Director’s Blog

A disused school was an appropiate venue for 2gether08, a conference sponsored by Channel 4 to bring together digital social entrepreneurs. This was very much a mix of classroom and playground.

Go to their website for lots of video and text about the two-day shindig in Shoreditch. The presentations were varied and high quality but the best sparks came in the little workshops.

A couple of random thoughts that caught my brain:

Why are politicians the only people without a support group?

What is the Online equivalent of a street protest?

How do you listen online?

What’s entrepreneurial about social enterprise when it doesn’t make a profit?

I’ve said it before, but Robert Green must be the nicest goalkeeper in the English Premier League. Here’s proof. He’s just returned from a trip to the slums of Nairobi in Kenya where he had been on a sponsored climb of Mount Kilimanjaro. His thoughts after talking to Kenyans who have, of course, just been through a period of civil conflict:

“They watched from a maize field as people were hacked with machetes and burned alive…Footballers live in a bubble. It’s a wonderful life but I want to experience other things. I can’t remember what I did for a holiday last summer. But I’ll remember this trip forever.” Read the rest of this entry »

I am obsessed by how journalists can survive and thrive in the face of rapid technological and social change - but is it that rapid? Read the rest of this entry »

Former top Tory Lord Fowler is about to publish A Political Suicide about how the Tories lost power and entered the political wilderness. His timing is superb for many reasons. Partly because they are about to get back in to power. And also because Labour might learn something from the story. Read the rest of this entry »

BAGHDAD CALLING is an exceptional photography book by photojournalist Geert van Kesteren - but it much more than that. Kesteren has combined his own professional photography with images taken from the mobile phones and digital cameras of ordinary Iraqis. Read the rest of this entry »

The BBC’s regional services in the Norwich are have always suffered from association with Alan Partridge. But now my old colleague Matt Precey has come up with a rather wizard way to jazz up their email news alerts. Read the rest of this entry »

It seems to me that the Leftwing blogosphere is as knackkered as Gordon Brown’s poll ratings.

I have just been to (half - I had to get back home early, I am a single parent) a meeting where Sunny Hundal had been trying to find common ground with a group of leftish bloggers.

At times it felt like a digital re-enactment of that scene in Life of Brian: “No we’re the people’s front of Judea” etc. Read the rest of this entry »

Is the Internet making the US Presidential race a more open and democratic contest? Can the rest of us learn any lessons from American’s use of political blogs, email, social networking and websites? Tim Watts is Polis’ pet spin-doctor (sorry - political communications expert) and he’s been at the Personal Democracy conference in New York. Read the rest of this entry »

The BBC and Channel 4 are dancing around each other but it’s more of a hakka than a waltz. As I have reported before there is a Battle of Britain in the UK over the future of Public Sector Broadcasting. And toes are being stepped upon. Read the rest of this entry »

Comedian George Carlin has died. But he lives on at YouTube where countless clips testify to a man who followed in the footsteps of Lenny Bruce. Read the rest of this entry »