To paraphrase Oscar Wilde, it would require a heart of stone not to laugh at the (near) death of Manchester United.

Chief Executive David Gill’s successful pitch of a £500m bond secured on the club may have eased the pressure from the super-high interest loans for which the owners are personally liable, but selling off the family silver (Cristiano Ronaldo, price £81m) is something you can only do once.

With empty seats appearing at the “theatre of dreams”, an ignominious FA cup exit and other intimations of footballing mortality, England’s best-supported club is struggling to maintain its outward swagger as, like a premier-league Lehman Brothers, it is devoured within by a toxic combination of excessive debt and wildly irresponsible assumptions of future success.

What is sometimes forgotten however is the role Sir Alex Ferguson has played in all this. Against the backdrop of this Saturday’s “We love United. We hate the Glazers” protest, his programme notes appealed for unity whilst admitting: “I’m not slow to express disapproval myself – even in the boardroom.”

But wasn’t it Sir Alex’s expressing disapproval at the races, not the boardroom that caused all this? His acrimonious dispute with the Irish businessman John Magnier  over stud fees for their horse led to the sale of shares that resulted in the Glazer’s successful purchase of the club.

My kingdom for a horse? While the Glazers decide, financially, to be or not to be, the legions of Manchester United’s non-fans can only watch, wait, and like dear old Oscar, laugh.

Last year, I pulled together some examples of the business strategy known as Lethal Generosity .

This week, Nokia unleashed a prime example when they made their satellite navigation software free to all current and future owners of their smartphones.

Those losing out most from Nokia’s “generosity” are Garmin and TomTom who charge up to £100 for in-car navigation systems and the various companies charging for downloadable apps to other phones. On my iPhone for example, Navigon AG charge £52.99 for a fully functioning satnav for the British Isles and NNG Global Services want £54.99 to guide me to “any address in Europe with the help of out outstanding graphics, clear visual cues and precise voice instructions.”

Anssi Vanjoki, Nokia’s Executive Vice President, denied that the decision is a defensive move against companies like Google who are encroaching on their turf. “It is a very offensive move if you will,” he said. “We are not talking one product for one country, we are talking map coverage in 183 countries, launching simultaneously globally in 76 countries with 46 languages and with millions of devices already out there, plus with all of our new products being equipped with this. So it does not sound too much like defence to me.”

The full cost to Nokia of this act of lethal generosity will include the £5.6 billion they spent in 2007 when they bought map firm Navteq. How much value they derive in market share remains to be seen and how long will the handheld satnav remain an app of choice for smartphone users?

When I was a kid, our family stopped taking our transistor radio (google it if you’re under 50!) in the car when the motor manufacturers fitted car-radios as standard. In a world where every carmaker needs the sustainable-green-low-carbon-footprint-save-the-fossil market, how long before they swallow the costs of fitting them to every vehicle as standard? Fuel economy goes out the window if you get lost on the way…

In the complex interlocking system of companies making maps, apps, phones and cars, it’s a brave man who bets the thin end of seven billion Euros for an indeterminate gain.

Brave leadership or desperation? On the road again, or on the road to ruin?

We’ll see.

Photo with compliments to Simon Jacobs and Guardian Newspapers

Santas – the ultimate endangered species of climate change.

Copenhagen has not made them any happier. Rising global temperatures will make the snow a thing of the past, turning their hot red suits into fur-edged infernos.

Reindeerless, and lacking the essentials of a white Christmas, the Santas will run amok, in a fat and wheezy way until robbed of their natural habitat and livelihood they will turn to crime.

In one awful moment the traditional bringer of presents will become the one who takes them away. Just like Mother Earth who, sick of us her ungrateful offspring, will soon burn us off her hide.

Like ticks on the back of a cow.

Some nights I wonder: How did I become a D-Bo?

Twenty years ago, I would have been sat at my desk in a big corporation, dictating memos. (Do you use your Dictaphone much? No, I use my finger – this was a joke of the time.) Dictating copy for the marketing department to spend a small fortune on printing it somewhere on a dead tree and wonder who the hell would read it. I come from a time where we had someone to do our typing for us. In Tapscott terms this makes me a digital immigrant – I moved on-line in my lifetime. I wasn’t (like my children for example) born here.

Now, in fact, I’m a digital nomad – I work where I sleep and several times a month, I sleep where I work. When the big corporation was swallowed by a mega-corporation, they might have let me go because my function was a duplicate of an existing one. Actually, I had already left of my own volition. Now I type my own copy to be turned into electronic pulses by Twitter and transmitted to whomever of my followers can be curious enough to tap a key and see them. Fortunately, because I still oil some communication wheels at mega-corp (in fact several mega-corps) I can afford to dick around like this. I guess there’s a lot of us out there and if we can handle the uncertainty we should appreciate the freedom.

