It’s 42 now ask a different question

Up bright and early this morning to be dumped on the outskirts of Swindon for the Coach to Heathrow.   I start this week in Trieste for the State of the Net event I spoke at last year.  The video of my keynote there is one of the most popular so I have much to live up to.   After that its Singapore, Hong Kong and Bangkok  before the best part of two weeks in Australia with a possible side trip to New Zealand.  And before anyone says it I will be home before the first Lions test and the only match I have any chance of seeing if I can get tickets is the one in Sydney against the Waratahs on the 15th.

I made all the connections and arrived in the former sea port of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in the late afternoon.  The view from the hotel window shown gives a sense of the place.  Lots of warehouse buildings in various stages of decay or being converted into offices or conference centres.   I have to speak about How not to manage complexity which is nicely generic.   The format is twenty minutes but then I get to sit and have a conversation with Doc Searles and Euan Semple for the rest of the hour so that will be interesting.

Conversations with other speakers in the evening started to give me a focus and I think I am going to focus on some the issues of using the net for participation, the dangers of Big Data and eDemocracy as fads and the need to start treating technology as a tool rather than a fetishistic device.  Come to think of it I  have been making the latter point for two decades and this is the third time I have been through the Give me a lot of money and I will create an algorithm which will solve the problems of life the universe and everything nonsense.  The answer is multiple three by two by seven guys, now lets move on to something that uses humans before we destroy humanity by neglect.  More tomorrow …