I once persuaded  quite of lot of people to spend 11 hours on a bus: a trip that would leave them pretty much where they started after three or four times round a loop. “Is it for charity?”, people would ask. And no, no it wasn’t. […]
It’s not out until 11 February, but Danny and I received advanced copies of Pier Review — the book which we had the idea for back in 2010 — just this week. Most of that time was spent not doing anything, then going through the publishing […]
Just pulled this list of pieces together to test something on Facebook. It’s not everything I wrote this year: but hopefully some of the more interesting bits. Hope it might fill a reading gap for someone. First, a festive bit about establishment hegemonies, Twitter and panto:https://www.imperica.com/viewpoint/twitters-pantomime-jon-bounds […]
We’ve just completed and sent away to the publisher via our agent the text that is to become the book Pier Review. We signed with Summersdale a few months ago, and they plan to release the finished thing in the spring next year. There will no […]
A comment piece in the Daily Telegraph today, with some hopefully fresh angles on Birmingham accents. It looks much nicer in the paper, than anywhere you can read the 150 or so comments below.
Pluralistic ignorance and the modern condition – on social phycology and group behaviour. Ol’ Red Eyes: Marxist TV reviews – a tumblr full of the Marxist television writing I’ve been commissioned to do recently. Den Pen’s Shoes – on people who pretend to be dead authors […]
Below is a copy of an email that I have just sent to David Brookes, editor of the Birmingham Mail. Dear Sir, I would like your thoughts on a series of ‘similarities’ between articles posted on a website I edit (paradisecircus.com) and some on birminghammail.co.uk. Paradise […]
Along with the usual Paradise Circus and Pier Review work, here’s a few things I’ve written in the last month or so. Lolitics: The power of civic satire, which is about how satire is now something everyone can do. Why everything is shit nowadays, which is […]
I published it on Paradise Circus as it was inevitably set in Birmingham. At around 1600 words it’s not too long to be read in a few minutes.
I was asked to ‘create’ a Twitterstorm as part of an art project, and I sort of did. While this wonderful Buzzfeed post describes the stages that one goes through, in order to measure the size of a storm and hence the success of my operation […]
  I’ll write up the xHumed talk asap, Joseph Priestley sending this Tweet: It is my conclusion that until they can be made safe the bi-cycle must be banned from the streets of Birmingham and other large towns. — Joseph Priestley (@JPriestley1733) November 5, 2013   […]
For a thing, I’ve been investigating some Twitter communities I wouldn’t usually go anywhere near. Most due to lack of interest but one sort due to a distaste of a lot of what it sets out to do. That one was the concept of a timed […]
Is how my brain processes xHumed, at which I’m appearing on Nov 5th in Brum. Tickets available now.
The best jokes never make it past the subs, but here's a thing I wrote for the Guardian recently. [link]
There was a piece featuring me and the sale of BiNS on the BBC News site last week. As ever with ‘news’ I felt the interesting stuff didn’t make it to the actual article and in fact I’m sure I didn’t say anything about gaps quite […]
At some point over the weekend, I decided to out the low level moving on campaign and put my most famous website up for sale on eBay. I started the site back in the May of 2002, before there were really such things as blogs in […]
I was on Danny Baker’s Radio Five show earlier, which was great. I’ve always been a big fan of his and consider him to be one of the few genuinely innovative and brilliant broadcasters. I’d texted in in response to a question about being a terrible […]
I really like the Photosynth iPhone app for creating panoramas, it’s a painless process and can be done quite quickly. Of course moving people, or dogs, can create an odd effect. This one is at the summit of Tal y fan in North Wales, with added […]
After my talk at Oxford Geek Night I was happy to have a couple of suggestions to see if the algorithm could produce better results. One was to remove retweets from the search, which makes sense as we all know from many Twitter bios “a RT […]
While working on Siôn Simon’s push for there to be a directly elected Mayor for Birmingham I contributed an ideas paper around the possibilities for a more open system of government in the city. It covered open data (in broad strokes rather than technical details), comms […]
After moving down to Oxford I did an update of my Birmingham Emotions conversational psychogeography project. That’s now quite simple as I have built a ‘happy monitor’ that can centre anywhere. I’m not as happy myself as I was with the results however, whether due to […]
From 18th July until September the large glass edition of the Birmingham Music Map is going to be on display at The Public in West Bromwich as part of their Summer Exhibition. It’s free to visit and has a rather nice coffee shop-cum-bar. Thanks to Jez […]
Fused magazine, which (as well as sister publication Area) I’ve done stuff for in the past, has just released a very special edition. It’s thick, beautiful and perfect bound and it’s the first volume of what they’re calling the second volume of the mag. It’s got […]
Forty two piers in to our circumnavigation of the coast of England and Wales we arrived bleary in Saltburn-by-the-sea one morning. Luckily the breathtaking coastline and the warming sun perked us up. Luckily as it was the only time we were captured on video during the […]
Poorly Collected Works 2010-11 is the title of an eBook I pulled together at the end of last year. It sold a few, and jumped into the Amazon charts when it was part of a promotion, but was more of an experiment. In continuing experimentation, now […]
On Friday I got round to doing something I’d been thinking of for a long while. I added location detection to my conversational psychogeography tool. Like the Is Brum Happy? system it takes the latest tweets around a location and rates emotionally sensitive words against a […]
Edgeryders is an EU project to try to work out how creatives and freelancers can make a living ‘on the edge’. One of the people working on it is good mate Chris Pinchen (often found online under the moniker Cataspanglish) and he has been doing a […]
When I returned to the Labour fold and joined the party a few months before the 2010 General Election it was party through fear, partly through duty, but mainly because I thought there was a real opportunity that it could be reclaimed from the New Labour […]
Well, phoned the singer up. I interviewed Peter Hook (Hooky, of Joy Division, New Order, Revenge, Monaco and now The Light…) a little while ago for Fused Magazine. They’ve just put it online. Go have a read.
On the first day of April Danny Smith and I delivered a walking tour of the ‘back end’ of Birmingham city centre as part of the Still Walking festival. Ben Waddington the genius behind the festival asked for something that played with the city’s memes and […]