“If you’re going to take a long-term orientation, you have to be willing to stay heads down and ignore a wide array of critics, even well-meaning critics. If you don’t have a willingness to be misunderstood for a long period of time, then you can’t have a long-term orientation.”
That’s Jeff Bezos in US News. Jeff also gets a mention in this TED talk by Stewart Brand about a field trip they took to the site of the Clock of the Long Now.
Demos have a great new report out by my friends Celia, Charlie and Pete about the rise of online and mobile video. Here (aptly) is the video introduction to the report.
From our friends at Meetup.com:
Sorry about the short notice, but do come along to hear Clay Shirky talk about his book Here Comes Everybody at Demos on Monday at lunchtime (event starts at 12.30pm). I’ll be playing host and asking him a few tricky questions if I can think of some.
I particularly want to ask him about his views on gin.
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Since all this fuss about whether Google makes you daft I’ve been thinking a bit about how the way that I consume and produce information has changed over the last few years.
When I was at Demos I used to read almost all the UK papers, listen to the Today programme and watch Newsnight every day. I was a magazine addict, reading The Economist, Wired, Prospect, The Atlantic, New Statesman, the New Yorker and many more. I would read a non-fiction book every week. I was subscribed to hundreds of RSS feeds, loads of email lists and went to two or three events per week. I was spread incredibly thin across a huge number of subjects.
But I’ve found that being an information pancake person (spread thin) is not really compatible with running a start-up. It becomes all consuming and you need to concentrate. You need to go deep into the information that’s really relevant to the task and that rarely comes from the 24 hour media machine.
So I’ve found myself rationalising my addiction to information and over the past few months I’ve been cutting down. I don’t listen to the Today Programme in the mornings and don’t miss it if I’m honest (it sounds just like Chris Morris’s On the Hour if I do catch a few minutes). I don’t read the free papers on the commute into the office — I’ve taken to reading one paper a day (the FT) and maybe a couple at the weekends. I’ve slimmed down my RSS subscriptions to a hundred and I’m on far fewer email lists than I was. Since I was at Demos, Facebook and Twitter status updates have come along, so I’m having to struggle to keep them under control as well.
I think I’m starting to win though. Next step is to work out what the best way to be productive with all that cognitive surplus is.
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:
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.
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.
A nice little promo for Seedcamp including a few glimpses of School of Everything team members.
[via Robin]
We’re so going to try this out at Everything HQ. Hardware hacking at its best.
Thanks Rob!
