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.

Nico Macdonald asked a few of us to feedback from the events we’d been to this year at his Innovation Forum last night. Since Andy Hobsbawm did such a good job talking about TED, I shared a few thoughts about what was good at SXSW Interactive.

Steven Johnson’s talk about the Ecosystem of News was superb. He’s put it online as well which is a very good thing to do with these kinds of things I think. His basic point was don’t panic about what’s happening in the news industry at the moment, from a citizen’s point of view, we’re nowhere near seeing how this is going to play out. He also gave School of Everything a good plug which is always good.

Laurence Lessig’s Change v2.0 talk was very slick. I remember the first time I saw him do his Free Culture presentation back in 2003 and how blown away I was by the way he used Apple’s Keynote. Well he’s still the master. Here’s a video of him doing the talk elsewhere:

I do have a bit of a problem with his version of democracy though. I think by focusing so much on the money he’s missing a bigger problem with the basic idea of representative democracy. I’m not saying we don’t need it - of course we do - but I think he needs to question the basic way we structure democracy as well as the way we fund it.

The final highlight for me was Bruce Sterling who played conference grouch. He talked about everything that was going wrong in the world and all the things that social media had harmed such as his ability to have good parties and the way that people don’t pay attention to conference talks (he got his own back by bringing his own beer and crisps because he said if the audience was gong to behave like that then he could do what he wanted on stage as well). He’s right of course, I know I certainly find some aspects of social media pretty unhealthy.

But through the humour and how he ended the talk you could tell he’s actually an optimist. Just go and do something he said, no matter how small. Use your abilities as humans and technologists to make the world a better place. Amen to that.

[This is a slightly adapted version of a short talk I gave at MASS LBP on 10 March 2009 in Toronto, Canada]

It feels a bit unfashionable in tumultuous times like these but there’s something you should know about me before we start. I’m an optimist - a practical optimist in that I like making things happen and changing things for the better. I’m a great believer that the direction of human progress is towards greater and greater ability to solve problems. People are getting more intelligent individually and groups of people are getting even smarter because of new tools for collaboration and new ways of co-ordinating activity.

This talk stems from some things I’ve learned over the last five years about what’s possible when you try to take ideas that could change the world and put them into action using web technologies. It’s also about a quote that I made in a film called Us Now that got me in a little bit of trouble with my political friends:

“Representative democracy is based on the assumption that people are thick. And that’s just not true.”

It was one of those things that just came out of my mouth without much thought beforehand. The advantage of saying it on film is that I’ve had to think about it afterwards. What I meant was that by putting decisions and the provision of public services in the hands of a small group of elected representatives we miss a massive opportunity to tap the power of people to solve their own problems.

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Just noticed that Andy’s TED talk is up explaining Do The Green Thing. I’m a big fan.

So yesterday lunchtime was fun. We had a Packed house at Demos to hear Clay do his thing. I just filled him with coffee and then asked a few questions. You can listen to the whole thing here.

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.