Long Now Foundation fans might be interested to know that co-founder Stewart Brand is doing a talk at the ICA about his new book - Whole Earth Discipline on the 30th January. Do come along. The meetup group will also be hanging out in the cafe for a couple of hours after the talk if you can’t make the talk but would like to find out more.

Films

Moon - Duncan Jones’s debut is just stunning. I’ve watched it again on DVD now and there are so many clever bits you don’t notice first time around. Also best original soundtrack for quite some time by Stourbridge’s finest Clint Mansell. It’s been adopted as favourite coding music at Everything HQ.

Anvil - this one surprised me and I basically went along just on the basis of the blurb in the Curzon Soho guide. It’s Spinal Tap but real, there are scenes that had me crying my eyes out and the ending is fantastic.

In the Loop - There was pretty much only one person scary enough to pit Malcolm Tucker against: Tony Soprano. So many perfect comic moments and lots of real insight. I still contend that Thick of It is better for politics than the West Wing.

Albums

I’m not very good at describing why I like particular bits of music but these are my favourite albums of the year.

xx by The XX

The Eternal by Sonic Youth

Two Dancers by Wild Beasts

Lungs by Florence + Machine

Sigh No More by Mumford & Sons

TV

I think it’s been a good year for British TV, it feels like the ecosystem is settling into a new pattern which is pretty creative. I hope that programmes like Can Gerry Robinson Fix Dementia Care get more of a run at it next year.

The Inbetweeners - really very simple formula this one but still fantastic. Bit of a cross between Peep Show and Skins.

The Thick of It - As with In the Loop, I don’t know where the spies are but so much of it is true. And just so painfully funny.

Can Gerry Robinson Fix Dementia Care? - I just happened to be watching when this was on but what a fantastic programme. Really taught me a lot and actually might change things. What public service TV should be like.

Radio

In Business - Peter Day is a complete legend and when you run a business you realise quite how amazing his analysis and selection of what’s important is compared to most of the guff that comes out of business schools. One program this year in particular might just have shaped the future of School of Everything.

X-posure on X Fm John Kennedy is turning into a bit of a John Peel. I’ve come across quite a few things this year via his show and it shows no sign of getting stale:

Adam and Joe - Still having fun, still causing havoc and still a great way to wake up on Saturday mornings.

Web stuff

Spotify - I had my doubts about the business model but it does seem to be starting to work and the standard of the service is brilliant. I’m now a premium member and the iPhone app is also pretty amazing.

Meetup - this was the year for me when Meetup went mainstream. I heard more and more people saying they were finding it useful and it has been a really great tool for both Long Now London and Social Innovation Camp. Scott and the team have also made it profitable which is no mean feat.

Kickstarter - new this year but a sign of much more to come in changing the ways we finance creativity and invention. Really hope they keep on growing.

Food

Momofuku Ssam Bar, New York - I’m usually at the whim of Rob or other friends when I’m in New York so don’t tend to read reviews or anything but apparently this is quite trendy. Fantastic though.

Champor Champor, London - This place has been around for ages but I hadn’t been for a long time, probably since I was working at Demos five years ago. The Spicy squid salad with ginger flower and mint and papaya salsa was probably my dish of the year.

Glenelg Inn, Glenelg - I’d been to the Applecross Inn a few months previously and this was the other inn with great reviews and within range of amazing walking on the West Coast of Scotland. The basics of Scottish gastropubs are very fresh ingredients cooked as lightly as possible. They managed that brilliantly.

Newspapers and magazines

Although I’ve hardly read a newspaper in 2009, I have read quite a lot of magazines.

Still the best for me is actually one produced by a newspaper - the FT Magazine. It does what I want from a print publication which is to tell me about interesting things that I don’t already know about and uses the format to do that in a compelling way - ie use really top notch photography. I’m a big fan of Charlie Bibby’s stuff.

Wired UK deserves an honorable mention but seeing as I know pretty much everybody who is featured in it or writes for it (that’s a slight exaggeration), that does seem like a bit of a cop out based on my criteria above. The design is great though and they do a very good job of covering the scene I suppose I’m part of.

And then Private Eye has had a storming year. To be fair though they have had a lot of material to go on with the expenses fiasco.

Events

TED in Long Beach. TED is the standard as far as events to inspire and entertain with ideas are concerned. It felt like a massive privilege to get a ticket and I made the most of it.

Social Innovation Camp in Glasgow. OK I’m biased because I played a small part in setting this one up but it was still a brilliant event and I’m just a little bit proud of what’s come out of it.

Interesting in London. One of my favourite days of the year. Loved it.

