- Blog
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A distributed business
Up many flights of stairs to the not-very-glamorous offices of brainy trend-spotters Sense Worldwide. Jeremy Brown, Tom Savigar, Raj Panjwani and Inma Martinez run an unusual business, employing only 8 staff but with on-demand access to about 1,000 other people from a global email network of egg heads, designers, fashion victims, people watchers and journos…
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Pilger vs. Lloyd in The New Statesman
Absolutely compelling war writing in this week’s New Statesman. John Pilger’s article is bitter, Messianic, despairing stuff. For him, the actual conduct of the war confirms everything he said and thought in advance: “…a glimpse of fascism”. John Lloyd – one time editor of the magazine – is a pro-war Blairite. His angry article is…
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Radio stars
To unlovely Shoreditch via lovely Liverpool Street Station with its disfiguring retail warts (the station concourse and train shed remain beautiful but only if you hold up your hand to block out the sediment of Sock Shops and Soup Shacks up to about first floor level) to meet Matt Hall, head of radio for Somethin’…
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An Athens by the Central Line
So UpMyStreet – apparently a latterday Athens peopled entirely by cool, fun people who worry about things like geo-encoding their web site – has gone bust. Over at NTK the shock was so great they announced a total cessation of sarcasm for a minute to record the company’s simultaneous slashdotting and receivership. Elsewhere, no one…
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Word out (but not up)
Word is a worthy and probably doomed attempt to tackle books, cinema, music, art… everything really… for literate middle-brows in one monthly magazine. It’s the first project from the stellar Development Hell team, edited by Mark Ellen and with all sorts of top names popping up throughout: David Quantick, Paul du Noyer, John Naughton. It’s…
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Beeb to Charter renewal opponents: ‘give up now’
According to Dan Milmo and Maggie Brown in The Guardian: “The BBC has begun a three-year battle to secure its future and retain the ?2.5bn licence fee by appointing a team of 50 to work on a new royal charter.” Most UK businesses and many of the corporation’s most important competitors, especially online, employ fewer…
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Churchillian in more ways than one
Ed Richards, principle advisor on Telecoms and new media to the Prime Minister until he took a job at Ofcom last week, reveals Tony Blair’s decisiveness on Broadband Britain: “First, I want you to tell me what this broadband thing is. Second, I want you to tell me why it’s in crisis, and third, I…
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Mars please…
Oliver Morton, who wrote the excellent Mapping Mars, says in Wired that we should scrap the shuttle and head straight for Mars. I’m in.