I’ve got something to tell you. It’ll probably be a surprise, but I think it’s a good surprise…

That’s pretty much the line I used when I broke the news to the rest of my family, a few months ago, that I’m going to be a dad again.

Yeah.

So anyway, we’re now into week 38 and so that means the answer to the most frequently asked question is: “any day now, but next Friday, 12th at the latest”.

I know.

I’ve found it quite difficult to know when to make an announcement here. I put it on Facebook to friends only a couple of weeks ago. But last time I did this was 1993 so I’m not really up to date with the etiquette. And now I just want to avoid turning up here at Christmas saying “so this thing happened”!

We’re very happy and excited. I’d get a strong wife punch if I said it had been plain-sailing from the start, but all is going really well.

Excuse me, while I put this crib together…

Write the date at the top of the page and then get on with the day.

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Because I’m playing with feed readers, I subscribed to the Flickr feed for photos tagged with my name.  I thought I’d just subscribed to my photos, but I think I was also subscribed to new tags already.  Anyway.  A weird thing happens where I periodically get notifications of a few newly tagged photos, and sometimes I’m surprised to see that they’ve only just been tagged, because they are in a set with others that are all tagged too.  And I don’t think I have a way of checking whether it’s real (ie someone is actually paying attention to other people’s photos enough to be tagging me – which seems unlikely) or a “feature” of how Flickr construct the feed. 

Here’s an example:

(“putting the camp into GovCamp since 2012”)

PS I know I’m not the only Lloyd Davis in the world… as evidenced by my gmail.

It’s hard work being me, you know.

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Blogging on the train like it’s 2008.

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One of my favourite AA sayings is something like “people don’t fail at this programme because they’re too stupid, but some do fail because they’re too clever!” 

I find this “game of life” to be like that, whatever you’re playing at right now and whether it feels like it’s  finite or one of those infinite ones.  I think that lately, I mistook one particular infinite game I’ve been playing as finite. But then I’ve been drawn to say that there are no finite games, but you don’t learn that until one game you thought was finite comes to an end and here you are starting another one whether you like it or not. 

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I’m on my way in for another Coffee Morning.  Whoever comes are the right people… etc.  Last month we heard at the beginning that they’d appointed Sarah Mullally to be Archbishop of Canterbury.  This week Zohran Mamdani won the mayoral election in NYC.  So a pattern is kind of emerging 😀

In his newsletter Dave points to Duncan Brown talking about bookings as an example of what he calls “design by cliché”.  It’s an interesting idea, but in the case of bookings, I don’t think that being a ‘cliché’ is the problem.  

It’s more that the reason all these things are called bookings is that once upon a time, the record of the thing it’s describing went into a book, an actual book – it might have been called a ledger or a diary or something, but it’s a description of a technology being used rather than the thing itself.  And that’s why trying to treat all bookings as if they were the same is as meaningless now as saying “I need to make a computering”.  If anyone needs an old man shouting at clouds, I’m available.

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There’s a lot of cruft in that link to Dave’s newsletter above, which may or may not be tracking you or me in some way, but I didn’t have the patience to work out which bits I could cut out.

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My dear departed pal from New Orleans, Ray Nichols, did an interesting thing when he retired.  He would describe his voluntary work as ‘interning’.  So basically he’d appoint himself as intern with an organisation or collective (it didn’t matter what) as a kind of joke, but also pointing to the fact that he wanted to keep on learning and stay slightly humble.  I’m not retiring, but I’m attracted to being a self-appointed intern in a number of contexts, making tea, helping out, observing and learning, but also sharing stuff that I know but that you wouldn’t necessarily fully employ me for.  As Ray would have undoubtedly remarked, “Just Sayin’!”  

I also think of LLM chatbots as fast, eager-to-please interns that you can mercilessly exploit without the usual consequences, but who might also make catastrophic errors if you give them too much agency. 

Poor old interns.

