Month: May 2006

I’m currently making plans for an exciting project, producing a daily podcast for the Cambridge Film Festival, which takes place from July 6-16th this year and will be packed with great films.

We’re going to be interviewing members of the audience as they queue to go into each show, and since it’s always a good idea to give each section of a radio show its own name, as it helps people understand the structure, we had been looking for a suitable snappy title. I remembered about six months ago coming up with ‘vox pod’ for this, as a play on ‘vox pop’, short for ‘vox populi’ or ‘voice of the people’.    I googled it and nobody else was using the phrase, so it seemed like an excellent plan.

I was surfing around today and came across this extract from the Media Guardian podcast, and knew just how Newton must have felt when he heard about Leibniz’s work on calculus…

I reckon we’ll still use it, though…

Drawing crowds in the Old City

Monday was not quite the hottest day in Delhi so far, but 44 degrees Celsius made it the hottest May 8th for five years and, if the CNN weather maps are to be believed, made Delhi one of the hottest places on earth.

This may in part explain why, when Julian, Gareth and I stood at the closed gates to the Red Fort, the massive brick construction at the heart of the Old City built by the Moghul Emperor Shah Jahan, we attracted such a crowd. They were waiting to see which of us would faint or perhaps even die first in the heat that was extreme even for residents.

Continue reading “Delhi observations”

It’s seventeen degrees Celsius in my hotel room on the sixth floor of Shangri-La Hotel in New Delhi.  The room is just starting to get warmer as I’ve turned off the air-conditioning, but it’s unlikely to approach the searing temperatures on the road outside, where yesterday’s peak of 44.5 was the highest in the city so far this year and prompted health advice from the local government.

Continue reading “My first time in India”

I’m in Delhi, working on some programmes for Digital Planet, and I’ll write more about my first time in India later. But on saturday evening, seven hours after my plane touched down, I was lucky enough to be able to go along to a meeting of the Delhi Bloggers.
It was their eleventh meeting in the last two years, which is pretty impressive, and around thirty people showed up, which is more than normal. It would be nice to think they came because the fame of Digital Planet has spread to the Delhi blogosphere, but I suspect that wasn’t the case…

Continue reading “Meeting the Delhi Bloggers”

My good friend and long-time colleague Will Davies, originally at The Work Foundation and more recently at ippr, is inteviewed by John Sutherland in today’s Guardian, talking about the dangers of putting our faith so completely in technologies whose current primary purpose is to make the world ever more “flexible to the whims of consumers in egocentric and irrational ways.”

It’s an argument he’s been making for some time – as he points out in his usual self-deprecating fashion on his blog – but no less valid for that. I recall standing outside Demos one evening some time ago as we argued that text voting was making it all too damn easy for people and devalued the democratic process…