I love that the working title of Martha Lane Fox's proposed new public institution is Dot Everyone. Yes, the "everyone" bit is like motherhood and apple pie. It's important, but it's not a strategy. But dots (and we all know that @ signs are so last decade, don't we?), dots are cool. Dots are so cool … Continue reading I ♥︎ Dots: Why I signed Martha Lane Fox’s petition
The web is 21, says Ben Hammersley, it can now legally drink in America. And yet, as it strides out into young adulthood, it has much to learn. At dConstruct we hear some of those lessons - ones about humility, unpredictability and the self-appointed tech community's responsibilities to the rest of humankind. I agree with … Continue reading dConstruct threads: Arrogance, uncertainty and the interconnectedness of (nearly) all things
This is my youngest son, Pascal, when he was two years old. He's looking sheepish because he's just picked an apple. It's an apple from the orchard at Woolsthorpe Manor, Lincolnshire, the orchard where Isaac Newton first conceived of gravity. We were drawn to this beautiful, remote farmhouse for a tea break on a long … Continue reading “The bit where the screen went black and you said ‘look up'”: on the irresistible pull of a story in the place where it happened
Cornelia Parker got the army to blow up a shed full of stuff and then hung the shards from an art gallery ceiling. It felt like a metaphor for almost all the talks at Matt Locke's brilliant event, The Story: everywhere narratives are fragmenting, and no one seems certain how to put them back together. … Continue reading Small pieces loosely joined: on the way home from the Story
The depths of winter, two weeks off to take stock of where we are and where we're going, a chance to catch up with family and friends. We travelled through blizzards, cooked and ate good food, lit fires, drank wine, fiddled with MP3 play-lists, time-shifted TV, and made one (thankfully minor) visit to Accident and Emergency. We … Continue reading And te tide and te time þat tu iboren were, schal beon iblescet
Over the last few days I've had a chance to reflect on the relationship between the mobile web and service design. The more I think about it, the more I'm convinced that the two are tied together, in a way that was not the case with either the PC-based web or pre-internet mobile services. Why? Well … Continue reading A tale of attention and abundance: Why service design matters on the new mobile web
Be it known that at some point in the near future I plan to bloviate on the concept of the prospectus and its coming revival in new and unexpected transmedia formats. Consider this a prospectus. I'm so meta.
It was a delight to welcome the writer Steven Johnson to Leeds last week and to hear first person some of the themes in his book, the Invention of Air. We were, I think, doubly fortunate to hear Steven just a day after his appearance alongside Brian Eno at the ICA. It's worth listening to the … Continue reading The smallest book
In my ramble through the possibilities of Mobile Gothic, Ruskin's fifth quality of Gothic - Rigidity or Obstinacy - was the hardest to express. It may not be all of Christopher Alexander's qwan, but it's certainly an important part of it. At the time I wrote: "The articulation of the parts of the mobile user experience … Continue reading The Hyperjoy of Hypertext
I've always found it strange that Eric S. Raymond chose the cathedral as his metaphor for closed development in free software, because the construction of our great medieval cathedrals must have been a very open process. Passing peasants were doubtless discouraged from picking up a chisel to hack at the nearest stone, but Gothic buildings … Continue reading Mobile Gothic: a flight of fancy
I'm on the bus, checking my RSS feeds with Bloglines Mobile. I see a couple of links I might want for later. The obvious thing would be to bookmark them on Delicious. But that's not an option using the mobile versions of many sites in Opera Mini. So I reach for the nearest scrap of … Continue reading Mobile bookmarking the old-fashioned way
In a single Noisy Decent Graphics post, Ben Terrett effortlessly segues between my two preoccupations of the moment - agonised middle-class parenting, and the superiority of mobile web over fixed. How could I resist? "City kids are not like country kids", he notes, "... the space available to play is smaller... so they learn to play smaller." … Continue reading Play Small: why mobile challenges designers to make a better web
What a stroke of genius to commission Scott McCloud to tell the story of Google's new web browser, Chrome, in comic form. McCloud's own books have communicated his enthusiasm for the past, present and future of comics themselves. Now his fluid, conversational style perfectly captures the diverse passions of project team members - passions that … Continue reading Brushed chrome – the story of Google’s browser in comic book form
Carlo Longino on Mobhappy and Tarek Abu-Esber at Mobile Messaging 2.0 both asked this week "When Will The Mobile Web Be Mass Market?" - a question prompted by the declaration from Nielsen Mobile that we've now reached critical mass. According to Nielsen, 12.9% of the UK population used the mobile internet in Q1 2008. Now … Continue reading The mobile web: today, asparagus; tomorrow, the world
... that the internet was ever tethered to wall sockets and floor boxes. Now obviously the participants in a Mobile Internet Portal Strategies conference are a self-selecting bunch of enthusiasts, but last week there was a distinct sense of confidence that our moment has arrived. People who've spent the best part of a decade expounding … Continue reading In the future, people will think it strange…
Matt Edgar writes here 