Paul Miller

Great little piece on the Today Programme this morning about a guy who’s going to try to walk to India from Bristol relying entirely on generosity and exchange for food and shelter. He’s not taking any money with him. Listen here.

I picked up a copy of this in a bookshop when I was in the US and absolutely love it. Great for kids of all ages. “Howtoons: The Possibilities Are Endless” (Saul Griffith, Joost Bonsen)

Cory has a post on BoingBoing about the completely absurd headline boards that go up around London each evening to try and make you buy the papers – especially the terrible Evening Standard. Check out his Flickr set here. I always see them as I head to the tube from our office in Bethnal Green. [...]

One of the possibilities we considered in the Retail Futures work I did with Forum for the Future last year was the idea of allotment produce trading. Well here it comes – VegExchange.com got a good plug on Broadcasting House this morning. Forum for the Future

PlanningAlerts.com is another great site from MySociety. Richard Pope just talked about it at BarCampUKGovWeb. Also Tom Steinberg mentioned EveryBlock in the US. There’s some really interesting stuff going on around how you find out what’s going on in your neighbourhood. Local

Just a quick post on the UK Government’s decision a couple of weeks ago to give the go ahead for a new generation of nuclear power stations. The decision for me is a stupid one rather than a dangerous one – I’m not anti-nuclear for safety reasons – my main objection is that the Government [...]

I’m at BarCampUKGovWeb today about how Government could best use technology and set itself up so that other people can use their data too. Best thing I’ve found out about so far is Farmsubsidy.org. I’ve long thought the CAP is absolutely bonkers, but these guys prove just how crazy (and secretive) the system is.

Doing a couple of conference talks later this week about School of Everything. First, on Thursday, at BETT about social networking and education and secondly on Friday at the World Entrepreneurship Summit about what it’s been like setting up an internet start-up in London. If you’re coming along to either, do come and say hi.

I’ve been fascinated by prediction markets for a while. I often do a couple of tricks in conference talks to get the audience to make predictions to show their power. Turns out Google have an internal prediction market that seems to be getting some interesting results.

The guys at Demos (where I used to work and remain an associate) have put together a great little video explaining the idea of ‘everyday democracy’. I keep on meaning to post about the controversy about party funding. More soon…