Just been listening to the current edition of BBC Radio 4′s In Business about Tim Smit, the founder of the Eden Project. Really interesting. Tim is a pretty unconventional entrepreneur and leader but a very effective one. Well worth a listen again.
A towering idea
My friend Peter Macleod has a great idea in a comment piece in the Toronto Star today. He suggests that the new LED lighting system on the CN Tower should be used to show the city the impacts of citizens’ collective behaviour: A nighttime glance at the tower could tell us whether we were gradually rolling back car usage or whether it was continuing to [...]
An Average Post
My friend Tim is making a documentary about Britain’s most average person which has been picked up by the papers this week. Now I’m sure all the readers of this blog are well above average, but if you think you know where he should be looking do drop the team a line.
“If there is no such thing as society, why is there such a thing as Facebook?”
David Miliband gave an interesting speech at a Google event yesterday which puts him firmly into the tiny group of politicians who ‘get’ what’s now happening with the internet.
Net worth
Oh dear. Better stick with the day jobs. According to Cyberwire’s Website Value Calculator, this site is worth a grand total of $126. [via John Naughton]
More on open source tenders
Nick Booth (of the mighty Podnosh) has written more on David Wilcox’s open source bid to the Office of the Third Sector. He’s also nominated them for an award, which I think would be thoroughly well deserved. Whether or not David and the collective win the bid or not, they’ve done something genuinely new. It’s one of the neatest institutional hacks I’ve seen in a [...]
Forbes on networks
I meant to mention a couple of weeks ago the special ‘networks’ issue of Forbes magazine after Chris Anderson pointed it out (I’m not a regular Forbes reader, I have to admit). It’s an interesting read and has quite a lot of similarities with the Demos collection that I edited with Paul and Helen called Network Logic a few years back. Anyway, the fact that [...]
Opening up Cabinet appointments
Gordon Brown is in a fairly unique situation in that he knows that he will be Prime Minister in six weeks time. Normally in the UK, leaders become Prime Ministers overnight. So how about using the advance notice to get people to apply for Cabinet posts and opening up the process a bit? It might go something like this: Gordon decides what posts he wants [...]
The Dongtan Story
There’s a great piece in the new Wired about Dongtan – the ambitious project to create a zero carbon city for half a million people near Shanghai. It’s something I’ve heard about tangentially and in shorter news articles but this is the first feature I’ve seen that tells a fuller story.
Be careful when you Google yourself
Jon Ronson had a great little piece in the Guardian Weekend yesterday that illustrates in just a few hundred words what’s changed and stayed the same about journalism in the last couple of decades. Them is one of my favourite non-fiction books – way ahead of its time in terms of the characters Jon chose to follow. He was writing about Omar Bakri Muhammad well [...]