Just heard another pitch for a hamster-wheel business. “We want to let people organise their stuff” translates to “We want to sell advertising space to brands and a ‘service’ to people who want to sign up for ‘information’ about a bunch of brands while organising their stuff”. Confusion still reigns about who the real customer…

When Occupy popped up last year, people would say “What are they protesting about? They don’t believe in anything”. That was how it looked, but there was more to it than that. They were occupying the here and now expressly *without* common purpose or agenda – and the process of doing that is a very…

I’m reading Le Carré’s The Honourable Schoolboy. This post contains spoilers but since the book was first published in 1977 I’m going to blunder in anyway. I’m about 150 pages in.  The last 50 pages or so have been a description of a mission that it turns out is all about getting details of a…

This is a development of the way I’ve been thinking for a while.  And what I wrote yesterday about organising all this stuff is part of it too. So I talked at a gaming unconference on Saturday about Culturematics, open sourcing their development and opening up the data that they produce. This is what I…

I have been creating stuff on the web for more about fifteen years. That thought alone depresses me – on the one hand it seems overwhelmingly huge, there’s so much of it out there accumulated over five thousand days – but on the other it all seems trivial and insubstantial, a whole load of blether,…

Someone needs to say they’re going to show up for it. That’s what makes stuff happen. Lots of other important things help too, but it really kicks off when someone says “I’m going to be there or do this, no really, I am, I don’t care if nobody else does, I am.” That’s what makes…