Ada Lovelace day is a day to celebrate women in technology/science/maths – a way of redressing the still-apparent imbalance in the representation of the role of women in the past present and future of the various strands of technology. One strand of it is people blogging about women who have influenced them and their tech/science/engineering/maths-life. […]
Author Archives: Steve
The Housing Question – Travelling North & Shirts4Shelter
This is the week we say goodbye to London. Well, at least, the week we cease to call it home. We’re off to Birmingham, since the cost of being in London in no way reflects the benefits of still being here. Birmingham is home to many of our friends, it’s a cool city for music […]
Calling All Indie Musicians…
dear lovely musicians, want to be a part of something fun that may make life a little easier for all of us? I’ve been working with the genius digi-gnomes at the Imperial College Dept Of Social Computing for over a year on a music sharing app/platform. It’s been through a few revisions, and we want […]
What Happens When ‘They’ Don’t Get Social Media? Why the Bullying Of Baskers Matters.
Wow, there really have been a whole load of social media shitstorms of late. First, there was the case of Paul Chambers, AKA the #twitterjoketrial, where one guy tweets a jokey, hyperbolic, frustrated tweet ostensibly to his friends that follow him, and has now ended up (after appeal even) with a £1000 fine and a […]
The Internet Is Not The Enemy – Inspired by An Excellent Rant
Yesterday, the wonderful and talented Miranda Ward wrote this brilliant rant entitled ‘The Internet Is Not The Enemy‘. Which in turn inspired in me a comment so long it kinda deserves its own post. So here it is, but read her post first 🙂 -o0o- Excellent Rantage. I feel afronted by the web-phobic ramblings for […]
IBM Summit At Start – Sustainability, Collaboration, Copyright and Language.
For the last three days I’ve been at the IBM Summit at Start – 9 days of seminars, hosted by Prince Charles, looking at Sustainability issues, particularly as they relate to business. There have been some amazing speakers, particularly James Jones the Bishop of Liverpool, Ellen McArthur, Larry Hirst, Stephen Howard… all offering an inspiring […]
Greenbelt: Actively Doing Nothing.
August Bank Holiday Weekend IS Greenbelt. Sometimes it feels like the banks are closed in honour of it. For 19 of the last 21 last-weekend-in-Augusts I’ve spent my time in a field (til ‘99) or racecourse (the fest has been in Cheltenham for 11 years) engaged in four simple pleasures: soaking up great music encountering […]
Talent Development And ‘The Space Of The Talkaboutable’
It seems that one of the many obstructions to the balanced discussion about resourcing talent development is the semantic gulf between the (perfectly understandable) sense of entitlement that some artists have about their art, and their art-practice and the impartiality that has to be built into the structure of any resource body (whether its an […]
Have You Ever Been Funded?
Today I’m in Edinburgh with Amplified, at the ‘Talent Development Symposium’, co-sponsored by Festivals Edinburgh and The Arts Council. The Amp stuff will be posted at http://www.amplified10.com/tds10/, and there’s already a post I’ve put up there with a series of questions that face The Arts Sector. So one thing I thought it’d be good to […]
CC-Style Music Licenses For Small Businesses?
Much has been made of this article in the New York Times about the work of the BMI in enforcing the law that any business in the US playing music (radio, CDs, spotify, live etc.) needs to pay a public performance license, the cost of which is based on the size of the business. There’s […]