Technology for being better at being human Roland at NESTA highlights this great 10 min video of what happened at SiCamp I think this gets across how SiCamp managed to get geeks and non-geeks together, and how much energy is created by people working on things with...

Evil Twin visits America I see my evil twin brother Matt is on tour in the US, as follows. If you live in these places, I heartily recommend meeting him. Washington from May 9th to 11th. Chicago from May 12th to 14th. Boston from...

Brutality and civilisation I saw a documentary last night on the Beeb about the middle ages. Prof Robert Bartlett talked about how power structures changed over five centuries. It was a reminder of just how brutal power was then, and how oppressed the...

Top? So another of those lists of the world's top brands is out. Meanwhile, Roland notes with scepticism a new list of the "most innovative" companies. As Roland saysOver 40m US citizens are self employed 'free agents' and 20% of UK...

Getting wow into education A Swedish teacher wonders how to compete with World of Warcraft. Good question, the sort we might chat about on Wednesday afternoon at NESTA. There's room for few more if you're interested....

Health care Rob has a thoroughly thought-provoking post about mushrooming healthcare costs. I think Rob finds quests for "efficiency" as suspicious as I do....

Life as a voiceover Made me laugh. Hat tip: Andrew Sullivan...

Living a lie Hugh's latest: ...

Torching empty rituals The recent disruption of the Olympic Torch ritual fascinates and, frankly, excites me. I'm glad to see China's Tibet policies challenged and I also see this as part of a wider pattern. I think they've been doing the torch run...

Gaming for good? I've been thinking a lot lately about games and their relevance to organisations. Online gaming is massive and I'm intrigued by what these games provide that so engages their participants. And I wonder: could our organisations do with some of...

Conversation vs Diagrams Talking about our recent podcast, Matt writes:There was a whole bunch of stuff I put together in a mind map just prior to the show that I never used. The actual conversation was far more interesting than that...Regular readers will...

Leveraging blancmange The great Reggie Perrin could never stop picturing a hippopotamus at the very mention of his mother-in-law. I'm experiencing a similar mental quirk, where the hippopotamus is replaced by blancmange and the mother-in-law is replaced by a different trigger....

Work personas One of the things I talk about in the new podcast is the way folks have a work persona that's different from their social persona. A client shared this with me today- an FT piece, sadly lodged behind a paywall:...

Gaming and life Stephanie West Allen emailed me a link to this article: game developers can induce happiness. I've been thinking a lot about whether the fun and engagment of online gaming could be ported into less energised parts of our lives, and...

What is Warcraft? I suppose much of this will be lost on those of you who've avoided World of Warcraft, but this YouTube cracks me up. And captures quite a lot of the downsides of playing WoW. ...