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I heard someone on a call the other day saying “I’ve just heard of this thing called Personal Knowledge Management or PKM” which reminded me that:

“Every day somebody’s born who’s never seen the Flintstones“

But seriously, it got me digging into when I first mentioned PKM on this blog.  And of course it was the very first post in September 2004 🙂 and then a couple of months later I went over to Amsterdam for KM Europe and took part in a PKM workshop hosted by Knowledge Board (so Ed Mitchell?) in a kind of open space form where I called a session on “trust vs suspicion, faith vs fear…aaaagh the feelings…” which definitely sounds like the sort of thing I would still do.

Ton Zijlstra was also there and he’s been one of my anchors for PKM thinking ever since, as well as being one of the stalwart bloggers who’ve kept my RSS reader alight through the quiet years (Thanks Ton!) and his post from the end of last year explaining how PKM is personal along three dimensions will form the basis of my response to my friends on that call, who are just embarking on the journey.

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I don’t think I mentioned it here, but last week I completed the Couch to 5K programme again.  The goal is to be able to run for 30 mins or 5k three times a week and that’s what I did (30 mins but not quite 5k – I’ve never managed a 30 min 5k yet).  My plan from here is to keep building on that to get back to feeling comfortable running 5k again, no matter how slowly.  Today I did 3.6k and I’ll do that another two times in the next 7 days and then see whether I can stretch up to 4k.

It feels great to have re-established this rhythm.  When I first did it 7 years ago, it was straightforward for me to run every other day.  With the passing of time (and some accumulation of mass, especially on my waistline) just having one rest day between runs is pushing it.  Having two is ideal, I think, but three runs too much of a risk that I’ll fall out of the habit – three days off followed by a cold winter morning with torrential rain would too easily stretch to four and then…

I was encouraged though when I looked up how average pace declines with age, it’s not just that I’ve gotten out of shape, I’m also a few years older.  But it would be nice to be nearer the average pace for my age than I am at the moment.

I went down to Weymouth for a couple of days this week to see my mum.  On Tuesday we drove over to Lulworth Cove for a coffee, picnic lunch on the beach and an ice cream.

The first time (maybe) we went there was Easter 1973.  It was quieter than Autumn half-term 2025, the parking wasn’t as expensive (or managed via CCTV) there was a little less erosion and there were fewer ice-cream sellers.  But we did have a picnic on the beach.

It seems that seventeen years ago today, I was in Berlin at the Web 2.0 Expo.  

Andrea Vascellari got some video of me asking Tim O’Reilly a question about online/offline relationships.  In retrospect, there’s a lot of naivety and privilege in the air.

I noted:

the stories we’re telling are still more about technology than about what people are doing with other people.

plus ça change…

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We watched Paradise and kinda wished we hadn’t. It’s a less hopeful picture of the near future and how we’d deal with an apocalyptic event than you’d usually expect on mainstream TV. I want my apocalyptic tales to end with a less realistic, but rousing affirmation of the strength of humans to stick together please. I’m holding out for season 2 to deliver, but won’t be surprised if it doesn’t.

I spent a couple of summers in the early eighties selling ice cream, chatting up the odd grockle and looking out over the sea to Portland.

The other stream that I take to when I need to calm down a bit is NASA’s HD Views from the International Space Station

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Recent conversations about “the media”, reboots and regrowing cultures have had me looking back to the good old days of 2006 when I disclosed the contents of my “one-person media empire” bag and David Wilcox was starting to talk about “Social Reporting” – (btw the first link in that piece goes to one of David’s typepad sites, but “Thank Brewster!” it was captured by the Wayback Machine.)

In those days it appears it was all about the kit. The first iPhone was just around the corner. And now I carry all of that stuff *and* the software to edit and publish it around in my pocket every day. And so do you, probably. Utopian 2006 me would have imagined only a blossoming of enlightened civil society as a result. Silly Utopian 2006 me.

Something else happened in 2006 that seemed to offer hope for said blossoming and enlightenment. But the way it turned out makes that hope look appallingly naive. Twitter.

