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We’ll be doing the next in-person Living Culture Coffee Morning at Essex Hall this Friday, 5th from 10am. You should come if you’re around. I just realised when I sat down that yesterday’s post wasn’t published. There’s an extra publishing step that I’m somehow tricking myself into thinking doesn’t exist (is a way of saying it’s my fault, not WordPress, but I do think actually that it’s…

I think I may have just accidentally deleted a draft post that I wrote last week, thinking that it had already been published. Oh well, we’ll never know now! I’m working with an ADHD coach at the moment and it’s really helping. One great insight of the last week or so is that the same actions I’ve learned to take to remedy the depletion of executive function (dysregulation) can also be used to…

I went to a day conference on Saturday, called “Resisting Big Tech Empires” run by Global Justice Now at the London South Bank University. I came away remembering that there are an awful lot of people who want to tell other people what to think, what to do and what they’re allowed to say. That was the exhausting bit. It was also lovely to just hang out in a thinky space and see some friends from…

I’m getting back to work, but for that to be really true, I really need to be blogging regularly. So here we go. Someone asked me the other day, what I’d do differently if we got to have a Centre for Creative Collaboration again. The question’s been rolling round in me ever since. My simple/simplistic answer is that I’d bring an Open Space frame to the new space that we found ourselves in – I’d…

An old-fashioned podcast in the “voicemail while walking to the station” tradition. For those not aware, young people, on their Easter holidays from school, have been getting together in an unorganised way, that is to say, not for any reason that is legible to people over about 25 (unless those people do a tiny bit of work to summon up what life was really like when they were 15). What are we…

Two insights into how agent-assisted work feels in my feeds this week: Matt Jones writing in the frame of how the new technology is affecting our relationship to time (as new tech always seems to have done). I don’t know whether I’m rationalising this after the fact (probably) but I did feel a little unease while reading this, which I think I put down at the time to envy of anyone who can pull…

We’ve been having coffee (and often cake and biscuits) on the first Friday of every month at Essex Hall under the heading of “Living Culture Coffee Mornings” for just over a year now. It works brilliantly for some people, not so well for others. And, of course, there are people born every day who haven’t even heard of it. We’re going to keep doing them in person on the first Friday, but I will…

A wordpress.com notification that the site I made 16 years ago has finally made 100 views. Actually that’s not quite accurate, this is the wordpress.com version of the site that I made to house the posterous archive after that went kaput. So this is a) newer than 16 years; and b) not really a site that I’d expect anyone to look at, certainly not a measure of how interesting the project was or…

We’ve had the Gregorian version, the Lunar version, the meteorological first day of spring and in a couple of weeks we’ll have the astrological reboot at the equinox. But I haven’t written here (or very much anywhere else) since December 3rd 2025. That’s not a particularly long hiatus as this blog goes, but I feel in a very different space, a different world, a different me (or at least a…

I’ve got something to tell you. It’ll probably be a surprise, but I think it’s a good surprise… That’s pretty much the line I used when I broke the news to the rest of my family, a few months ago, that I’m going to be a dad again. Yeah. So anyway, we’re now into week 38 and so that means the answer to the most frequently asked question is: “any day now, but next Friday, 12th at the latest”. I…

Write the date at the top of the page and then get on with the day. Because I'm playing with feed readers, I subscribed to the Flickr feed for photos tagged with my name.  I thought I'd just subscribed to my photos, but I think I was also subscribed to new tags already.  Anyway.  A weird thing happens where I periodically get notifications of a few newly tagged photos, and sometimes I'm…

Blogging on the train like it’s 2008. One of my favourite AA sayings is something like “people don’t fail at this programme because they’re too stupid, but some do fail because they’re too clever!”  I find this “game of life” to be like that, whatever you’re playing at right now and whether it feels like it’s  finite or one of those infinite ones.  I think that lately, I mistook one particular…

In his newsletter Dave points to Duncan Brown talking about bookings as an example of what he calls "design by cliché".  It's an interesting idea, but in the case of bookings, I don't think that being a 'cliché' is the problem.   It's more that the reason all these things are called bookings is that once upon a time, the record of the thing it's describing went into a book, an actual book – it…

I heard someone on a call the other day saying "I've just heard of this thing called Personal Knowledge Management or PKM" which reminded me that: "Every day somebody's born who's never seen the Flintstones" But seriously, it got me digging into when I first mentioned PKM on this blog.  And of course it was the very first post in September 2004 🙂 and then a couple of months later I went over to…

I went down to Weymouth for a couple of days this week to see my mum.  On Tuesday we drove over to Lulworth Cove for a coffee, picnic lunch on the beach and an ice cream. https://flic.kr/p/2rChT4Y The first time (maybe) we went there was Easter 1973.  It was quieter than Autumn half-term 2025, the parking wasn't as expensive (or managed via CCTV) and there was less choice of ice-cream.  But we…

It seems that seventeen years ago today, I was in Berlin at the Web 2.0 Expo.   Andrea Vascellari got some video of me asking Tim O'Reilly a question about online/offline relationships.  In retrospect, there's a lot of naivety and privilege in the air. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b1UbTgsH-II I noted: the stories we’re telling are still more about technology than about what people are doing…

I spent a couple of summers in the early eighties selling ice cream, chatting up the odd grockle and looking out over the sea to Portland. The other stream that I take to when I need to calm down a bit is NASA’s HD Views from the International Space Station Recent conversations about “the media”, reboots and regrowing cultures have had me looking back to the good old days of 2006 when I…