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I’m not sure if this is every weekend but I’m going to a concert at the Royal Festival Hall tonight so it might be a good opportunity to pick up one or two items to supplement the organic vegetable boxesReal Food Market | Southbank Centre. http://ticketing.southbankcentre.co.uk/find/tickets/real-food-market-1000131The Real Food Market has become a real food lover’s destination. Take a wander round and it’s easy to see why, with fresh produce, tasty treats and gourmet delights every weekend.(via Instapaper)Andy Robertshttp://distributedresearch.net/blogvia posterousThanks for subscribing to Andy Roberts blogReal Food Market | Southbank Centre.Related posts:Borough MarketFutures market created for bird fluSouthbank movie

Arts Council cuts have hit many of this week’s theatre companies, from Shared Experience to Manchester’s Greenroom. All the more important to go on theatre breaks and see them – now.

This article titled “What to see: Lyn Gardner’s theatre tips” was written by Lyn Gardner, for guardian.co.uk on Friday 1st April 2011 14.06 UTC There’s plenty of great theatre around this week, but the question after this week’s cuts is whether the same will be true in five years’ time – or even a year. The Arts Council is not to blame for the hand it’s been dealt by the government, but has it really done enough to realign the landscape and redirect money away from the haves to the have-nots? Most importantly, has ACE’s strategic thinking been as robust as it needs to be to ensure that theatre continues to thrive and audiences grow both in numbers and diversity? So let’s start What to see this week with fine companies who have been unlucky in the recent funding round. Shared Experience have been excluded from the National Portfolio but who – as their multi-layered production Brontë confirms – can deliver probing and beautiful work. Catch it at Oxford Playhouse until tomorrow, and then at London’s Tricycle Theatre from next Tuesday. Another casualty – and one of several small touring companies who have been cut, including Northumberland Theatre Company and Oxfordshire Theatre Co – is Forest Forge, which is out on the road playing village halls and venues with Peeling (tonight at the Lighthouse, Poole). Then there’s Manchester’s Greenroom, which for 28 years has been supporting artists making performance and live art in a city dominated by the Royal Exchange, and who are this week playing host to Kings of England and Levantes Dance Theatre through their Method Lab, a scheme that previously helped nurture Nic Green’s Trilogy and Drunken Chorus. Remove the venue, and where do the artists find the support they need? Despite an 11% cut for many organisations, regional theatre buildings are going to have to do a great deal more to nurture talent, support companies and present work. Feeling the pinch will be no excuse and it can’t be business as usual. Every bit of theatre is now reliant on collaboration. This week Coventry’s Belgrade theatre, which took almost a 15% hit, has a new version of Uncle Vanya, which will then transfer to London’s Arcola (which, with an 82% rise, was one of the day’s big winners). North in Bolton, the Octagon opens its tale of local hero and steeplejack Fred Dibnah, The Demolition Man, in the same week that its highly acclaimed revival of The Price transfers to the Stephen Joseph, which says goodbye to Paines Plough’s touring show, Love Love Love, which in turns is heading into the West Yorkshire Playhouse. It’s all connected, and my hunch is that it will have to be more so in the years ahead. Staying in the north, Birmingham Rep’s teenage drama of life and death, Notes to Future Self, goes into the Royal Exchange Studio, the excellent Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf continues at Sheffield Crucible before heading to Northern Stage, and Alan Bennett’s tale of the woman who took up residence in his garden, Lady in the Van, is revived at Hull Truck. While we’re in Yorkshire, do think about booking for Harrogate’s Two’s Company Festival in May, a mini version of BAC’s brilliant One-on-One Festival, which features Laura Mugridge’s delightful camper van show, Running on Air, a new piece by Analogue, and Tea is an Evening Meal, a collaboration between Northern Stage and Third Angel, (the latter very mysteriously cut by ACE). Two successes in the funding round are Freedom Studios who are behind Mill – City of Dreams in Bradford, and Theatre in the Mill, which this weekend offers the interactive thriller, The Falling Sickness, and follows it with Instant Dissidence’s One on One, When Night Falls, from Tuesday. Let’s head further south to the Royal and Derngate in Northampton, where Rattigan’s In Praise of Love opens next week, and from there into London, where the lively young Colombian circus, Circolombia, which is made up of former street kids, returns to the Roundhouse (another funding winner). Looking ahead, at the Roundhouse you should be booking for The Fat Girl Gets a Haircut and Other Stories, Mark Storor’s participatory show made with teenagers. The Almeida may have suffered a substantial 39% funding cut, but it still gets £704,000, which should be more than enough to ensure that it continues projects such as Crawling in the Dark, a new play for young people inspired by the current main house hit, David Eldridge’s addiction drama, The Knot of the Heart. Soho Theatre – another significant loser but with new artistic director Steve Marmion at the helm – has Bryony Kimmings’ Sex Idiot, a tale of STDs and pubic hair. Ireland’s Abbey Theatre bring Mark O’Rowe’s play about Dublin life Terminus to the Young Vic, which has a small uplift in funding. Cheek by Jowl take their Russian Tempest into the Barbican. Tim Etchells and Ant Hampton collaborate on The Quiet Volume, a unique experience in a library as part of the London Word Festival and check out Chisenhale Art Club, which always happens on the first Wednesday of the month. I rather like the sound of Hotel Confessions, too, which is performed in a Bermondsey hotel. Just outside London, Lee Hall’s terrific The Pitmen Painters sets off from the Theatre Royal in Windsor on a nationwide tour. Derek Jacobi’s King Lear is at the Theatre Royal in Bath. Fevered Sleep’s delightful children’s show And the Rain Falls Down goes into Bristol Old Vic, Comedy of Errors continues at the Tobacco Factory, Journey’s End goes into the Theatre Royal in Brighton and at the Basement choreographer Ivana Muller considers her place on the stage in 60 Minutes of Opportunism. Circus did well in the funding shake-up and its happy birthday to Circomedia in Bristol who are celebrating in style. Marivaux’s A Game of Love and Chance opens at Salisbury Playhouse. In Scotland – which is, of course, unaffected by ACE funding decisions – Liz Lochhead’s Educating Agnes, a version of Molière’s School for Wives, is at the Royal Lyceum in Edinburgh. Elsewhere in the capital, the Jimmy Boyle-inspired The Hard Man is at the King’s, and Catherine Wheels’ new version of Beauty and the Beast, Caged, is at the Traverse today before moving to Aberdeen’s Lemon Tree tomorrow, with more tour dates to follow. Head to The Arches in Glasgow from Tuesday for a double showcase of award-winning work, which includes Me and the Machine’s dislocating love story When We Meet Again, Claire Duffy’s Money… the Game Show, Thickskin’s tale of teenage catastrophe, Blackout, and Gareth Nicholls’ Pause With a Smile, which lingers on everyday coincidences.

