I made my way out of Zopa a couple of months ago. Zopa's fine, but I there were too many things I wanted to peruse outside. Starting with a long trip to Manhattan!

We finally went live with listings this week. (See my listing.) Listing is a completely new approach at Zopa. You can select who you lend money to individually. There's still credit scoring (we discard the 'bad ones', but it's a guide rather than a rule.

Well, the auction is over and has raised £56 which isn't too bad. More importantly, my site traffic has increased by an order of magnitude!

Venice Spike

Over 90% of my current traffic is coming from people Googling for Venice invites.

I am currently auctioning an invite to The Venice Project beta. I had the idea after being emailed by many random [and, I'm sure, wonderful] people when I left a comment on GigaOm.

The auction is intended to make money for Amnesty International who will receive 70% of the money. I only expect to reach a $200 sales price, but even $140 should help. Whatever happens, it's a cute experiment in turning hype into mulla

I am auctioning one Venice Project invite - 70% to go to Amnesty International.

I am a Venice Project Beta tester. And this morning we were released from (most of) our NDAs, so that we could tell you all about it.

Passport and Yuan

See you all in two weeks!

MySpace Spam Reaches Steventon: Taken Oct 29th in Steventon, Oxfordshire, England.

Clicks and mortar ?

But that's never going to happen.

Two weeks ago I went to my first Need To Know event.

Bruce Sterling in Belgravia: Bruce Sterling enlightens trendy new media people at the New Statesman party.

Attended by an interesting assortment of Soho media people, journalists and geeks. Bruce himself was an interesting bundle of techno-evangelism and political realism. I especially liked the observation that if you're not building something that's dangerous, then it's almost certainly useless.