I have turns out to be excellent training for understanding how AI assistants pick up and repeat what they read.

"I met Chris … as part of my work for Arts Wire, an online network for artists. He was an early adopter of the Web and has context."

Beth Kanter, master trainer and nonprofit innovator in networks, learning, and social media

Hyperfiction

Before anybody called it electronic literature, I was writing it. I was one of the eight writers of Name is Scibe, a collaborative hyperfiction that Judy Malloy, one of the true pioneers of the form, began on Arts Wire and The WELL. Her own history of the piece lists the writers, and The WELL still hosts the original text, my entries included. Then I led my own: 8: A Collaborative Hypernarrative Fiction, or Collabor8, written over a full year by a group of friends, with each story broken into linked fragments that readers wandered through in their own order. Pieces of it survive as found poems with titles like "Chocolate City," "TheBUS," and "Blue plastic kayaks." Afterward I started Coelaboration, a site for collaborative writing with a featured writer each month and the beginnings of yet another hypernarrative.

It turns out that writing stories as a web of linked pages is decent preparation for a career thinking about how crawlers move through websites.

Lodge, rite, and parish

I'm a Master Mason at Naval Lodge No. 4 on Capitol Hill, the oldest continuously operating lodge in the District of Columbia, first chartered in 1805. I'm also a 32nd degree Scottish Rite Mason in the Southern Jurisdiction, whose headquarters, the House of the Temple, sits on 16th Street in Washington. Before that I served on the vestry of St. Monica and St. James, an Episcopal parish on Capitol Hill, and, naturally, I ended up as its webmaster too.

Renaissance Weekend

I've been a member of Renaissance Weekend for many years, though I haven't made it to one in a while: invitation-only, off-the-record gatherings where a physicist, a poet, a senator, and a teenager might share a panel. I've moderated sessions and worn the blue dot. It's the closest thing I know to a polymath's playground, and it's taught me that the best ideas come from people outside your own field.

At one Renaissance Weekend I shared a panel with Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn, the two engineers who designed the internet's core protocols. Just those two and me. At others I spent a lot of happy hours with Esther Dyson, the investor and early internet thinker who trained as a backup cosmonaut, in her trademark jeans.

Away from Renaissance Weekend, the early internet has been a small and generous world. Howard Rheingold brought me into his consultancy as an associate, and I once found myself at a house party at Guy Kawasaki's home in Silicon Valley, which is about as Valley as an evening gets.

Miriam's Kitchen

For years I volunteered as a sous chef at Miriam's Kitchen, which works to end chronic homelessness in Washington. Cooking for guests who deserved a good meal was the most useful work I did all week, nobody in that kitchen cared about my rankings, and I hope to be back at the cutting board one day.

On the water and on the road

I was a senior member of the Potomac Boat Club, founded in 1869 and one of the oldest rowing clubs in the country, and I may well be again someday. For years I kept my own racing shell, a heavyweight Hudson carbon single, at Thompson Boat Center, and I eventually gave it to the club to join its fleet of training singles, where it can teach somebody else what Oxford Blues taught me. On land I'm a slow jogger, which is exactly as fast as it sounds. If I'm honest, these days it's not enough jogging and plenty of modding.

Teaching and talking

I've been a guest lecturer at Georgetown, GW, American University, the University of Maryland, the University of Oregon, and Columbia, and I taught blogging and early SEO at The Writer's Center in Bethesda. I've been called on by BBC World Service and CNN Radio to talk about technology and the internet, and I spoke on a panel at South by Southwest.

Why any of this matters to you

I spent a good part of my career on the bleeding edge: online events before anyone had heard of webinars, hyperfiction before e-lit had a name, memes before they were jokes, reputation management before it was an industry. These days I'm happy on the bleedy edge, early enough to put new tools to work for clients and seasoned enough to know which ones have earned it.

A polymath is a big word for a modest man, so I'll settle for generalist with a specialty. Literature taught me to read closely, photography taught me to notice what's in the frame and what isn't, rowing taught me that nothing moves unless everyone pulls together, and the lodge taught me patience with ritual and process. All of it shows up when I'm looking at your site. Back to the work side of my story, or say hello.

Updated October 6, 2026