A list of Questions
Here’s some self indulgent twaddle:
Bought a good book recently with some questions in
What turns me on?
My Partner
Music
Quest for knowledge
technology and change
Human experience
Travelling
how rich do I want to be?
I would like to have £4million pounds in the bank and modest assets
what would I do if I could afford to?
Set up a knowledge trust to help kids reach potential
Start a record label
Write a thesis on the frequency of Karma
is my family behind me?
Yes – to a degree!
what do you want for your kids
Lots of sweets and a good dentist
Plus I want them to have choice and freedom to express themselves
Take a risk rating
7 – I like risks, but tend to be very cautious in situations i do not understand at all
what are the things that really matter to me?
Family
Creative expression
The Sea
Compassion
The ability to choose
Health
where does it fit in the big picture?
Hopefully my life will have a positive effect on the next generation
who are my business heroes?
Richard Branson, George Soros, Dale Vince
what use are notes?
Important for learning
shut up!
Ivor at his best
Make ‘Hey!’ while the sun shines
This is quite a useful service
Its such a modern phenomenon, especially the friendly ‘2.0′ web phenomenon that sites are now using the word ‘Hey’ (usually with an exclamation mark) to convey a sense of friendliness and approachability. It does remind me of the simple manner of direct marketing in the 50’s – along with the pastel colours and the ‘pop out’ rosettas.
I am no cynic, but I do find it a little patronising when sites take this over friendly approach. I much prefer a sensible approach to marketing, one that thinks about (and is measured to) its audience.
Anyway, enough pontificating about shit – here’s the pixies version of Hey!
ihazsupper
Drawn by inspiration from a chat with Pytey about the iphone-dev saga. Please note, I am not insinuating anything about WOZ in this picture, have a look at the original. Not sure what the original artist was suggesting either though ^^.
Banksy is unmasked
I feel a bit cheated, Banksy is a bloke? I prefer to think of him as a mute, mystical cartoon like figure that wafts around the streets of the world – the only form of communication being his ability to draw stencil art.
My mate recons he went to school with him, recons he was a friend of the family. Well he would say that wouldn’t he.
Lazyweb 2.0
Effort is currency on the lazyweb.
They say:
“Isnt it great? freeware, open source, shareware (you can ignore), cracks, hacks, everything for free!, but don’t give me bad, no if its free it has to be good, in fact – tailored, bug free, great for me”
“the lazyweb will solve it, the lazyweb will fix it, I can count on someone getting enough kudos from solving/creating/fixing/updating it to get what I need for free. If they fuck it up I will complain and ruin them, yes my opinion counts”
“Hang on, I am taking some time out of my day to use this free/share/open/ware/service, you are ’stealing’ my attention! you owe me a good service. If I bother to use your thing (even though the thing is free) surely your thing has to be good, surely I am now giving you my time, you must justify it by giving me good service. Now now now! If not I will use your competitor. How dare you steal my time!”
“If i bother to download your free software or use your free service, or use your open source work and make it into something I own and can make money from, something that improves my life! But I will not pay, not in any way. Unless you give me a reason to pay – then I might.
As good will on the internet grows, so does bad attitude.
Effort is currency on the lazyweb.
Phreaking Great
This is a fantastic BBC Radio3 documentary on Phone Phreaking. Interesting insights into Bell’s monopoly at that time too. I remember listening to the subtle noises on a dead phone line as a child and being amazed that I could sometimes hear other peoples conversations, even though very faintly. The fact that you could dial the whole world from this device really sparked my imagination.
http://www.simonsound.co.uk/connecting.html
Best quotes from the blind Joy Bubbles:
“I can recognise the number of hertz to within 1%”
“I could call around the world by whistling”
The Pheromone Trail
Ants and pheromones are the basis for some work I am doing producing ‘The Pheromone Trail’ a set of short stories for adults in children’s book form.
“As one successful forager lays a pheromone trail, many ants are recruited to that resource. Consequently, pheromone trails result in the mass recruitment of foragers to a resource. Mass recruitment is the recruitment of many individuals to an area where work is required. This leads to rapid exploitation of resources.” Quoted from this page
Its being produced as an explanation of human endeavour and thought patterns that go beyond what we are currently capable of, or to put it simply “human development”. We can look to ants as a way to study ourselves, our own possibilities and structure as a species.
This interests me as it goes some way to explaining the existence of meme’s – not a new phenomenon, but one that has become more and more apparent as the internet shares more and more information about us as a species. We are much more able to see the patterns and ideas that exactly match our own – though often completely unconnected, they can often be shown to be doppelgänger’s of our own thought patterns.
On origin of Extensions
Well there is a lot of fuss about ICANN’s proposal to add unlimited domain extensions. I believe that this will have a two fold effect on current domain values.
- Domain values of recognised extensions (.com, .uk, .de) will increase over the next few years while the companies that are building brands under .news .jobs .ebay etc are busy working their shit out, spending money promoting their new extensions etc….
- There will come a tipping point when over 10% of direct navigation changes from searchterm.com or searchterm.co.uk to search.term (think of ebay.co.uk changing maybe to uk.ebay) . At this point, current domain brands will be big enough to withstand the change in this activity but new, younger brands will not, rendering the undeveloped, parked, low traffic, searchterm.com nearly valueless. Partly because with an increase in real estate, SEO/ppc/offline marketing will become the major factor, which requires investment, which in turn affects purchase price. Panic selling will become the norm as people try to realise the value of their big domain portfolios. Over the long term – It can only negatively effect prestige in the .tld namespace – prestige being a major valuation factor. i.e. It will be more prestigious to own .brand than brand.com.
My advice. Don’t sit on anything, build it or sell it, unless its making good money on type ins.
Documeme
I had an idea in University which sprung from my interest in online communities such as The Well and my love for the documentary media format, using both photography and film.
Here it is explained and summarised:
A meme (pronounced /mi?m/) consists of any unit of cultural information, such as a practice or idea, that gets transmitted verbally or by repeated action from one mind to another. Examples include thoughts, ideas, theories, practices, habits, songs, dances and moods and terms such as race, culture, and ethnicity.
A Documentary is a creative work of non-fiction.
A DocuMeme is an evolving collection of documentary media centered around a meme.
I need to pilot this.
Finally!
I have:
- Known people who have written blogs
- have commented on other peoples blogs
- thought about doing my own blog
I haven’t (to date)
- written my own blog
Here it is…