Great little film (which took a lot of work I imagine) by Chris Searson.

Rush Hour London from Chris Searson on Vimeo.

Saw one of these on my way to work this morning. Encouraging.

I love Meetup and there’s a great piece in the FT Weekend Magazine that explains quite what it is that makes it work. It really started to come together for me a few weeks ago when we had a fantastic Long Now London Meetup. Up until then it had just been people I knew, but last month we grew beyond that. It was great to be able to organise something so easily that brought together people around a shared interest.

So what’s it got to do with Why Don’t You? Well, the full title of Why Don’t You was “Why Don’t You Just Switch Off Your Television Set And Go Out And Do Something Less Boring Instead?” which was pretty revolutionary for a TV program when you think about it. Somebody once described the email magazine Pick Me Up that I used to help out with as Why Don’t You for grown-ups. With our manhunts in Covent Garden, taking cows to Toxteth and journeys to find the source of the Thames, it was all about getting people away from their email.

I like that idea - that we should build technology projects that help people get away from technology and I’d say Meetup are one of the most inspirational companies that already do so. I hope we’re doing it with School of Everything and Social Innovation Camp too.

Oh, and our next Long Now London Meetup is on September 17th. Come along!

I went to a really interesting dinner chat on Wednesday night organised by Saul Klein for Fred Wilson the VC who was over from New York. I left a bit unsatisfied with the story we told Fred about London, so in the bar afterwards and on the bus home I tried to work out why.

The conversation centered on how difficult it is to set up tech start-ups in London compared to the US. The other entrepreneurs talked about how incredibly hard it is to raise angel money for tech start-ups, how difficult it is to hire great coders, how risk averse British culture is and how there are no great start-up role-models in the UK. It’s a story that I’ve heard before and all of these things are true.

What frustrates me about this is what it misses out by assuming that London should be just like Silicon Valley. Much as I love and respect the Techcrunches of the world, I do get fed up with the reification of start-ups and entrepreneurs as if it was the only way of creating value and as if the best thing to happen would be if everywhere became like the Californian tech scene.

I don’t think the lack of angels in London is quite such a problem as some people make out. If you really are doing something great then there’s a simple solution - get on a plane. Our experience with School of Everything is that people in other countries are very willing to invest here if you’re doing something they think might change the world (we have angel investors based in the US and Europe). There’s also a very nice ecosystem of early stage funding emerging here that doesn’t come from angels. Nesta, UnLtd and the Young Foundation are all trying out new models. Channel 4 are soon to join them in quite a big way. Even the Cabinet Office is trying.

Then there’s the people. In the US, it’s assumed they will be MBAs or engineering graduates. Here, it’s a totally different community. It’s been most visible to me at three fantastic events - all of which I would heartily recommend to people like Fred - Social Innovation Camp, Interesting and 2gether08. The influx of people into the start-up world to look for from an investment perspective is former (and current) campaigners, activists, policy and civil service people.

Matt Jones put the reason for this neatly when he said that the 80s and 90s were the decades of the think tanks because they were the most cost effective ways of experimenting with ideas that could change the world. Now you can build a start-up for the same cost as a Demos project - with School of Everything we got a site up, team together and “proof of potential” for £20,000.

Just a final note. For me there’s something special about London (and the UK) because this is the beating heart of so many social movements. From anti-slavery to fair trade, universal suffrage to third world debt cancellation, many of them have started or grown from here. And as John Batelle says, every great business is an argument. Umair Haque writes that the tech world needs to solve the world’s big problems. And Fred too has written about his yearning for projects that are a force for positive social change.

So - despite our grumbling on Wednesday, I’m incredibly positive about the potential of London to be a cauldron of new ideas, projects and value creation. We’re just not going to do it the in the same way as Silicon Valley.

I went along to Russell Davies’ Interesting 2008 on Saturday. Up there with Social Innovation Camp as one of the best events I’ve been to this year. So many things I could mention but this was definitely one highlight:

I’ve been hanging out with Scott and the gang at Meetup a bit recently and remembering what a fantastic tool it is for getting people together. So I’ve set up a Long Now London Meetup group to try and get people interested in long-term thinking and the work of the Long Now Foundation together. Do come along for a drink and a chat if you can.

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. The one that made me laugh out loud last year was this one. It was a nervous laugh, you understand.

I popped along to see the winning entries of World Press Photo 07 yesterday in London’s Royal Festival Hall. In a world where I feel surrounded by grainy long lens shots of celebs getting in and out of cars, it reminds you of the power of real news photography. Some of the images in the exhibition completely blew my mind. Well worth a visit if you’re in town.