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Recorded music, record labels, the breaking of new bands and the selling of their work is a business in crisis. The old music industry is dying and Google now sees music as a crucial battleground in its fight with Apple in an increasingly mobile world

This article titled “The sale of Warner Music highlights a turning point for the whole industry” was written by Dominic Rushe, for The Guardian on Monday 28th March 2011 06.00 UTC Edgar Bronfman Jr, the music mogul heir to the Seagram whisky fortune, deals in trophy assets the way other people swap knick-knacks on eBay. Mies van der Rohe’s Seagram building, Picassos, Rothkos, huge chunks of the family’s business – Bronfman has traded them all. In the process of moving his family back from London, he is selling his $28m Manhattan townhouse, once owned by the Muppets’ creator Jim Henson, and looking for another. It’s the third piece of prime property he’s sold in less than two years. But it’s another set of assets that Bronfman has on the market that is attracting the most attention – Warner Music, the home to Led Zeppelin, Bruno Mars and Plan B. Given the parlous state of the music industry in recent years, when Goldman Sachs was appointed to look at Warner’s options back in January, the big question was would anyone care at all? Now a colourful set of contenders are cutting up rough as they line up bids for all or part of the firm. There’s Len Blavatnik, a Russian-born oil magnate turned media player; Ron Burkle, the politically connected supermarket mogul dubbed the “Billionaire Party Boy” by the New York Post; music rivals Sony, and maybe Universal; and a whole host of financial players. And hovering in the wings is the man who killed the music industry, Sean Parker, who co-founded Napster, the downloading service that kick-started the digital revolution, before first joining and then quitting Facebook. A casual observer might surmise that the music industry is hot again. A look at the numbers suggests otherwise. Warner was Bronfman’s comeback deal after his 2000 merger of Universal and Vivendi went disastrously wrong. Backed by Thomas H Lee Partners and others, Bronfman paid $2.5bn for Warner Music in 2003 when the music industry was already struggling. It’s got a whole lot worse since. If Bronfman does decide to sell, he will only make a profit thanks to a successful IPO in 2005. He and his investors made their money back then; subsequently the shares, listing at $17, peaked at $30 in 2006, but are now worth less than $6. Part of the problem is that nobody, not even Bronfman, really knows what is going on. Rumours and counter-rumours are circulating. No one talks on the record. Bronfman had wanted to sell his publishing assets and then bid for EMI, say some well-placed industry sources: a marriage between the two smallest of the sector’s major companies has been on and off for the better part of a decade, and Bronfman sees a future where music firms make their money in “360″ deals – owning rights to everything from merchandise to tour tickets and digital sales. He believes he could turn EMI’s troubled recorded music division around. Scott Sperling, the co-president of Thomas H Lee, is said to have disagreed and pushed for the whole company to go on the block. The sale has not been made any easier by EMI. Its disastrous takeover by Guy Hands’s private equity firm Terra Firma ended in court and control by the deal’s largest backer, Citigroup. The bank has begun tentatively talking to potential bidders about selling all or part of the business. EMI arguably has better publishing assets, Warner is stronger and certainly better run in recorded music. The two music firms could argue, and have argued, about who has the stronger assets. In the end it’s like asking who do you like better, EMI’s Beatles or Warner’s Led Zeppelin? The end price is likely to be much the same for either firm. There are probably so many permutations to this fugue that even Bach, let alone Bronfman, couldn’t resolve them. Sadly the same holds true for the entire music industry. Both Warner and EMI have outstanding publishing assets, collecting royalties from a catalogue of the world’s best-loved music. Music publishing is a steady, low-risk business that generates lots of cash – just the sort of thing private equity types love. But recorded music, the breaking of new acts and the selling of their work, remains a business in crisis. As Hands will tell you, it will take more than money to change that record. Glenn Peoples, a senior editorial analyst at the music industry bible Billboard, says he has been surprised by the level of interest. “Publishing I understand, but recorded music? I wonder what the attraction is. The digital age has been great for consumers but it’s been catastrophic for music companies, and the bottom isn’t in sight. You are probably looking at another decade before anyone comes up with a solution.” In 2000, when the industry and the CD market were at their peak, the total number of music buyers in the US was close to 160 million. Over the course of the past decade that number has fallen to below 130 million. Worse still, the average US music consumer now spends $43 a year buying it, down from $60 in 2000. Apple’s iTunes solved one problem for the music industry, offering a legal alternative to Napster and other free download services. But it presented a new one. Instead of selling CDs at $12 a pop, the industry now sells singles at 99c. “We have moved from a dollars business to a pennies business, sometimes a fractions of a penny business,” says one music executive. In this environment only the big survive, he argues. The same holds true for stars. Lady Gaga can cut a deal to promote Polaroid, Justin Bieber can make 3D movies and shill for Proactiv spot cream, but the cash they make from recorded music will not rival the cash Madonna or Michael Jackson made from selling CDs. Lesser stars have little to prop them up, says Peoples. It’s a sad song that is playing across the industry. Warner’s revenues fell 13% between 2004 and 2010, EMI’s fell an estimated 22%. Cushioned by a big company like Sony or Universal’s Vivendi, the leading majors can wait it out, hoping digital dollars will emerge. EMI has already lost its independence. Warner may be the better-run company, but its prospects of keeping running for long don’t look healthy. However, developments over in California could offer a glimpse of salvation. Marissa Mayer, Google’s hotshot vice-president of consumer products, is pushing the search firm to focus on music. She recently interviewed Lady Gaga, for example, for its Musicians@Google series. Google now sees music as a crucial battleground in its fight with Apple in an increasingly mobile world. Its service is likely to provide an alternative to the iTunes model – offering subscriptions, making all of a consumer’s music available anywhere on any device, and moving away from Apple’s death by singles sales approach. Google’s entry will shake up a market Apple has so far defined, and coincides with a second wave of music services coming online from Spotify and others catering to a smart phone, iPad and tablet PC customer base that’s expected to reach nearly 1.5 billion by 2015. Maybe, just maybe, there is a way the music industry could make some money out of all the music that will get played on those devices. That future seems a long way off to Peoples, however. “At the moment all the music companies are leaky ships bailing water,” he argues. Although they may be getting better at bailing, he adds, the leaks are far from plugged. Still, as bids for Warner start to take shape, Bronfman must be encouraged that someone is crying “land ahoy!”

