The title of the next book (barring last minute changes) is “The Kings of the Road Club” and it’s the story of what happened when I decided – nearly three years ago – to sell almost all of my possessions, abandon my London flat and begin what was supposed to be a one-year experiment living in upscale hotels around the world. The fact that I still live in hotels should probably give you a clue as to the outcome. Except not. Because what starts as a story about travelling the world and living in fancy rooms soon turned – thanks in part to a well-timed pun and some Las Vegas hairdressers – into something very different, and more than a little fucked up.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. I’ll explain more about the contents later. For now, Bea at W&N has just sent me the current version of the cover. Here is is!

The car? That’d be this.

Further Reading:

1. Fings ain’t wot they used to be (citation needed) For the second time in my life, I find myself...
2. Hello world 2.0 Oh, you noticed. Welcome, then, to BNTTP: OBOANMH – a...
3. The hole in my shoe is a metaphor for my soul As if preparations for the formal launch of the new...

And as for you, hotels – ha! hotels! – if ever there was an industry ripe for disruption, it’s you clowns. Charging $300 a night for a bed and a shower and a tiny plastic enema of shampoo when AirBnB will let you get the same, and more, for $50, so long as you don’t mind the creepy thrill of living in a stranger’s apartment. Kapow! See you in hell, hotels!

But of course the old men are fighting back – dusting down their old service uniforms and oiling their muskets and surrounding themselves with legislative sandbags to prolong their pathetic existence for another few months. This week, New York Governor, David Paterson, signed a bill outlawing the use of private dwellings as makeshift hotels. The bill, supported by hotel industry lobbyists (natch), bans rentals of less than 30 days and makes operating a residential apartment as a transient hotel illegal in New York City. Good news for big hotels, bad news for poor old New Yorkers who now find themselves banned from letting space in their apartments using AirBnB or Craigslist. And even worse news for NY-bound tourists who will now struggle to find a room in Manhattan for less than $100 a night (apart from these).

As TechDirt’s Mike Masnick puts it, “the internet has made it so that people can be more efficient in things like transportation or short-term housing, and the old guard doesn’t like it one bit, so they come up with regulations like these to outlaw it.”

Yeah!

Except, no.

Read on at TechCrunch…

Further Reading:

1. #Ebony and #Ivory – The Brave New World of Online Self-Segregation Waking up in my San Francisco hotel room yesterday, I...
2. Content Is King! Rest In Peace, Content “Can Tim Armstrong make AOL king of content by 2010?”...
3. This week’s column: A man of slightly fewer words “One of the most amusing sights in the world –...

Today, though, was a special day.

Today, wrapped innocently in tissue paper, came “Barbie Video Girl”: a genuine Barbie doll, featuring a hidden webcam in her necklace. It’s hard to get across in text alone how messed up this thing is, so I hopped on to Skype with CrunchGear’s John Biggs in New York for the first episode of a new video segment I’m calling “What’s Fucked Up In Toys… With John Biggs.”

Further Reading:

1. Dial like you mean it So, prompted by my soy-filled Blackberry (and by reading the...
2. Last week on TechCrunch: The Skype settlement, Hitler vs Obama in the app store, Scamville, SnapNames and more… I’d love to have witnessed the scene at eBay’s house...

Sure, for Pilgrim the trigger was the trauma of war, while for me it’s the lunacy of getting ready to launch TechCrunch TV in a few days (more on that soon), but apart from that we’re basically the same. Except that I’m not American. Or a fictional character.

What I am though, is confused. I’m sitting here in the TechCrunch office, on a Sunday evening, trying to placate my editorial paymasters by bashing out something resembling a column in the five minutes I have between conference calls with TCTV contributors. To expedite the process I’m trawling the web; pinging the major technology news sites to find out what big stories I’ve missed this week. The only problem is, every time I click on a story, I discover that I’ve been transported back in time.

Read on at TechCrunch…

Further Reading:

1. This week’s column: Here we are now, entertain us “While I wouldn’t normally need an excuse to visit a...
2. This week’s column: And we’ll tweet at the end of the tour “I’m trying to imagine how it happened. The point at...
3. Christmas time is here, by golly. Disapproval would be folly The nights have drawn in, it’s freezing cold outside and...

To show that the phenomenon wasn’t limited to online-only brands, I gave the example of Forbes.com – with its mish-mash of celebrity slideshows and tacky lists of ‘Americas best paying blue-collar jobs’ and ‘hottest summer convertibles’. Since the column was posted, I’ve spoken to a number of former and current Forbes employees who (off the record, naturally) have expressed agreement with my criticisms. Forbes’ obsession with page views at all costs (or, rather, no cost) is just plain embarrassing.

But clearly the company have taken my criticism to heart: earlier today Paul Maidment, chief editor of Forbes.com, tendered his resignation, while new ‘chief product officer’ Lewis Dvorkin called an on-the-record meeting to announce a bold new online strategy for the company. Prior to joining Forbes, Dvorkin was founder and CEO of crowdsourced news site, True/Slant, which was acquired by Forbes back in May. And, what’s his bold plan to improve the journalistic standards of one of the world’s most respected business publications?

That Forbes.com will soon be opening its doors to 1000s of unpaid contributors and that [rather than commissioning quality in-house journalism] “Forbes editors will increasingly become curators of talent”.

Gggggaaaaaaahhhhh.

Read on at TechCrunch…

Further Reading:

1. Carr sends out press release in the third person So, I just sent out the big launch announcement. They...
2. Doing things, bye half! Yippee-ki-ay. I’ve just sprinted past the halfway point – 10,000...
3. Good buy world I just posted the following on my other blog. But...

