"We'll only really understand what we're doing when it stops feeling new, when we have a sense of history about what we're making." Better keep on making, then. (This is good. Also: well done Phil. It's important to say well done, and this is a lot of effort, and it's been brilliant. Finishing in May! Gosh).

"...one point I wanted to make, to all those agencies that have decided that making products is the future. That's a laudable and intelligent aim, but it took five years for BERG to go from here to here. And they're really good. They had to be focused and ambitious, working really hard. This isn't stuff you can just chuck out the back of a creative technology department  Just a thought." Yeah, there is that.

"I suspect 'creating something personal, even of moderate quality' and letting people share it is going to be one of the business models of the next century. And one of the social movements. Which will happen if we can squeeze the convenience and scale of the internet into other places."

"My main point brings me back to Pretending Apps. Because there are lots of other things you can steal from games, many other aspects of gaming that people find appealing and some of them might be more easily and usefully extracted." Yup. This was one of my main beefs with the whole "let's make everything playful/gamey!" trend that kicked off a few years ago: "game-y" was associated with "having points", and really, that's not what makes a game at all. (Other things that make a game: pretending, as Russell mentions, and visible mechanics, as I think I have to write about soon).

"So much city thinking seems mad keen for a return to city states; autonomous islands, connected to each other through finance and fibre but not to land that surrounds them. It's a little bit collapsist; let's wrap the city around us while we still can. But maybe we could think about network technologies as a way to reintegrate rural and urban rather than accelerate the dominance of one over the other. Perhaps all this brilliant city thinking could lift its eyes a little and look beyond the city walls - I'd love to see what we'd come up with then."