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Songwriters are given a week to write a bunch of songs about Cecil Sharp.  The eight folk-music songwriting ‘celebrities’ include Leonard Podolak from The Duhks, Steve Knightley from Show Of Hands, Jackie Oates, Kathryn Roberts, Jim Moray, Caroline Herring

This article titled “Folk’s man of mystery: is Cecil Sharp a folk hero or villain?” was written by Colin Irwin, for The Guardian on Thursday 24th March 2011 22.30 UTC It sounds like some hideous TV reality show dreamed up by Simon Cowell and Andrew Lloyd Webber during a night on the lash. Dump eight folk-music celebrities in a secluded house in Shropshire and give them six days to create from scratch a suite of songs to be performed in front of paying audiences in Shrewsbury and London and then recorded for a live album. Careers have been destroyed on less whimsical ideas. The subject of their mission is Cecil Sharp, the great song collector whose work in the early years of the 20th century helped lay the foundations of the modern folk revival. Visiting them on day three at their remote hideaway – a rambling farmhouse near Church Stretton – you anticipate plenty of carnage: frayed tempers, blood on the carpet, egos splattered on walls, creativity-devouring levels of tension in the air. But no, instead, they are … dancing. Part of their brief is to incorporate Sharp’s collecting trips to the Appalachian mountains, and Leonard Podolak, an extrovert, shaggy-haired Canadian taking time out from his band the Duhks, is using this as an excuse to lighten the mood and teach the others some audience-rousing step-dance moves. “It’s going pretty well,” says Steve Knightley, frontman with Show of Hands and unofficial father of the house. “We came in on Friday, had a Chinese takeaway, listened to a talk about Sharp, got drunk and started work.” It sounds as if Knightley almost cracked it on that first night. “The women all went to bed and the rest of us sat in the kitchen strumming and talking, and in the space of that time Steve wrote three songs one after another,” says singer, writer and multi-instrumentalist Jim Moray in wonder. “He’d play a chord and off the top of his head sing something, anything, and say: ‘I’ll just record that on my phone.’ Some of the words are nonsense and don’t gel, but he goes back and develops it. I can’t do that. I can’t sit there free-associating nonsense, because I feel so self-conscious about it. But Steve has that confidence in his own ability to do that.” Operating under the umbrella of the Shrewsbury folk festival, where the Cecil Sharp Project will be staged at the end of August, project director Neil Pearson’s choice of artists reflects personal taste as much as any scientific assessment of personalities. “I had a long list of about 40 artists who I thought could make it work. I approached 10 of them first of all, and the eight who said yes are the eight we have here.” “I’m not getting involved in the creative process at all,” says Pearson, who masterminded a similar project to mark the bicentennial of Charles Darwin’s birth, two years ago. “The only thing I’ve said is that I’d like them to start and end with ensemble pieces. The rest is entirely up to them. I’m very confident the musicians we have will come up with something special.” Considering the time strictures, they do all seem remarkably laidback, gathering in little clutches around the house. Fuelled by a constant flow of iced coffee, Leonard Podolak is a loud and relentless force of nature, carrying his laptop around to treat housemates to his favourite YouTube clips, banjo glued to his arm, shouting, “I’m a Cheatham County chitlin-cooking lover …” at the top of his voice to anyone within earshot. Chitlins are a dish made from pig’s intestines, and he’s trying out a song that confronts the dietary limitations encountered by the vegetarian Sharp on his journey into the Appalachians. In the kitchen, meanwhile, some more genteel interaction involves Jackie Oates and Kathryn Roberts practising glorious harmonies on Seeds of Love, the first traditional song collected by Sharp. He heard it sung by a gardener, John England, while taking tea with his friend, the Rev Charles Marson in Hambridge, Somerset in 1903. In another room, Moray fleshes out a guitar arrangement as Knightley toys with darker images of Sharp on his deathbed, haunted by the ghosts of the singers from whom he’s collected music demanding the return of their songs. The subject of Cecil Sharp has long divided folk-song scholars. The popular image is of a charming