Anyway, that’s enough about me – let’s talk about you. What kind of “work” do you do? Whether you work for a corporation, a small-to-medium enterprise or you operate as a sole-trader (or “bed-ender” as they used to be known, after their bedroom office) your work might fall into one or two of these categories:

• You develop content-free IT and attend the care and maintenance of the information superhighway (remember that one?) You are like Wallace & Gromit in “The Wrong Trousers”, laying the train-track as we run on it
• You trade in knowledge, products or services. This might be straight on-line commerce (like e-bay, Amazon etc), e-learning (web-enabled training) or face-to-face events marketed and/or disseminated on the web (conferences, workshops, webinars and the like). Your design skills might be the best. You make games. You may be charismatic in a commercial way (or vice-versa)
• You work creatively in the areas of autobiography, photography, music, poetry, writing and similar artistic endeavours. You are a digital bohemian (D-Bo!)

Wherever you sit or stand on this Science – Commerce – Art continuum, you can choose to use some of the resulting time and money from the first or second category to fund your activities in the third. To a greater or lesser extent this simply defines you as being civilised – “having instincts other than survival.” So bit by bit, byte by byte, you might say that we are all becoming more “civilised” through our activities as digital bohemians. It’s 2.0, it’s unmediated (and might benefit from some editing), but it’s all about our lives and loves in the 21st Century.

Wikipedia defines Bohemianism as the “practice of an unconventional lifestyle”. Compared to what went before, swopping a suit and a tie and a desk 9 to 5 in exchange for pyjamas and a laptop all hours of the day and night. “…Often in the company of like-minded people, involving musical, artistic or literary pursuits”. Hello Tweeps! “…With few permanent ties. Bohemians can be wanderers, adventurers, or vagabonds.” Or just a bit random, eh?

Are D-Bo’s creating the cave paintings of the Digilithic era – made in the dark winters by people using stone tools and berries? Maybe it’s potentially something as long-lasting as that. Will you be remembered for the last few elegant lines of code you wrote in ASP or PHP? No. Or the instructional design you did on that Health & Safety training? Not likely. Did I write history with that teambuild I ran for 60 senior managers in Manchester last week? No, but maybe that blog you wrote, that picture I took, that clip she stuck on YouTube (35 million views and rising…) – it’s a long shot but any one of our little digital boho-doodles might just go global, or failing that, simply show what it means to be human in the 21st Century. Civilised, despite what goes on all around us.

Maybe in the future everyone will be famous for 15 million bits. Maybe not. Either way – immigrants, natives, nomads – all hail the civilising influence of the D-Bo.

Sam Taylor-Wood tells a good tale in Sunday’s Observer Music Magazine. Her movie about John Lennon (Nowhere Boy) depicts “one of the biggest icons in the world” and she describes her concerns about making the film as sensitive as possible to Ono, McCartney and the other keepers of the Beatles flame.

She builds the emotional tension nicely:
“So I did have a moment where I just thought, ‘I don’t know if I can do this.’ Then I got in the car and turned the ignition on and Lennon came on the radio and I thought, ‘OK I’m doing this.’”

The song was (Just Like) Starting Over. Released as a single on 24 October 1980, it reached number one in both the USA and UK two weeks after Lennon was killed.

Thank you, and you did pass the audition, Sam…

1. I am part of a vast active living information system (Valis)

2. I write tracts (Our Friends from Frolix 8 )

3. I am a crap artist (Confessions of a Crap Artist)

• Taking a limo in from the airport and watching the glass-skyscrapers get closer
• Eating sushi on Davie
• Hiring bikes at the edge of Stanley Park to ride to Beaver Lake then going to Second Beach for a swim and booing Steve Balmer’s yacht in the bay
• Playing volleyball at Sunset Beach as like, er, the sun sets
• Evening drinks in our apartment, watching the Vancouver cats walk along the balcony rails, eleven floors up
• Chilling in Van Dusen Gardens with hot-dogs and a beer
• Heading out to the University of British Columbia to see the Museum of Anthropology and use the outdoor pool with the 7-metre diving board
• Stopping off at the beach on the way back (see above)
• Driving a 4×4 up to Whistler so the lads can don body armour and take the adapted ski-lifts then hurtle downhill on mid-range mountain bikes
• Hurtling back down south to Vancouver in-and-out of the road-works preparing the highway for the Winter Olympics
• Missing out on buying rare 7” vinyl such as Toddla T’s remix of Roisin Murphy’s “You know me better” and Mozza’s “First of the gang to die”. Damn
• Waiting for the man by the juke-box in that pub…
• Dining at the Tapas-tree, the last restaurant as you head west on Robson
• Riding round Stanley Park at 4am in a Mustang with the top down, still deaf from going to that club in Gastown where everyone communicated by sign-language
• Buying jeans, t-shirts and boxers on Robson
• Wondering when that enormous pile of yellow sulphur across the bay will go down
• Wishing we didn’t have to go home

1.    Talk like a Premiership Football Manager

2.    Introduce competitor-devastating strategies into your business

3.    Write a British situation-comedy with loads of irony

4.    Foretell the future

5.    Achieve Inner Peace

In my recent piece on BackNoise and related matters, I explored some personal and professional dilemmas relating to public speaking and (probably) coined the phrase Prez 2.0. This is the possible phenomenon whereby the simultaneous social-media backchat (e.g. Texts, MSN, Skype, Twitter and recently, BackNoise) becomes integral to the speech, making in effect an audience-created presentation.

