I was chatting recently with a private equity investor who invests frequently and successfully in US media companies (a relatively difficult thing to do simultaneously) when he mentioned how the Thomson Reuters electronic signs among others in Times Square now drowned-out the once-iconic Allied Chemical Building news zipper. You know the crawling display of news illuminated by thousands of light bulbs that once announced the end of World War II.

This got me thinking. Is the news zipper now operated by Dow Jones a metaphor for the broader drowning-out of mainstream media by the clutter of a new digital "Times Square." A crossroads of emails tweets facetimes blogs skypes 4 square check-ins etc. How should we discover what is meaningful? In an era in which anyone and everyone can be a publisher who publishes anything of value? Will we all need personal "curators" to show us what to read?

This of course is not a new thought. Speakers’ Corner that great metaphor for freedom of expression and that actual platform for reaching a London public has also lost its megaphone among the honky tonk of Marble Arch. In the US a string of Supreme Court cases once sought to establish a right to speak in privately-owned shopping malls arguing that these modern indoor spaces were the functional equivalent of public soap boxes. In general no such right was recognized.

On the internet as in digital Times Square we are again confronted with the choice between public free speech and private property rights. Since we can all be publishers and so many of us choose to be who can find us? A few thousand of you ever read this blog swelled by Thomson Reuters employees and the occasional industrious journalist. How could I compete if I wished to with brands that spend millions to attract eyeballs?

As always brand matters. Some will complain that this means that the moneyed interests will once again carry the day; or the most loud or shrill. I am more optimistic. Reputation standards and track record also matter. I will look at the Dow Jones ticker but more often and more loyally the Thomson Reuters screens because I know what they stand for and what they have to lose if they waiver from these high standards.

So let the lights of Broadway burn bright and the competition for attention reach fever pitch I shall stand my ground – the digital curmudgeon.

The quadrennial World Cup was played this year so perhaps I could be excused for thinking it would not be an auspicious time for Argentine — Brazilian relations. However my experience this week in Buenos Aires and Sao Paulo belies that assumption.

I have been visiting these two great countries regularly for many years including the period in the late 1990s when I enjoyed my first operating role at Reuters as the manager responsible for our Latin American operations. What I recall clearly from that time was that despite the creation of the Mercosur trading zone linking them both nations acted more like competitors than trading partners. Senior executives and government officials would compare the one to the other and I always had the feeling they viewed a gain for one country as a loss for the other.

I come away from this trip with a totally different impression. I was struck how leading figures in Argentina now recognized that the success of Brazil over the last several years is not just one of those periodic false dawns of the past. This time it is not just luck or the IMF or strong caipirinhas. There was a recognition that what is good for Brazil could also be very good for Argentina through free trade labor mobility and foreign investment.

What a wonderful maturing in the bilateral relations of these perennial football rivals. But don’t expect to see Diego Maradona replace Dunga any time soon.

There is a time for thought and there is a time for action. Most of the items I have posted to this blog are in one form or other thought pieces — journals of ideas. As some of you have pointed out the thoughts are sometimes half-formed or just plain wrong but to me this medium seems best suited to reflections – on my work on the future of media and technology or on the joys of sport and family life.

This piece is different. I want to convince you that all peace-loving people regardless of country face an imminent threat: the threat of cyber attack on the technological infrastructure upon which we and the societies in which we live increasingly rely.

In a recent post Harry Potter and the Conflict of Laws I argued that the transition from a unilateral world dominated by the United States to a multilateral one coupled with the increasing proportion of commerce that is electronic was leading to an international conflict of laws. The US is also losing its status as the sole cyber superpower with the result that other nations and far more ominously small unaligned groups are gaining the capability to wage cyber war.

Think about how reliant we have all become on the internet to live our lives. No I don’t just mean watching Hulu Skyping or Gmailing with our friends or shopping on Gilt. I mean airline reservations navigation and air traffic control systems; power grid just-in-time manufacturing supermarket inventory and ATM systems; and nuclear arsenal and military command and control systems.

The good news is that responsible governments have worried about and taken reasonable precautions to isolate and protect the last category of systems. The bad news is that we are very exposed to attack on all the “civilian” systems upon which we rely. The vast useful and fascinating internet we know today was originally designed as a relatively small network linking the early computers of government and trusted academic institutions. Few security features were included in this early “Arpanet” since its computer endpoints and users were trusted. However as the modern internet has evolved into a sprawling network of unknown and proxied users no corresponding security features were added to authenticate and protect the computers that were connected to it. Thus the inherent power of the network its “network effect” has become its Achilles’ heel.