eccentric cycling around Somerset knocking on people’s doors persuading old ladies to sing him their lovely old songs so he could save them from extinction, and preserve them through his books and lectures to provide a formidable harvest for future generations to enjoy and plunder. The conflicting modernist view is of a controlling manipulator who presented a false idyll of rural England by excluding anything that didn’t fit his agenda, moulding himself as an untouchable icon of the folk-song movement in the process. Either way it’s a compelling story. At a time when other folk song collectors such as George Butterworth were dying in the trenches during the first world war, Sharp was on a mission in the US, battling ill-health exacerbated by the oppressive climate as he obsessively attempted to unravel the heart of the old world in the purity of folk songs he found in the new. “It is strenuous work,” he wrote. “There are no roads in our sense of the word … I go about in a blue shirt, a pair of flannel trousers with a belt, a Panama hat and an umbrella. The heat is very trying …” And that’s about as much as he reveals about himself, frustrating the songwriter in Knightley, who considers Sharp a far tougher nut to crack than Charles Darwin. “With Darwin you had world-changing views, with all the reaction to that from the religious side, plus the geography, the travel, the exotic flora and fauna … and no music to distract you. With Sharp there’s this great body of work, and nothing about the man.” This may in no small part be due to Maud Karpeles, Sharp’s faithful assistant on those epic expeditions into the Appalachians, who fiercely protected his legacy following his death in 1924, writing an anodyne biography that depicted him as a saint. “What we all really want to know is: did Cecil shag Maud?’ says Knightley to nervous hilarity in the house, with enough secretive giggling over hastily written lyrics and nascent choruses to suggest such lascivious suggestions are indeed being considered as an irreverent song topic. “Sharp was definitely all about the work,” says Moray. “His diaries are informative, but they just say things like ’2pm: dinner with Miss Hamer. 6pm: theatre.’ If he had ulterior motives – whether political or whatever – they weren’t mentioned or documented. Most people have arrived at this idea of him being a controlling, sanitising man, but I don’t think it was malicious or sinister. I just think he was very driven. I don’t believe he was rewriting history the way some people imagine.” Hailing from Canton, Mississippi, Caroline Herring knows all about Sharp’s US collecting trips. “The ballads I’ve heard since childhood, like Fair and Tender Ladies, Barbara Allen, Knoxville Girl, make up the standard bluegrass tunes I first played. I jumped at the chance to come here. A folk music career in the US is not always showy and sexy, so it was a dream to come over here and work with these musicians. I go online at night and read about how they’re all stars and come back down and have pancakes with them in the morning.” It was Herring who picked up on the fact that at a time when 13% of the population in the Appalachians was black, Sharp wilfully ignored them. He collected only two songs from black singers, one of them being Barbara Allen, learned from “Aunt” Maria Tomes, an 85-year-old former slave he found smoking a pipe in a log cabin in Nellysford, Virginia in 1918. Suitably inspired by this footnote, Herring and Knightley start working up a vehement blues telling Aunt Maria’s story. Exhausted, they all gradually drift off to bed, half-written songs and scraps of tunes spinning round their heads. Yet deep into the early hours, the group’s two main mischief makers, Podolak and Cutting, are still swapping tunes, jokes and video clips before deciding to make a pancake mix for breakfast. When he surfaces a couple of hours later next morning, Podolak says he still couldn’t sleep. “When I went to bed I wrote this brilliant three-part tune entirely in my head, but I was too tired to get up and now I can’t remember any of it. I wish I had one of those frickin’ iPhones.” You wonder if Cecil Sharp might have thought the same. The Cecil Sharp Project performs at Cecil Sharp House, London, on Saturday and Sunday.

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The near-bankrupt country of Portugal hopes a new festival of British musical theatre acts will draw the tourists it needs to recover. The Phantom of the Opera, Evita and Jesus Christ Superstar head the bill. Maybe other versions top London shows will follow.

