My friend Amy Alkon has discovered a wonderful homeless artist in LA named Gary Musselman, and we’re going to try to work with him to get some customers for his art. (He has sold his work to at least one customer in the Starbucks where he sits and does his drawing, but only got a […]
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I grow weary of people comparing compulsory state ID cards to supermarket loyalty cards - too weary, in fact, to take the conversation much further with such people. JP Rangaswami sums up the differences in a very tidy way:
I don’t have to have a passport. But there are things I can’t do if I don’t […]
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Dennis Howlett thinks I (financing my blog with my own cash and time) am like David Milliband (financing our blog with our cash and our time) because I have comments on this blog disabled by default while David Milliband simply cherry picks the complimentary comments to publish and blocks the inconvenient ones.
No, I don’t get […]
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It took getting pumped full of bullets by Al Qaeda for journalist Frank Gardner to realise that the bad guys don’t check your credentials before they try to kill you, because your credentials amount to diddly squat when you’re an infidel:
[I]t crossed my mind how unfair this was. I had spent four years studying Islam […]
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David Milliband, Minister of Communities and Local Government, is happy for (undisclosed) government employees to post comments full of praise for him on the taxpayer-owned blog he uses to promote himself and his department. When a taxpayer - in this case, journalist David Tebbutt - asks if the fawning comment is indeed from a government […]
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Jeff Jarvis is consulting the BBC, and is excited over the Beeb’s claims that it wants to “reinvent” itself. Here’s what I said to Jeff:
Jeff, the point is that the BBC doesn’t want to ‘reinvent’ the very worst element of itself: the funding via shakedown of Joe Public. We’re not talking about a situation where […]
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A huge bouquet of beautiful flowers (and another on the way), sitting on a table in a house that’s been thoroughly cleaned (by somebody else), with all the week’s ironing done (by somebody else), facing a three day weekend with nothing scheduled but unscheduled fun. A clear diary, even for a day or two, […]
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Gosh, I’ve gone all political today. Feels like old times.
Antoine and I are engaged. I have conflicting feelings about marriage. Some of them I can’t quite put my finger on, but a conversation with Antoine and Patrick Crozier before dinner last night did help.
I was saying how strongly in favour of gay marriage […]
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My early morning post about unintended consequences, good and bad, prompted an email exchange between me and our friend Paul Coulam. Paul works in philosophy and publishing, and on my long wishlist of those I’d love to blog, his name is high on the list. Thanks to him for giving me permission to quote from […]
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Last night, we had Brian Micklethwait and Patrick Crozier around for supper. During the meal, Antoine mentioned something about how, in schools where teachers are given performance-related incentives, cheating is much more rife. After all, it’s not in those teachers’ interests to police such things very stringently. Then, after dinner, Patrick said that the ultimate […]
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Not only is Jacques Chirac, no matter what he thinks and says, NOT funding a French ‘Google killer,’ he “doesn’t even know what a mouse is”. And that comes directly from a guy who’s a partner in the French non-’Google killer’. Search expert John Battelle interviewed the guy, Francois Bourdoncle, and writes:
So what is [Chirac] […]
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My friend (and beauty blog co-editor) Hillary Johnson is working a new gig right now, helping a hardware start-up manage its considerable IP. What’s that mean?
My job, right now, is to attempt to build up a methodology that can support an inventor’s native processes, to get the inventor’s creative output to stream into the […]
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Has Hollywood discovered the long tail by accident? If they are indeed improving box office takings by selling less of more, like Amazon and Netflix do - that is, fewer tickets per film, but lots more films showing - then perhaps this is what will finally kill the unsustainable, economically bankrupt, overblown budget model. We […]
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My decision to concentrate on positive people/situations and let negative relationships/situations die of neglect has been a good one. If nothing else, it has left me continually gobsmacked by how much support I receive from so many positive people. Not all of them are necessarily friends (my definition of friendship being, I hope, not that […]
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