We should assume that the power grid ATM and financial systems and civilian aviation networks of most advanced nations have already been penetrated. Most of these know incursions have been made by the military or clandestine services of other nation states. While worrying in its own right I more fear the spread of this capability to smaller unaligned criminal and terrorist groups. Sure China could probably take down the US financial system for a few days but they know this would only mean that the US could not calculate and pay the interest due on the trillion dollars of US sovereign debt they hold. While this could still be a risk if hostilities broke out over Taiwan or North Korea I worry more about the threat of asymmetrical warfare: A small group with nothing to lose who decide that one Apple Mac and a couple of smart programmers can inflict more damage than a wave of Predator drones.

So what should we do? I said this was a time for action not ideas. First start at home. Take sensible security precautions with your computers and mobile devices (eg use robust password protection install security software to sweep for malware viruses worms etc. don’t open files from unknown sources). If you would not leave your front door open at night don’t do so with your computing devices. Be prepared to trade off some level of convenience and privacy for security – hey I don’t like to carry keys in my pocket either but it beats sleeping on the front step. Second raise awareness. Talk to your family adopt policies at your company write your government officials. Third don’t assume it’s someone else’s problem. Back-up your data keep paper copies of bank records and remember what it was like to live before the seductive convenience of computers.

Ultimately I believe that the answer lies in creating a “super net” or overlay internet among trusted and authenticated institutions akin to the role mil.net served for the US Department of Defense. We are slowly evolving from an unpoliced network of anonymous nodes to a multi-layered network of authenticated institutions and individuals. Just as individuals must be approved to receive a security clearance from their government so can their machines be identified and approved. What emerges need not be an Orwellian nightmare of government control. Rather I can imagine a layered internet in which the nuclear arsenal is controlled by the highest and most secure level the power grid air traffic control and ATM networks are secured by a sufficiently robust next layer but an open cyber frontier — a wild west — remains for individuals to roam free of government control and authentication but also open to attack and abuse.

No system will ever be perfectly secure but I would like to think that we can find the collective will to act before a harmful attack calls us to action.

I have been mulling over for some time the thought that the tranistion from a single superpower world to a multilateral one coupled with the increasing proportion of commerce which is electronic will require an unprecedented level of international harmonization of law.

I chose the annual Oxford Analytica conference at Christ Church Oxford as the venue to develop these thoughts. I entitled the speech "The Death of Domesticity." The room where I delivered the talk was none other than the main hall of Hogwarts School of Harry Potter fame (see accompanying photo).

Oxford Analytics is an excellent provider of analysis on a broad array of subjects drawn largely from the Oxford faculty. I salute in particular OA’s brilliant and indefatiguable founder Dr. David Young.

I reproduce below the full text of my talk.

Tom Glocer speech to Oxford Analytica Conference

The Death of Domesticity

I’d first like to thank Oxford Analytica and especially Dr. David Young for asking me to speak here today. David is a very persuasive scholar and statesman and he once made me promise I would not leave England before speaking at this conference. Well it’s been two years since my family and I moved back to the States but as I used to tell my university professors in the day “I hope my interest in the subject of this paper excuses its lateness.”

What I want to talk about today could be called “The Death of Domesticity” or how we can fashion a system of international regulation and multi-lateral recognition for the digital age; but first let me provide some friendly travel advice.

Imagine you are a successful entrepreneur and you have invested substantial amounts of your own time and money to establish a new on-line enterprise. After years of hard effort you fly off on holiday only to find yourself arrested in a foreign country because the enterprise you are running has been breaching laws of which you were unaware.

Or imagine you are a journalist reporting on court proceedings involving one of the most high-profile terrorism cases your country has ever seen. You file your report only to find that it cannot be published because of legal restraints imposed by another country many thousands of miles away.

These are real examples of how globalization digitalization and regulation are impacting business. In the first a UK chief executive of a gambling website was arrested when he changed flights in the US because it did not (and probably could not) bar US citizens from participating. The journalist example comes from my own company Thomson Reuters and relates to the strict trial reporting rules under English law.

And these are not isolated cases – I could cite many others. For example the restrictive defamation rules in the UK have spurred the new enterprise of “libel tourism” which in turn led the US to enact specific legislation to protect US citizens from such lawsuits. The common feature of all of the examples I have cited is that they have occurred due to an outdated regulatory framework that has not caught up with the technological and commercial reality of an increasingly global world.

The current legal framework for global business was established in the aftermath of World War II largely under the leadership of the United States. For the second half of the last century when the US enjoyed a position of economic superiority it extended its laws in critical areas of international commerce including antitrust tax and securities laws well beyond its borders.

So for example US tax law is one of the only systems that tax citizens on their world-wide income and US securities laws can easily cover purely international transactions unless burdensome Eurodollar procedures are followed.

Another area of US extra-territorial regulation are the US anti-trust laws which are framed so broadly as to capture nearly any sizable international transaction that might affect the US market. The US asserts antitrust jurisdiction over actions that take place outside its borders if they have “intended or actual” “substantial or foreseeable” effects within the US.