This article titled “Portugal’s new tourism draws are Phantom Of The Opera and Evita” was written by Vanessa Thorpe, for The Observer on Sunday 20th March 2011 00.05 UTC The songs of Andrew Lloyd Webber have moved audiences to tears and set box office tills ringing in London’s West End for more than 30 years, but can they help to shore up the Portuguese economy? As the country struggles this weekend to play down new fears about an impending bailout by the International Monetary Fund, the national tourist agency has announced a plan to draw a stream of British tourists into Portuguese resorts this summer by booking a succession of popular British entertainment shows and acts. At the top of the bill are The Phantom of the Opera, Evita and Jesus Christ Superstar. The British band Morcheeba is already booked, as is jazz singer Norma Winstone. There are also plans to bring in Lamb, the electronic trip-hop musicians from Manchester. The entertainment scheme, called Allgarve Nations, aims to celebrate the culture of one of the favourite visiting nations each year in turn. “For this first edition we have chosen the United Kingdom, which is our main tourism market, with a programme that includes British artists as well as national ones,” said Augusto Miranda, the co-ordinator of the campaign. “The cherry on the cake is that we are still working on the programme and there are more surprises to come,” he added, announcing the programme of events in Faro last week. Despite his country’s economic crisis, Miranda said he hopes to secure the normal budget of €3m for promotional schemes this year. A reliable flow of holidaymakers from Britain has been crucial to Portuguese finances for some years, but the heavy burden of the economic crash means it is no time for complacency. The influential credit ratings agency Moody’s downgraded Portugal’s financial standing by two notches last week in view of the country’s weak growth prospects. The move prompted damaging speculation that a bailout similar to those handed out last year to Ireland and Greece cannot be far away. The rating agency said “subdued growth prospects and productivity gains” over the near- to medium-term were behind their decision, as was concern that reforms to the labour market and the justice system had yet to “bear fruit”. On Friday the Portuguese prime minister, José Sócrates, urged his parliament to back new austerity measures. “I will do what it takes to avoid a bailout,” he said, emphasising his determination to go to the EU summit this week with a solid plan. His minority socialist-leaning government has staked its reputation on avoiding a bailout and it claims its new programme of spending cuts – the fourth in a year – will restore market faith in the economy. Opposition parties are calling for more, including a pensions freeze. Another glimmer of hope for the Portuguese tourist economy comes from plans for more low-cost flights to the Algarve. A budget airline, Jet2, has announced that it will be adding two new British routes to and from Faro from next month. Property professionals believe the news will help to revive the plummeting local property market by encouraging investors who want to buy second homes and let them to holidaymakers. Prince Charles and Camilla, the Duchess of Cornwall, are due to make an official visit to Portugal next week as part of a tour also taking in Spain and Morocco. Their visit will begin in Lisbon and will, according to Clarence House, “celebrate long-standing co-operation between the Portuguese and British navies, support British trade and investment opportunities and highlight the work of the substantial resident British community”.

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Oliver Burkeman went to Texas to the South by Southwest festival of film, music and technology, in search of the next big idea. After three days he found it: the boundary between ‘real life’ and ‘online’ has disappeared.

This article titled “SXSW 2011: The internet is over” was written by Oliver Burkeman, for The Guardian on Tuesday 15th March 2011 08.00 UTC If my grandchildren ever ask me where I was when I realised the internet was over – they won’t, of course, because they’ll be too busy playing with the teleportation console – I’ll be able to be quite specific: I was in a Mexican restaurant opposite a cemetery in Austin, Texas, halfway through eating a taco. It was the end of day two of South by Southwest Interactive, the world’s highest-profile gathering of geeks and the venture capitalists who love them, and I’d been pursuing a policy of asking those I met, perhaps a little too aggressively, what it was exactly that they did. What is “user experience”, really? What the hell is “the gamification of healthcare”? Or “geofencing”? Or “design thinking”? Or “open source government”? What is “content strategy”? No, I mean, like, specifically? The content strategist across the table took a sip of his orange-coloured cocktail. He looked slightly exasperated. “Well, from one perspective, I guess,” he said, “it’s kind of everything.” This, for outsiders, is the fundamental obstacle to understanding where technology culture is heading: increasingly, it’s about everything. The vaguely intimidating twentysomethings who prowl the corridors of the Austin Convention Centre, juggling coffee cups, iPad 2s and the festival’s 330-page schedule of events, are no longer content with transforming that part of your life you spend at your computer, or even on your smartphone. This is not just grandiosity on their part. Rather – and this is a technological point, but also a philosophical one – they herald the final disappearance of the boundary between “life online” and “real life”, between the physical and the virtual. It thus requires only a small (and hopefully permissible) amount of journalistic hyperbole to suggest that the days of “the internet” as an identifiably separate thing may be behind us. After a few hours at South by Southwest (SXSW), the 330-page programme in my bag started triggering shoulder aches, but to be honest it was a marvel of brevity: after all, the festival was pretty much about everything. We’ve been hearing about this moment in digital history since at least 1988, when the Xerox technologist Mark Weiser coined the term “ubiquitous computing”, referring to the point at which devices and systems would become so numerous and pervasive that “technology recedes into the background of our lives”. (To be fair, Weiser also called this “the age of calm technology”, implying a serenity that the caffeinated, Twitter-distracted masses in Austin this week didn’t seem yet to have attained.) And it’s almost a decade since annoying tech-marketing types started using “mobile” as an abstract noun, referring to the end of computing as a desktop-only affair. But the arrival of the truly ubiquitous internet is something new, with implications both thrilling and sinister – and it has a way of rendering many of the questions we’ve been asking about technology in recent years almost meaningless. Did social media cause the recent Arab uprisings? Is the web distracting us from living? Are online friendships as rich as those offline? When the lines between reality and virtuality dissolve, both sides of such debates are left looking oddly anachronistic. Here, then, is a short tour of where we might be headed instead: Web 3.0

