Complaining that I have a deluge of interesting things that I never get round to blogging, Neil suggested I use audio instead. Here’s the first one. listen to ‘Public Knowledge Gap Filler, a new profession’ on Audioboo Links to the topics in this audio blog: Overview Project, which helps you find stories in large dumps […]

This is the second part of a series of two posts. Part 1 explains how we came to make PledgeBank, what it does, its similarities to GroupOn and Kickstarter, and how we iterated on the product. It ends asking, “Why did GroupOn and Kickstarter succeed, when PledgeBank failed?” This part gives my answer. Here’s what I […]

“I’ll do X but only if N other people will do Y” I was abuzz. A cafe in Holborn. 2003. A secret meeting. James Cronin and Tom Loosemore, who’d made the genius does-what-it-says-on-the-tin FaxYourMP, bought me coffee and changed my world. Wow, there’s actually other people who think computers can revolutionise democracy! And they’ve an amazing […]

We really struggled. We felt guilt. Wracked with pain. It’s the mid 1990s, and computers are impossibly hard to use. Anyone who could program them, and who also cared about people, was ashamed. So we fixed it. Books were published, websites launched, a new profession was born. It took a while but many of the key insights from that furore benefit […]

“If you really want to … truly ancient history, you have to go back to delta decks on punch cards.” (Jim Rootham) In a world where biographies of cod are not just accepted, but rightly popular, it wouldn’t seem entirely crazy to write a history book on how computer programmers store the vital product of their […]

I’m pretty sure lots of people are going to ask me why I just joined the Green party, so here’s the reasons. I’ve moved to an area of Liverpool where green is strong – two Green councillors live nearby, there’s a very local organic box delivery, and the main indy co-op food shop has just […]

You know when you have those really annoying arguments that turn into disputes about definitions of words? And they end up a tangled mess of pointlessness, and you just don’t want to be there any more? Well, I’ve just realised that they’re much more important than I thought, but you have to think about them […]

Every now and again a project comes along that could change everything. I’ve been lucky enough this year to come across two of them. The first I wrote about in Seven facts about Unhosted. It has the potential to decentralised the web again, while simultaneously keeping it just as easy to use and powerful. Today […]

It’s really easy to get used to business models. As if they were natural things that have always been there. But actually, all the successful machines that make money were at one point extraordinary – inspired wonder when the first company found them. Here are some recent examples: 1) Flickr. Invented “freemium” for SaaS on […]

Unhosted is finally the project I’ve been waiting for, that stands a chance of decentralising the web. It separates application writing from hosting your data. Encryption magic means that neither the writer of the application nor the storer of your data can access your data. This will empower users, create more competition and boost open […]