In that December I said:

If it’s quiet on this blog of late, the partial explanation is twitter.

It’s kinda diverting the energy that usually goes into blogging. It is a temporary diversion as I’ve also got some big posts to get out too, but they might come slowly over the festive season.

Dear reader, that “temporary diversion” ended up lasting another 10, 15, 20? years and one might argue that it actually broke what we were doing altogether. It takes practice and willpower to get back into writing in anything more than 140 character chunks (not solved when the limit got stretched to 280) especially when other parts of the ecosystem are working against you.

Dave Winer was pointing out how stuck we were with this stuff in 2014

Twitter says our posts don’t have titles, and can’t be longer than 140 chars. And Google Reader said our posts had to have titles, and could be unlimited in length.

This is why my world is fractured, and so is yours.

Now, I got a lot of good things done with a combo of Twitter (and Facebook/Instagram) and blogging in the intervening years – it wasn’t all gloomy. And I have friends who make a living now from people who pay them to write e-mails (and have Substack deal with the distribution details and some of the marketing. Oh and the payment processing) or make little films and let YouTube pass on some of their ad revenue.

You don’t have to be a wild conspiracy theorist or some sort of nostalgic Web 2.0 obsessive to recognise that giving that much power over your work to a third party owned by billionaires carries significant risk, especially given the way such billionaires have behaved in the past. But most people, me included, don’t then get farther than “Well, whatcha gonna do?”

I don’t have the whole answer yet, but I’m picking away at it here. I inwardly groan when my morning inbox is full of messages from group mailing lists that belong on a linkblog. Or I have to download an interesting-looking article from a friend on a WhatsApp group because it’s behind a paywall or some other barrier to reading it on the web.

Why is this? Why can’t I just accept that the media ecosystem is fractured and that I have to treat this kind of information in one way and that kind of information in another way, because that’s just the way it is.

You can’t expect the world to just organise itself according to your whims, Lloyd!

Well yes, partly it is my own idiosyncratic ways of organising my work and thinking and how I think about information and knowledge. But it’s also the understanding of why these tools get organised in such a way as to enable the exploitation of our collective labour by people who already have more money and power than they know what to do with.

I’m not making generic recommendations for the whole world. I’m thinking here in particular about some small-ish groups I’m in, that could imho accelerate and improve the thinking and activity and effectiveness of the group, if there weren’t these strangers in the room, intermediating between us as friends, and taking their cut at the same time, the owners and managers of these platforms.

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I'm taking part in a reading group for "Hospicing Modernity" with a particular focus on how the messages in that book might apply to churches and spiritual community.

We're gathering once a month and the meetings are confidential (I don't think we've even agreed on using the Chatham House rule) but I'm only going to share some of the things that came up for me, both in my prep (I'm medicated, I can now do prep! I read the chapter before the meeting!) and in the course of the gently- and gracefully-facilitated (by Liz Slade and Al Barrett) session.

I'd already tried reading this book a couple of times and then I also tried listening to the audiobook.  I've never got very far before.   So I'm grateful to have this group as an excuse to make perseverance more of a priority.  It's not just me, it is a difficult and challenging book, in the same way that I found my first reading of "Alcoholics Anonymous" difficult and challenging.  

The subtitle is: 

"Facing Humanity’s Wrongs and the Implications for Social Activism" 

Yikes!

and the publisher's bibliographical summary reads:

"A discussion on how we must face the multiple crises of modernity, interrupt and retire damaging modern behavior patterns, and reimagine how we learn, unlearn, and respond to crisis"

It's a lot.  

I will need more than one post to cover what went through me yesterday.  I had the familiar feeling of having my inner world rearranged both by reading and discussing with others. I dreamed weird dreams afterwards.

The first part (which we've covered in the first couple of sessions, while also gingerly getting to know each other) is about sixty pages and it lays the preparatory foundations for the rest.  It begins with a discussion of what, or rather, WHO "modernity" is and then invites you to "to witness and offer palliative care to modernity dying within and around you".