“Big ideas are like locomotives,” says Tim O’Reilly, a computer book publisher legendary among geeks, embarking on one of the grand metaphors to which the headline speakers at SXSW seem invariably prone. “They pull a train, and the train’s gotta be going somewhere lots of people want to go.” The big idea O’Reilly is touting is “sensor-driven collective intelligence”, but since he coined the term “Web 2.0″, he seems resigned to people labelling this new phase “Web 3.0″. If Web 2.0 was the moment when the collaborative promise of the internet seemed finally to be realised – with ordinary users creating instead of just consuming, on sites from Flickr to Facebook to Wikipedia – Web 3.0 is the moment they forget they’re doing it. When the GPS system in your phone or iPad can relay your location to any site or device you like, when Facebook uses facial recognition on photographs posted there, when your financial transactions are tracked, and when the location of your car can influence a constantly changing, sensor-driven congestion-charging scheme, all in real time, something has qualitatively changed. You’re still creating the web, but without the conscious need to do so. “Our phones and cameras are being turned into eyes and ears for applications,” O’Reilly has written. “Motion and location sensors tell where we are, what we’re looking at, and how fast we’re moving . . . Increasingly, the web is the world – everything and everyone in the world casts an ‘information shadow’, an aura of data, which when captured and processed intelligently, offers extraordinary opportunity and mindbending implications.” Alarming ones, too, of course, if you don’t know exactly what’s being shared with whom. Walking past a bank of plasma screens in Austin that were sputtering out tweets from the festival, I saw the claim from Marissa Mayer, a Google vice-president, that credit card companies can predict with 98% accuracy, two years in advance, when a couple is going to divorce, based on spending patterns alone. She meant this to be reassuring: Google, she explained, didn’t engage in such covert data-mining. (Deep inside, I admit, I wasn’t reassured. But then Mayer probably already knew that.) The game layer

Depending on your degree of immersion in the digital world, it’s possible that you’ve never heard the term “gamification” or that you’re already profoundly sick of it. From a linguistic point of view, the word should probably be outlawed – perhaps we could ban “webinar” at the same time? – but as a concept it was everywhere in Austin. Videogame designers, the logic goes, have become the modern world’s leading experts on how to keep users excited, engaged and committed: the success of the games industry proves that, whatever your personal opinion of Grand Theft Auto or World of Warcraft. So why not apply that expertise to all those areas of life where we could use more engagement, commitment and fun: in education, say, or in civic life, or in hospitals? Three billion person-hours a week are spent gaming. Couldn’t some of that energy be productively harnessed? This sounds plausible until you start to demand details, whereupon it becomes extraordinarily hard to grasp what this might actually mean. The current public face of gamification is Jane McGonigal, author of the new book Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better And How They Can Change The World, but many of her prescriptions are cringe-inducing: they seem to involve redefining aid projects in Africa as “superhero missions”, or telling hospital patients to think of their recovery from illness as a “multiplayer game”. Hearing how McGonigal speeded her recovery from a serious head injury by inventing a “superhero-themed game” called SuperBetter, based on Buffy the Vampire Slayer, in which her family and friends were players helping her back to health, I’m apparently supposed to feel inspired. Instead I feel embarrassed and a little sad: if I’m ever in that situation, I hope I won’t need to invent a game to persuade my family to care. A different reaction results from watching a manic presentation by Seth Priebatsch, the 22-year-old Princeton dropout who is this year’s leading victim of what the New York Times has labelled “Next Zuckerberg Syndrome”, the quest to identify and invest in tomorrow’s equivalent of the billionaire Facebook founder. Priebatsch’s declared aim is to “build a game layer on top of the world” – which at first seems simply to mean that we should all use SCVNGR, his location-based gaming platform that allows users to compete to win rewards at restaurants, bars and cinemas on their smartphones. (You can practically hear the marketers in the room start to salivate when he mentions this.) But Priebatsch’s ideas run deeper than that, whatever the impression conveyed by his bright orange polo shirt, his bright orange-framed sunglasses, and his tendency to bounce around the stage like a wind-up children’s toy. His take on the education system, for example, is that it is a badly designed game: students compete for good grades, but lose motivation when they fail. A good game, by contrast, never makes you feel like you’ve failed: you just progress more slowly. Instead of giving bad students an F, why not start all pupils with zero points and have them strive for the high score? This kind of insight isn’t unique to the world of videogames: these are basic insights into human psychology and the role of incentives, recently repopularised in books such as Freakonomics and Nudge. But that fact, in itself, may be a symptom of the vanishing distinction between online and off – and it certainly doesn’t make it wrong. The dictator’s dilemma

Not long ago, according to the new-media guru Clay Shirky, the Sudanese government set up a Facebook page calling for a protest against the Sudanese government, naming a specific time and place – then simply arrested those who showed up. It was proof, Shirky argues, that social media can’t be revolutionary on its own. “The reason that worked is that nobody knew anybody else,” he says. “They thought Facebook itself was trustworthy.” This is one of many counterintuitive impacts that the internet has wrought on the politics of protest. But perhaps the most powerful is the one that Shirky – himself a prominent evangelist for the democratic power of services such as Twitter and Facebook – labels “the dictator’s dilemma”. Authoritarian leaders and protesters alike can exploit the power of the internet, Shirky concedes. (At least he notes the risks: in another session at the conference, I watch dumbstruck as a consultant on cyber-crimefighting speaks with undisguised joy about how much information the police could glean from Facebook, in order to infiltrate communities where criminals might lurk. Asked about privacy concerns, she replies: “Yeah – we’ll have to keep an eye on that.”) But there’s a crucial asymmetry, Shirky goes on. The internet is now such a pervasive part of so many people’s lives that blocking certain sites, or simply turning the whole thing off – as leaders in Bahrain, Egypt and elsewhere have recently tried to do – can backfire completely, angering protesters further and, from a dictator’s point of view, making matters worse. “The end state of connectivity,” he argues, “is that it provides citizens with increased power.” The road to that end state won’t be smooth. But the compensatory efforts of the authorities to harness the internet for their own ends will never fully compensate. Either they must allow dissenters to organise online, or – by cutting off a resource that’s crucial to their daily lives – provoke them to greater fury. Biomimicry comes of age

