Do you earn a salary? Salaries are like love and hot water. You only miss them when they’re missing. This is a little shout-out to all you salaried folk, especially those who have anything, anything at all to do with making payments to small businesses and freelancers: pay up on time. I don’t mean write […]
Arthur Attwell
Arthur Attwell is a Shuttleworth Foundation Fellow, co-founder of Electric Book Works and Bettercare, and founder of Paperight. He lives in Cape Town. On Twitter at @arthurattwell.
Posted inNews/Politics
‘Bush is linked to torture ring’: An alternate reality
This week Americans have been rocked, according to the New York Times, by Governor Eliot Spitzer’s patronage of a high-end prostitution ring. Just for my own entertainment, I’ve made a few simple changes to the paper’s report, imagining what it might be like if the public reacted as viscerally to Bush’s recent veto of a […]
Posted inGeneral, News/Politics
Trains, tragedy and the light at the end of the tunnel
This morning a colleague of mine saw a man killed at Retreat Station. Trying to force the door of a moving train, my colleague tells me, he slipped onto the rails and was cut in half by the train’s wheels. This is all I know at this stage, and this from a traumatised colleague not […]
Posted inMedia, Sport
Cricket Australia says cricket isn’t news
When you watch sport, are you watching news or entertainment? Well, both, of course. But the distinction is becoming rather important, in one regard at least: for sport fans, cricket books may soon have far fewer photos in them. It’s like the melting ice caps: you may not care now, but just wait till all […]
Posted inBusiness, Media
An original idea? Beaten to it by 600 years
My friend Mike and I have been working on a plan for a new product. Mike likes to look me in the eye and say: “Arthur, we are not geniuses.” This is his way of reminding me that we need to get a move on, because somewhere, someone else has already thought of the same […]
Posted inBusiness, Tech
Web 2.0: The emperor’s new code
Every time I hear the term “Web 2.0”, I throw up a little. The man behind the phrase, Tim O’Reilly, is a legend, sure. His publishing company, O’Reilly, is a thousand-megawatt leading light whose ideas I filch regularly. But, oh, what a turdy little storm he started when he coined the term back in 2004. […]
Posted inMedia
Need a sticky marketing idea? Try offending someone
For many of us small-business owners, marketing is the hardest part of the job. At EBW, we’ve learned the hard way that none of our four members are much good at it. We’ve taken to hiring freelance publicists project by project, which is fine, though we’re yet to generate the kind of social epidemic we […]
Posted inBusiness
Legalese vs the little guy
In a telling op-ed piece in the New York Times, legal-lingo expert Adam Freedman cuts to the chase on the debate about the “right to bear arms” mentioned in the US Constitution’s Second Amendment: it’s all about a comma that means everything to us now, but meant very little to its writers. The article is […]