Ironically for a city that’s always been so adept at branding itself, New York has always struggled to articulate its place in the worldwide web, and Internet Week is the clearest manifestation of that identity crisis. Name an industry that the Internet is disrupting: newspapers, publishing, advertising, banking – and you’ll find its heart in Manhattan. Despite the best efforts of Mayor Bloomberg and, uh, Dennis Crowley to paint New York as the place to do business in Web 3.0, the fact is that billions of advertising and investment dollars continue to flood west, never to return. And yet New York, bless it, continues to try to stay relevant – for one week a year at least – to the industry that’s bleeding it dry.

Witness the Webbys – the awards ceremony that congratulates New York based celebrities who have learned to tweet – witness the awkward panels filled with mismatched home-grown personalities (“Julia Alison meets Jeff Jarvis“) and witness (if you can’t avoid it) the week-long parties where thousands of identically unique hipsters cram into lofts to drink booze sponsored by one or all of the east coast’s four successful start-ups.

Even when they invite west coasters to get involved, the effort manages to come off more weird than wired: I was flown to town, on the kind of handsomely subsidised meal ticket only New York can offer, to moderate a panel on “Internet dating in a web 2.0 world” for an audience of feature writers from women’s magazines. This despite the fact that asking me to help navigate the minefield of online dating is like asking Rudolf Hess to give guided tours of Dachau. Nice try, New York.

Read on at TechCrunch…

Further Reading:

1. Steal this game A few days ago, Techcrunch broke the news that Hasbro...
2. Sorry AirBnB Hipsters, I’ll Take Health and Safety Over the Cult of Disruption Get out of the way, old man! You’re being Disrupted!...
3. Paris, PLV! Bonjour! Je suis arrivé à Paris pour Le Web –...

No related posts.

Specifically I’m editing a chapter that begins with me being thrown out of a Starbucks in Chicago for swearing on my cellphone. It was a strange – not unhilarious – episode, and one that caused me to consider the contrasting American and British attitudes towards profanity…

“The concept of ‘appropriateness’ is much more real to Americans than it is to Brits, despite us being the ones who are supposed to be stuffy and formal. I’ve noticed it a lot with swearing: while Brits of both genders will be quite happy, among friends, to use the word ‘fuck’ – as a verb, a noun and adjective or an adverb – a surprising number of Americans blanche at the idea. Rather they’d talk about ‘dropping the F bomb’ as if four letters were capable of levelling Nagasaki.”

And so it was this past week at TechCrunch Disrupt when Yahoo’s Carol Bartz now-infamously told Mike Arrington to “fuck off”. The remark was clearly something Bartz had prepared in advance, and at a British conference it would have been about as notable as a speaker wearing jeans rather than a suit. But in America the idea that a CEO – a female CEO no less – might resort to comedy foul language is headline news. Literally.

The swearing had the desired effect of course; becoming the meme of the conference – full of sound and fury, signifying nothing – and distracting from the real story: that the CEO of the third most visited site on the web was unable to concisely describe what her company actually does.

Read on at TechCrunch…

Further Reading:

1. Charm, Offensive (A few months back, the German cultural magazine, Kulturaustausch, asked...
2. OMG ATMs: just one of the things British banks need to copy from their American counterparts If moving to the US has taught me anything it’s...
3. Will there be a TechCrunch50 next year? What Jason wants, Jason Getz So here we go then, the fourth and final part...

Spotify users can access it here; for everyone else, here’s the track listing…

Mia – Paper Planes
Crash Test Dummies – Mmm Mmm Mmm Mmm
Bender – Turbulance – Original Mix
Fall Out Boy – Sugar, We’re Goin Down
Savage Garden – Crash And Burn
Semisonic – Down In Flames
Ash – Burn Baby Burn
Metric – Help I’m Alive
Destiny’s Child – Survivor
Fall Out Boy – Sending Postcards From A Plane Crash [Wish You Were Here]

Further Reading:

1. 1000 words in two hours I’m 1000 words behind my target already. No time to...
2. Undressing models and messing with Daniel Ek. There are apps for that Day two of Le Web and I’m hard at work:...
3. Leaving, Las Vegas It’s snowing in New York. Hard. I know this because...

‘Despite his unusual taste in living accommodations, Carr is easy to please when it comes to local landmarks. He’s thrilled about the Golden Gate Bridge: “Every time I see it, I get happy.” He’s also fond of the Tamale Lady (”who shows up in bars and sells you tamales, even though I can’t imagine that’s hygienic”) and, even though it is uncool, the Cheesecake Factory at the top of Macy’s in Union Square (”I like to go there and pretend I’m a tourist”).

His all-time favorite thing about San Francisco? The weekly pub quiz at Elephant and Castle, a Financial District bar named after an area of South London, whose menu includes bangers and mash. The quiz, run by a Brit, reminds him of home: “I get a two-hour respite from calling people ‘dude.’ I call them ‘chap,’ or whatever British people say.”‘

Read on at SF Weekly…

Further Reading:

1. From the Elephant and Castle to Twitter: trivial pursuits in San Francisco When I first arrived in San Francisco, I was disappointed...
2. Walk softly and carry the U.S. Pacific Fleet Col. Jessep: You want answers?Kaffee: I think I’m entitled.Col. Jessep:...
3. Stockholm Syndrome in Silicon Valley: or how I learned to stop worrying and love… whatever I’m sitting on the Caltrain, wending my way from Palo...