We focused yesterday on the third and final bit of "prep work" which clarified for me that this is about cleaning house (mostly within, but also without!).  One of the creative tensions that I expect to return to throughout is between the processes presented here of internal decluttering and composting and the processes that I'm familiar with from my step work in taking inventory, dropping the rock(s) and making amends.  I'm fairly sure from what I've seen already that they'll be complementary.

Without knowing the content, just before I sat down to read, I'd followed an urge to tidy my desk (if not the rest of the room around me). And then had to laugh at myself reading in the second paragraph: "Since modernity’s logic is one of accumulation, it conditions us to hoard stuff (both literally and metaphorically), thinking it might one day be relevant." 

Oof!  Is that what all this is?  An unconscious hoarding of stuff?  Certainly, if I were able to change my thinking about it's one-day-maybe relevance then I would walk away immediately.  I can imagine the lightness of doing so.  Immediately crushed by the grief and loss that I imagine would follow. And I'm not the worst at this kind of thing.  I've done some work.  I've let go of a lot. But there are things that follow me around, that haven't really been touched yet.

A lot of my physical stuff is important to me either because it's about me in the past or because it carries some feeling or meaning about people who aren't here any more.  When my dad died, you may remember, I wrote about the need I felt to gather up the things that might otherwise have disappeared with him.  Was that just modernity?  A trick, to distract myself from what's really going on in the world or the pain of losing someone so close? Maybe also the pain of being me (don't worry, I don't expect that it's any worse than the pain of being you!) and the difficulty of recovering from whatever shit went on in the past that wasn't possible to solve there and then.

I was very grateful, for example, to find my old school reports in my dad's stash, the contents of them really helped me understand and have a bit more compassion for the guy I've always been.  When I shared about that at the time, there were people around me who said "Now burn them!" but I wasn't ready to and I'm still not.  There's another stage in the process between where I am and "that's all gone" and I think it's something to do with transmuting, or in the language of this book, composting all these things that aren't needed in their current form, but which hold something precious that can support another cycle of life.

I've had an ongoing fantasy project that never gets anywhere.  You know, a bit beyond "someday/maybe".  A bit more like "when I've really got my shit together and am a much better, more enlightened and free person and don't have to sit around writing stupid e-mails and that". And it's about taking all of the books, tapes, records, pictures, files and shit and creating new things out of the precious emotional parts of them, new things that carry the essence of me and my ancestors for my descendants where it's useful, so that the non-precious physical parts of them can be reused or recycled.

I came away from last night's session with a little more hope that regardless of how unenlightened I feel, I might have permission to do more of that kind of thing now.

I'm glad to see that at least Dave B is reading this nonsense.  I didn't get a pingback, though Dave, I saw it because I read your post via RSS.  Is that deliberate?  I don't remember how these things work. Maybe it's an artefact of the way your microposts are aggregated?  

Anyway.

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I agree with the thing about reading and writing in the same place –  I want it to be my (the writer's) place, not yet another centralising force who one day might be tempted to wall it all off.  Having a reader built in to the blogging tool was one of the features that I really liked in Radio Userland, back in the brief period that I used it.  I actually used it more for reading than writing due to my well-known shyness about talking in public…

The use cases I'm thinking of at the moment are for groups to blog and learn together.  So a collected feed from all the people in the group (although a curated set of feeds from outside would be a useful thing too).

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I just tried to find my old Userland blog, but instead, Google just threw up this to distract me.  Somehow, in 2010, I was invited to take part in a couple of editions of BBC Radio 5 live's "On The Money" with Declan Curry.  My brief was to answer listener's questions on how to use social networking in business.  It was fun.  I got to sit in the Today studio then at TVC.  Many of the questions were basically "how do I use this magic social media thing to do magic and make my business really successful, tomorrow?" and I suspect my answers about there being no magic other than persistence and patience was what led to me not being asked back more than once.