Asked how many Symbian applications are running on his phone (a Nokia 6600).
"Not one," he says. He simply doesn't see a mass market for software. Instead, he thinks, most people will want "a lot of things you can get on the Internet on your phone translated as a service, piece by piece".

The appetite for data cannot be underestimated - people are just looking at the wrong type. It's just not going to be download or video data - it's going to be transaction data.

You already don't carry money or a ticket with you. I have a wireless card for my car and I don't carry keys: if only I could get rid of my wallet! Then my passport. This has a very high consumer appeal, but you've got to make it easy to access.

The reality is that trying to push everything into everything just doesn't make sense. We'll see an unfolding of more things like the iPod - focused at a particular consumer solution. Everything doesn't go into there. Where you can break out groups of functions - the phone and the camera may work for some segments but not others; some might never want it, or might never use it. As we get more and more digital, all this complexity has to be tamed in a way that the consumer can access it.

So what innovation and what services do you think we are going to see?
Ask yourself, what are people going to with all their pictures in the future? What are they going to do? Is writing to CD-ROM really safe? Sorry - it's gone in a few years. Are people going to do a 3-stage offering, or make one of their copies in an alternative geographical location? Nobody does that.
No one has designed architecture for the home. We've got Wi-Fi and broadband and Bluetooth but there's no way to put it all together.
You have to tackle the product offering yourself. You start doing something vertically because you can't work with everybody. So somebody has to break through, starting with a niche.
Whoever does this has got to do the hardware, and the software, and the systems infrastructure, and not many people can do that; and they must have a brand that the consumer respects. On the one hand they have to be known for style going into the home, and on the other be able to manage infrastructure. And they've got to be big.
So they need to establish a beach-head, and some companies wouldn't even bother to try to cross this chasm. And it needs a really big organization to be able to deliver. So I don't even know if they know they should be doing this.

I have been told of websites that needed content management systems, as most frequently updated websites need these days. However, one site in particular, which has had a content management system written especially for them has me aghast at the waste of public money.

Over the past 4 years that it has taken to write this system, the company developing it has charged around £100,000 each year.

The RSS feed cost £12,000 to develop. To add department or category RSS feeds will cost another £2,000. I could list several simple components that cost this sort of money, for example, It uses a shortcut sytem that that is so tricky to use, that it isn't used. This cost £15,000.

It uses it's own desk top application, which is not user friendly.

I'm not saying that the company developing this platform, for that's what it is, has ripped off or cheated. I believe they have worked hard. Some of the money came from an IT grant (still, public money).

Each Manila installation can handle, to my knowledge over 1,000 sites, take over 150,000 dynamic page builds per day (though statically rendered pages can take much, much more—obviously).

It's UI is far, far, superior, with 7year old children using quite merrily, it's been around for 4½ years with hundreds of thousands of users, so it's been bug tested to hell and back.

When Radio Userland is connected up to Manila, then you have an out of this world, powerful desktop CMS application. Radio, itself opens up several orders of magnitude of functionality on top of a Manila site's functionality. Throw a developer in there and you'd have more easy to use features than you could shake a stick at.

The list price for a Manila installation is nearly £600 (plus some developer time for that extra 5%). Against nearly £500,000 for a CMS that nobody else will use. What's worse? I know of several other departments thinking they need to spend hundreds of thousands also! There seems to be two reasons: 1) the hard-on of spending so much taxpayer's money, 2) the apparent comfort in thinking, "it must be worth it."

Perhaps I should tender with Manila's functionality yet at a price that's one thousand times more than it's six hundred quid, take an afternoon to install it and use the rest of my life trout fishing.

An excerpt: "Some of the worst things that happened you don't know about, okay? Videos, um, there are women there. Some of you may have read that they were passing letters out, communications out to their men. This is at Abu Ghraib ... The women were passing messages out saying 'Please come and kill me, because of what's happened' and basically what happened is that those women who were arrested with young boys, children in cases that have been recorded. The boys were sodomized with the cameras rolling. And the worst above all of that is the soundtrack of the boys shrieking that your government has. They are in total terror. It's going to come out."