Support for this more avant-garde approach to any situation where the many gather to be addressed by the few comes from an unexpected quarter in today’s Observer .

Mick Brookes, general secretary of the National Association of Head Teachers says: “Schools should be harnessing the fantastic educational opportunity children carry round in their pockets, instead of banning the phones with their cameras, voice recorders and internet access.”

Picture the scene: poor dress sense, recent bad haircut and spinach-on-the-teeth episodes captured and ridiculed, leaving a little time for last night’s escapades and the usual brief this-subject-is-boring exchange… all with the Heads’ blessing!

But you’d be wrong.

In schools where children were provided with phone and internet access to use in lessons, teachers have reported very little misuse if the evidence of Learning2Go is anything to go by. They have run a scheme for the last five years in 18 primary and secondary schools in Wolverhampton.

But, apart from fact-checking (“if children want the date of the Battle of Hastings, they will Google it”) what exactly have the Black Country boys and girls been up to with their high-quality smart-phones? They have, in fact, been using them in lessons and for homework and see them as a tool for learning!

How often have you been to a conference and behaved like the imaginary naughty kids – smirking, bitching, texting and dissin’ the corporates? The Wolverhampton wonderers set us a good example – if only we knew what it was.

The questions we need to answer are: How 2.0 is Wolves? Do they learn through self-generated content? And what does their experience tell us about the future of Prez 2.0? Of Conf 2.0? Even of Class 2.0?

Face(book) up to the facts – the Skype’s the limit. Watch this (My)space.

As keen students of film and TV drama, Mrs Bizlike and I have identified a concept we call the suspect plot device. This is an initially irrelevant, but ultimately critical detail in a story.

A good example can be found in Carol Reed’s film “The Third Man”. In one scene, Holly Martins, the hero played by Joseph Cotton, is at the apartment of Anna, his love interest. He dangles a piece of string in front of her cat, in a vain attempt to encourage it to play. The cat is unimpressed and leaves, prompting him to remark on its lack of sociability. Anna replies that the cat only liked Harry – her boyfriend, the eponymous third man supposedly killed in mysterious circumstances. Shortly after, we see the cat nestling at the feet of a shadowy figure across the street – the first confirmation that, as Holly has begun to suspect, Harry is still alive.

I had cause to remember our concept of the suspect plot device recently, when running a presentations workshop at the offices of a client. My host and I had been discussing the problem of the ubiquitous “Crackberry” – the communication device to which so many business people are addicted. We agreed how difficult it was to retain anyone’s full attention these days and my host recounted how recently, another trainer at their premises had terminated his own course, mid-way through the day, on noticing that the entire group were e-mailing away and not listening to him.

I expressed my admiration at the nerve of this principled stand. Privately, I wondered whether the trainer would ever work for the organisation again… Simultaneously, I began to ask myself if our conversation was a suspect plot device of my own. Was I about to find myself in the position of having to force such an issue? Whilst the surreptitious thumbing of such devices was an ever present backdrop to my workshop, and indeed any other occasion where the many gather to be addressed by the few, might I be obliged to invoke the house rule (universally ignored) that “Blackberries be switched off during the session as adequate breaks will be provided for that purpose”?

As it turned out, my concerns were only partially but entertainingly justified when, part way through my first input, my own phone began to ring in my pocket! It’s always the person you least suspect, I mused as the delegates laughed and tut-tutted at my breach of the last remaining mobile-phone-at-work taboo.

Gaining and maintaining people’s attention is a continual challenge for us all, not simply limited to the dull and inept if Chris Brogan’s recent experience is anything to go by. Watch his entire presentation take place against a full screen stage display of the continuously updated Backnoise conversation that his speech is stimulating. Observe, as his live audience did, the incredible interplay between what he said and what the screen showed. Watch fascinated as he ignores some comments (those not worth a mention) but deigns to use others to reinforce key points in his talk. Social Media heckling brought out into the spotlight and dealt with!

Now this is a suspect plot device that we should all take careful note of. How exactly will this strange new version of the conversation (Prez 2.0) manifest itself? Stayed tuned (or don’t) and find out next week…