The search engine AskNature describes itself as “the world’s first digital library of Nature’s solutions”, and to visit it is to experience the curious, rather disorienting sensation of Googling the physical universe. Ask it some basic question – how to keep warm, say, or float in water, or walk on unstable ground – and it will search its library for solutions to the problem that nature has already found. The idea of “biomimicry” is certainly not new: for much of the past decade, the notion of borrowing engineering solutions from the natural world has inspired architects, industrial designers and others. Austin is abuzz with examples. “Nissan, right now, is developing swarming cars based on the movements of schooling fish,” says Chris Allen of the Biomimicry Institute. Fish follow ultra-simple mathematical rules, he explains, to ensure that they never collide with each other when swimming in groups. Borrow that algorithm for navigating cars and a new solution to congestion and road accidents presents itself: what if, in heavy traffic, auto-navigated cars could be programmed to avoid each other while continuing forwards as efficiently as possible? The Bank of England, he adds, is currently consulting biologists to explore ways in which organic immune systems might inspire reforms to the financial system to render it immune to devastating crises. “And what we’re looking for now,” Allen says cryptically, “is an interactive technology inspired by snakes.” ‘We are meant to pulse’

Until recently, the debate over “digital distraction” has been one of vested interests: authors nostalgic for the days of quiet book-reading have bemoaned it, while technology zealots have dismissed it. But the fusion of the virtual world with the real one exposes both sides of this argument as insufficient, and suggests a simpler answer: the internet is distracting if it stops you from doing what you really want to be doing; if it doesn’t, it isn’t. Similarly, warnings about “internet addiction” used to sound like grandparental cautions against the evils of rock music; scoffing at the very notion was a point of pride for those who identified themselves with the future. But you can develop a problematic addiction to anything: there’s no reason to exclude the internet, and many real geeks in Austin (as opposed to the new-media gurus who claim to speak for them) readily concede they know sufferers. One of the most popular talks at the conference, touching on these subjects, bore the title Why Everything Is Amazing And Nobody Is Happy. A related danger of the merging of online and offline life, says business thinker Tony Schwartz, is that we come to treat ourselves, in subtle ways, like computers. We drive ourselves to cope with ever-increasing workloads by working longer hours, sucking down coffee and spurning recuperation. But “we were not meant to operate as computers do,” Schwartz says. “We are meant to pulse.” When it comes to managing our own energy, he insists, we must replace a linear perspective with a cyclical one: “We live by the myth that the best way to get more work done is to work longer hours.” Schwartz cites research suggesting that we should work in periods of no greater than 90 minutes before seeking rest. Whatever you might have been led to imagine by the seeping of digital culture into every aspect of daily life – and at times this week in Austin it was easy to forget this – you are not, ultimately, a computer.

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 Published via the Guardian News Feed plugin for WordPress.

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By all means celebrate St George’s Day as well but keep May Day as a bank holiday

Bluebells on May Day

This article titled “May Day matters both for solidarity and our souls” was written by Cole Moreton, for The Guardian on Saturday 5th March 2011 06.00 UTC Workers of Britain, unite! Rise and dance at dawn, or charm a worm out of the ground – or do anything, really, as long as it’s daft. May Day madness is under threat, and it is our patriotic duty to save it. The government wants to move the holiday, to celebrate St George in April or the battle of Trafalgar in October. Business leaders want to extend the tourist season, which is fair enough – but some also say that it would be more patriotic. That’s nonsense. English people don’t feel much affinity for their patron saint, who’s from Palestine anyway. And even the finest tourist officer would struggle to sell Parisians on the idea of coming over in the gloom of autumn for a day that marks the crushing of the French. In contrast, there is no day in the calendar more wonderfully British than May Day. This is the moment when May madness hits and our unique passion for doing eccentric things is seen once more in all its glory. Worms will be charmed, maypoles plaited and the sinister Obby Oss will stalk Padstow. Men and women will dance at daybreak in Dorset, re-enacting imagined fertility rites in or near the dominant part – so to speak – of the hugely well-endowed chalk figure at Cerne Abbas. The May Ball revellers of Oxford will risk their privileged necks jumping from the Magdalen Bridge in evening dress, even as a choir sings. And those are just the headline-making events. Right across the country, May Day is when the British people exercise their right to get outside and do something really silly. “We are eccentric,” I was told by Lesley Prince, a social psychologist and lifelong participant in civil war re-enactments. “It is part of the British national identity.” Of course, most of these “traditional” events are not nearly as long-standing as people claim. The crab apple fair at Egremont in Cumbria goes back to 1267, but the world gurning championships held there – apparently inspired by the sourness of the fruit – is a relatively modern invention. Worm charming in Blackawton, south Devon, appears beguilingly ancient and rustic but actually only started in 1984, when a bored local at the Normandy Arms wondered what happened to grass when you peed on it. He rose from his pint to find out, saw the ground come alive with worms, and a tradition was born. But whether these events are old or new, people love them. The numbers of participants and spectators have soared over the last decade or so. They generate income – people have got to eat hog roast and drink real ale while they do this stuff, obviously – but that’s not really what it’s all about. The point is to celebrate just being alive. Just being us. People on the left tend to be as embarrassed by morris dancing and maypoles as they are by the flag of St George. They would prefer to keep May Day for the workers, and for international solidarity. Which is fair enough, we need as much of that as we can get. But such squeamishness misses the similarity between the two strands of May Day. Both share the same spirit – a desire to resist being ordered about and told what to do. The British people can be a rowdy, bawdy, rebellious, fun-loving, mischief-making lot – when we’re at our best. That spirit has got stronger again in recent years, so that even our old Etonian prime minister must appear to be a man of the people. But moving the May Day bank holiday would be a big blow to that independent spirit, not least because many of the things we like to do just can’t be done in bad weather, which is more likely earlier or later in the year. Those rituals need to stay where they are, and we need to learn to love them, because there is a serious point here. Britishness is changing before our eyes, as ideas and cultures from all over the world remake us. Rather than lament the loss of our old certainties, we can – and must – choose to celebrate the possibilities of new Britishness. That means being open to the new – but it also means being proud of who we really are, which is a daft bunch of eejits. Let the tourism chiefs go charm a few worms, open their eyes and see May Day for what it is: a fabulous – and highly marketable – festival of Great British Eccentricity. We need it, for our souls. And anyway, who’d want to go cheese-rolling in the snow?