He said that after he broke Abu Ghraib people are coming out of the woodwork to tell him this stuff. He said he had seen all the Abu Ghraib pictures. He said, "You haven't begun to see evil..." then trailed off. He said, "horrible things done to children of women prisoners, as the cameras run."

He talked about how hard it is to get the truth out in Republican Washington: "If you agree with the neocons you're a genius. If you disagree you're a traitor." Bush, he said, was closing ranks, purging anyone who wasn't 100% with him.

The outrages have cost us the support of moderate Arabs, says Hersh. "They see us as a sexually perverse society."

Well, I've just watched it. He talks about Bush's and Wolfowitz's strangle hold on the US and though the tone was very frightening, I see many similarities with Blair's leadership of the UK. Certainly the US is becoming more fascist — the media aren't interested in the deeper stories, the military are cowed and so is the justice system.

Brad came second in the toddler race

Out of my reach, pity. But in a few years, when prices have dropped to... A few grand?

But the upside is we'll be happily sitting in our mortgaged homes high on prescription drugs stroking our huge penises.

In 1977 there were 150 Elvis impersonators. By 1999 there were 35,000. If this rate of growth continues, by the year 2019, more than one third of the world's population will be Elvis impersonators.

Who's the biggest, fastest server beast in the jungle?

A quick two hour whizz through their intranet publishing system... Though they know it's a Manila erm... something, barely do they know the full power. Some use it daily, some not yet at all.

No wonder the time passed quickly, and I barely had time to thrill about RSS aggregation and how it's the next big thing. Though many were enamoured by my aggregator. And these guys have four, FOUR, archive years worth of all sorts of stuff. Though as they haven't been using Manila to the best effect, I'm unsure if these piles will be of much value. I think the future looks rosy with more sites being spawned, more stuff going in.

For the first time, I didn't mention the word blog, I briefly, whizzed through knowledge management though I doubt they'd remember. But, blog—no. Content management—yes. RSS aggregation, XML, URL, reverse chronological news page. But blog? No.

They appreciated the "shortcuts feature" a spin off from the address book app I built for all staff (though some names weren't in the address book). All they have to do to add a link to someone's details, location, numbers et. al. is surround their name with quotes. To get a mugshot, add the word mugshot, to get their mailTo link, add email. Thus, "steve hooker mugshot" ;-)

Another department has asked me back. Non IT too. Bottom up infiltration of... Blogs! <manic taking over the world laugh>

The Ring Nebula about one light year across. But look closer, into the barrel shaped cloud...

Ah! They get shrunk from 300k to 30k, depending on the phone/service, it seems. And MMS uses GPRS, as it's carrier method anyway. So, one button sending? That's hardly revolutionary. Ideally, I'd like to be able to drop the picture into a folder, like I do with pictures on my PC, and for those to be upstreamed just like Radio Userland does. But somewhere along the way, I'll need to caption and describe the action in the images or pix.

So, GPRS as a carrier is just like a phone line, or leased line. When Cognima say they use GPRS, what do they mean? FTP, HTTP? More GPRS specific protocols are about.

[update—04/07/04:] So, why are mobile phone companies screwing about? They failed with WAP—it was crap, and it looks as though MMS is a mess. Why don't they just open up their GPRS, and have more browsers fitted on phones. Thus, people will have fairly fast web access, and that's all we want. If all mobiles have their own IP address, they can have their own website—right there is a tonne of connectivity.

A day in the life
I read the news today oh boy
about a lucky man who made the grade
and though the news was rather sad
well I just had to laugh
I saw the photograph.

He blew his mind out in a car
he didn't notice that the lights had changed
a crowd of people stood and stared
they'd seen his face before
nobody was really sure
if he was from the House of Lords.