Despite fearful rhetoric to the contrary, terrorism is not a transcendent threat. A terrorist attack cannot possibly destroy a country's way of life; it's only our reaction to that attack that can do that kind of damage. The more we undermine our own laws, the more we convert our buildings into fortresses, the more we reduce the freedoms and liberties at the foundation of our societies, the more we're doing the terrorists' job for them.

Bruce Schneier

Still flushed from the success of the Oxford Flickr Exhibition and having given a lot of recent thought to just how much we've achieved as a group in the last three years it seemed a good subject to tackle.

The talk seemed to go down very well with more than a few laughs elicited from the crowd. I had a really great time and the Leeds lot are a really nice bunch of people. It's good to see the grassroots level geekery flourishing all over the country.

20:20 style talks are pretty tricky and if I learnt one thing it's not have so many bullet points in my notes, there's really only time for one nugget per slide. It was a lot of fun though and I'm going to see if JP is up for trying them out at a future Oxford Geek Night.

I've posted my slides if you want to have a look but I'm not sure how much sense they'll make in isolation. Of more use are the accompanying links on delicious.

Thanks to everyone at Leeds for a great night.

To criticise Twitter for its content (or, I should say, your perception of its content) makes as much sense as criticising the content of the telephone networks or the postal service. Like them, Twitter is a means of communicating. The content communicated has no bearing on its value.

And as he rightly recognises, they're not used to being called on their knowledge and veracity.

It’s now possible for columnists and companies to hear what people are saying about them. That’s unnerving for columnists, not least because their opinions are now frequently challenged by people who know more than they do. Instead of responding like adults – correcting when they’ve made a mistake, engaging when someone raises a sensible point and defending themselves from false accusations – they are whining like children and dismissing technologies that they don’t understand.

(Hat tip: John Naughton)

And so we have this tension. Drupal as a ‘Consumer Product’ and Drupal as a ‘Developer Framework’. Currently, the official direction is that the project is going to attempt to be both. I think this is a serious problem.

The target audiences for each of these objectives are so far removed from each other in terms of their tasks & goals, their capabilities, their vocabulary, their priorities. An attempt to devise an interface to suit both will result in an outcome that I expect we’ll see in the release of Drupal 7 – that is a compromise to both parties.

(emphasis mine)

I always tell people to send me physical things by email as attachments. The pause while they work out whether this is possible or not is a moment of great mechanical wheel turning beauty and highlights a cultural acceptance of the possibility of technological magic.

- srboisvert in a Metafilter thread about the UK postcode system

This morning I was interviewed by Phil Mercer on BBC Radio Oxford about the exhibition. My first ever radio interview.

For your pleasure (and my cringing) here I am in all my stumbling glory (flash embed):

I blame the fact that it was just after 8am and there was a lot of coffee kicking around my system.

At least I remembered not to swear!

Members of Torchbox amuse ourselves at the station whilst taking part in World Car Free Day.

(the irony of not being able to drive and therefore celebrating this day every day is not lost on me)

The failure of newspapers is not a failure of imagination or foresight nor is it a failure of individuals. This kind of failure is the hallmark of all institutions in the face of tectonic disruption. Institutions are a set of agreements that perpetuate a social order beyond individual intention or tenure. Changing those agreements is costly and time-consuming. So when the rate of change accelerates beyond the institution’s adaptive capacity - extinction follows.

The question is not “what should newspapers do?” but “how can a large institution effectively organize in response to disruptive change?” Taken thus, it is not only the fundamental question to ask of newspapers - but to ask of ourselves in relation to a host of big-ticket game-changers such as peak oil, environmental collapse and climate change that simultaneously require and defy our capacity for institutional response.

The larger an institution the less able it is to react to change, to the point where it would rather have society legislate against the disruption than adapt it's ways.

That's no good for anyone.