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 Published via the Guardian News Feed plugin for WordPress.

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Following on from the Podcast idea a few weeks back I promised to post again telling you how to subscribe in iTunes or get the podcast automatically delivered to the podcast player of your choice. We’ve had four podcast prototypes broadcast and published already and the show is ready to go live on Tuesday July 6th, at 7.00pm UK time so this is quite short notice for anybody who didn’t manage to keep up over at ustream

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RSVP on Facebook at facebook.com/event.php?eid=131126593587441 The website hosting the podcasts is over at andyroberts.me and there’s a post about the official opening night which says:

After 4 weeks of prototyping, the music podcast goes LIVE in July and we’re celebrating with an official opening night on Tuesday July 6th. So come along to the ustream page promptly for 7.00pm UK time to get your requests in, hang out with other podcast listeners and be part of my opening night recorded for posterity here at http://andyroberts.me/

Podcast Launch

Building the Opening Night It would be nice to have a bit of a crowd along for the opening night just to get the regular weekly podcasting off to a good start so I’ve created a facebook Event for this particular show which you can invite people to. I’ll also be making a post over on my long established blog site at DARnet Andy Roberts and one or two other places if I can think of them. The podcast opening night will also be part of the Cafe Noodle July Ustream Festival, a great music community organised by Matt Stevens Loop. I think it should be possible to embed the ustream show here on this site – so that’s something I’ll be having a go at too.

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Following on from the Podcast idea a few weeks back I promised to post again telling you how to subscribe in iTunes or get the podcast automatically delivered to the podcast player of your choice. We’ve had four podcast prototypes broadcast and published already and the show is ready to go live on Tuesday July 6th, at 7.00pm UK time so this is quite short notice for anybody who didn’t manage to keep up over at ustream

subscribe in iTunes

RSVP on Facebook at facebook.com/event.php?eid=131126593587441 The website hosting the podcasts is over at andyroberts.me and there’s a post about the official opening night which says:

After 4 weeks of prototyping, the music podcast goes LIVE in July and we’re celebrating with an official opening night on Tuesday July 6th. So come along to the ustream page promptly for 7.00pm UK time to get your requests in, hang out with other podcast listeners and be part of my opening night recorded for posterity here at http://andyroberts.me/

Podcast Launch

Building the Opening Night It would be nice to have a bit of a crowd along for the opening night just to get the regular weekly podcasting off to a good start so I’ve created a facebook Event for this particular show which you can invite people to. I’ll also be making a post over on my long established blog site at DARnet Andy Roberts and one or two other places if I can think of them. The podcast opening night will also be part of the Cafe Noodle July Ustream Festival, a great music community organised by Matt Stevens Loop. I think it should be possible to embed the ustream show here on this site – so that’s something I’ll be having a go at too.

Thanks for subscribing to Andy Roberts blogPodcast Live

Related posts:Podcast Ustream.tv Tuesday Nights Andy Roberts Music 7.00pm Gordon Brown Never a Frown

After 4 weeks of prototyping, the music podcast goes LIVE in July and we’re celebrating with an official opening night on Tuesday July 6th. So come along to the ustream page promptly for 7.00pm UK time to get your requests in, hang out with other podcast listeners and be part of my opening night recorded for posterity here at http://andyroberts.me/ Podcast Launch Building the Opening Night It would be nice to have a bit of a crowd along for the opening night just to get the regular weekly podcasting off to a good start so I’ve created a facebook Event for this particular show which you can invite people to. I’ll also be making a post over on my long established blog site at DARnet Andy Roberts and one or tow other places if I can think of them. The podcast opening night will also be part of the Cafe Noodle July Ustream Festival, a great music community organised by Matt Stevens Loop. I think it should be possible to embed the ustream show here on this site – so that’s something I’ll be having a go at too.

Chinese New Year February 14th 2010 Originally uploaded by AndyRob

The Chinese New Year festival falls on February 14th this year, 2010 but celebrations in London’s Chinatown take place for a week or more around that time. It’s a moveable feast, also referred to as Chinese spring festival, and just as much belonging to south east Asia as China.

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