Things have changed. The campus itself is comprised of a cluster of spectacular statements and feats of architecture. The accommodation itself was in a building shaped like a third of a giant ring doughnut with rooms on four floors looking in to a central courtyard.

This university used to be called Hatfield Polytechnic - a poly with a real history. It also hosted a great venue for music in the 70s and 80s.

Two exhausting days later I find myself home again, easing myself through a day, picking up the actions that came out of the event and clearing the eternal backlog of email.

Watch this space …. as they say in all the good periodicals.

As if nothing had happened!

And the transmissions begin again, from here.

Listening to Robert Fripp, and wondering whether the deep and mysterious messages which are so elusive in Gurdjieff’s work are the reason that the ‘work’ is so resonant, so meaningful and so prolific.

The service I use is www.bloglines.com which is worth looking at. You can ‘subscribe’ to a blog by clicking on an RSS button on the page, or use a button in your browser which you can download, or within bloglines itself. It’s a great way to keep up to date with your online reading!

For an example of the monetisation concept, I look to the work being done by Adam Curry in the podcasting world – he is mindful of the free-at-source roots of podcasting but can see the opportunities too, and is looking to monetise this sector. I’m not critical of this. There are loads of podcasters producing content for reasons of passion and obsession rather than for commerical gain. But there are many people who want to generate income. Adam Curry is working ingeniously to deliver business models which make that possible.

Around the issue of Open Source I think the approaches of Tom Peters and Seth Godin are really interesting. Both of them have a growing store of freely downloadable material for people to read. I guess they figure that they make plenty of money and the issue is about getting readership.

Although they presumably also realise that giving away free electronic content does convert into sales in a world where people still prefer the real printed page to browse and stick on their shelf. And it is this translation of free to purchase that leads to something else.

There is actually a 3rd way in all of this – something at the interface between monetisation and open source. I guess in software terms it would be shareware. But that isn’t quite what I mean. I’m talking about the way in which it is possible to build market share (something Amazon did in the early stages of its business where it lost warehouses full of cash selling at ridiculously low prices to get customers), build readership (Godin & Peters) and develop a meme-like interest through the ‘give it away for free’ approach. I guess this idea needs more work, but I am sure that we are on the brink of some new business models, and exciting new ideas.

I have written before about the ‘Creative Commons’ idea – this weblog has a creative commons license. This is another aspect of this wider picture. The challenge which faces web publishers (bloggers?), podcasters and other net-entrepreneurs is to work out how to weave through all of this and get out of the net what we want to, whilst ensuring that we give the reader / surfer what they want too.

There is a lot of talk at the moment about Web 2.0 which will take us into the next era of the web, beyond the market place which it has become of late. Exciting times are ahead – more thought is needed about the collision of monetisation, open source and creative commons to create new ways of doing things.

Blogger did a user survey recently – when are we going to get feedback, and what are they doing with the suggestions that were made in the survey?

Another thing that Blogger could provide, would be the facility to post a number of drafts and then have them automatically post to the site so that there is always a post from the backlog when there is nothing new. Other blogging tools can do this – why not Blogger? Is it just me, or do Google seem to be resting the whole development of Blogger since they bought it?

OK, whinge over!

I’m very blog-light at the moment as I rush about with the day job, and try to realign my life after a stack of changes. Things should pick up soon – promises, promises…

But then all rules are set to be broken! And it is worth an apology for the low frequency of posts. It is unlikely to change until September now.

I am reading “In Search of the Miraculous” by P D Ouspensky and feeling bewildered by a lot of it. He puts across the theories of Gurdjieff really clearly – it is the theories themselves that are so baffling. The man-machine idea is fascinating. Does this have anything to do with where Kraftwerk got the name from? Man sleepwalking through life. More on this book in a later post…