From carbon emissions to Ponzi schemes, why do so many educated people say really stupid things about web 3.0 without embarrassment? Here is a handy list of all the dumbest things I have heard smart people say about the web 3.0 era. They are more or less the exact same…

Booms and slumps in new tech always prompt the agency establishment to begin declaring everything is over for the newcomers. — Back in 1998 I took a job setting up the web department for a very successful UK marketing agency. The company had a big design department with no less than 3 print teams, earning well over 2 million per year in fees from high-end brochures and print material for major…

What’s your passion, your purpose, your mission, your calling? Your true destiny? Are you the chosen one? Or just looking for a job? — Please note: I am not trashing the many useful things that get posted into LinkedIn every day. …

Try these simple techniques to improve your chat show interview technique — it makes a huge difference to the quality of the finished show. — Our expectations of chats as media content are wildly different from chats as a pastime — chats need to be dynamic, narrative and lively to pass for listening entertainment. Hosting an interview is more of a performance piece than a natural chat. It’s not easy. …

How the 19th Century Arts & Crafts movement shaped modern design — Looking back on the work of William Morris and the late Victorian Arts & Crafts movement, it might be hard to see the connection between those days and modern UX and the progression of and design thinking towards combining aesthetics and utility. There’s a thriving modern industry reproducing Morris & Co. designs from the late 1800s. It’s ironic, really, because Morris was dead set against that sort of thing. He didn’t like industrialisation, or mass market products. …

How I managed to completely win over the worst crypto and NFT sceptics by dumbing down and skipping to the end. — “It’s a ponzi scheme!” they say. “It’s just a JPEG” they say. “How is any of it worth real money?” they say. “There’s nothing backing it” they say. “What’s to stop me from making a new crypto coin and saying it’s worth a billion?” they say. “You can’t pay your…

The tulip bulb investment bubble of the mid-1600s is a myth, and shows a complete lack of fact checking for the cynics who use it. — There was no investment bubble involving tulip bulbs. Fact. Move on. 17th Century tulips have nothing to teach us about cryptocurrency. They have more to teach us about luxury fads, like spending $10,000 on a pair of skinny jeans. In digital terms the tuilp fad was — and this is…

Why do we associate innocence with likeable personalities and guilt with disagreeable ones? — Amber Heard. Kate and Gerry McCann. Stormy Daniels. Victoria Guiffre. Half of Hollywood’s A-list women before Weinstein imploded. The long list of Cosby survivors. The dozens of faces who appear in reports of historical abuse allegations. So many of them are met with suspicion by the public because they don’t…

You can’t help but notice the whole conversation about NFTs, crypto, the Metaverse and Web 3.0 in general is happening beneath the shadow of a massive elephant in the room. A huge great technical mammoth of a pachyderm, called “Risk”. It’s not just a vague, nebulous general risk, it’s a…