The period in which the US was nearly alone in asserting its unique hegemony appears to be coming to an end however. The rise of the Internet the acceleration of globalization and in particular the growth of nations such as India China and Brazil have irrevocably changed the landscape. In 2008 for example China adopted its own pre-merger anti-trust clearance rules and has invoked them subsequently to review Pfizer’s acquisition of Wyeth and InBev’s acquisition of Anheuser Busch.

In adopting this law China became the latest in a growing list of countries to extend its influence over global M&A activities. This means that a typical merger between two large international corporations now ordinarily requires approval not just in the United States and the European Union but also in jurisdictions like Canada Brazil South Africa Russia Korea and now China as well.

In the tax arena you may have seen last week’s headlines about Vodafone’s potential tax liabilities in India. The Mumbai High Court ruled that Vodafone owes Indian tax authorities $2.6 billion in capital gains taxes on its $11.1 billion acquisition of a majority stake in Hutchison Essar three years ago. Vodafone is arguing that the transaction was between two foreign companies so that Indian tax authorities don’t have jurisdiction – and if they do they should pursue Hutchison the seller. The case could affect other disputed foreign transactions – and could change how foreign companies invest in India.

Or consider the area of privacy. Thomson Reuters businesses rely on the collection storage and analysis of information generated by users in a variety of countries. Every day we are confronted by the lack of consistency in the content of privacy laws across jurisdictions. Since there is no international standard to be compliant a multinational must review its specific obligations under each local law. This is even the case within the EU despite the fact that data laws in each of the member states emanate from the same source – the EU Data Protection Directive. The result is that a global company seeking to develop a consistent approach across all of its operations is usually required to adopt what might be called a “highest” or “strictest” common denominator approach.

In every facet of digital commerce a critical question arises: Whose law applies?

At the same time as conflicting regimes in areas such as privacy and antitrust are becoming more intrusive the number of truly multinational corporations has risen dramatically. Many of these new companies are sprouting up outside the US and EU – a trend which will only accelerate in years to come. Over the next fifteen years for example 2200 Indian companies are expected to set up operations outside India according to a recent study by PWC. Moreover the Internet has given the majority of businesses the potential to go global in far less time than the last generation of a similar size.

Many rapidly growing countries have understandably sought to protect their own economic positions and those of their home companies through the promotion of their own sets of regulations. As their economic power rises relative to that of the US and EU there is an increasing potential for these regulatory and legal principles to clash with one another. That can only serve to increase the cost of doing business and slow global growth.

So to put it simply more businesses are operating in more countries and those countries are promulgating more laws which don’t all say and require the same things.

We feel this keenly within our own industry. Thomson Reuters operates in more than 150 countries. In our regulated businesses such as operating securities trading systems this often means we must seek approval for the same service from many different regulators.

With few national regulators willing to accept the principle of “equivalence” for Thomson Reuters as for other global companies this means additional costs delays in bringing new services to market and a brake on economic growth.

In practice companies operating globally are often forced to work to the most restrictive and burdensome regulations since the implications of adapting to local variations can be economically operationally or technically infeasible.

For example in the US automotive industry car makers have long designed their vehicles to comply with the State of California’s tough emissions standards rather than attempt to design manufacture and market different cars in different states.

Sometimes this “highest common denominator” approach can have a less welcome effect. Some internet publishers that lack a historical commitment to press freedoms may find it commercially expedient to provide a single global product designed to meet the demands of the most restrictive state rather than tailor its offerings for each market.

Thus we are witnessing what might be termed the “Death of Domesticity.” Companies can no longer afford to concern themselves solely with domestic regulations. However we have not yet seen the birth of a new regime to tackle this issue.

There are of course well-established internationally recognized Conflict of Laws principles governing which jurisdictions take precedence in cases where laws clash. Indeed Oxford’s very own Professor A.V. Dicey of Balliol College – a leading English jurist of the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries – wrote a seminal treatise on the subject which remains today in its 14^th edition as Dicey Morris and Collins and is published (not co-incidentally) by Sweet & Maxwell a Thomson Reuters company.

These principles were largely drawn up to settle disputes in the arenas of maritime and aviation laws where a particular vessel may fly under one flag but operate in many different sets of territorial waters or airspace.

Essentially these principles were drawn up to govern things that moved. Now of course everything moves – capital people and especially data. As such the current conflict of laws regime is an increasingly outdated and inadequate one.

I believe the time has come to begin addressing the patchwork of conflicting laws governing global business because failing to do so will hinder already sluggish growth rates in the West. It will not be easy but unless we face up to the challenge we risk what my friend Dan Esty of Yale has called “a world of noncooperation free-riding and inadequate provision of global public goods.”

So what is the solution to this problem? There is as with most complex problems no one single answer. A variety of mechanisms will be necessary to bring about a workable solution. Broadly speaking there are three general approaches – each of which can play a role in creating a more robust and harmonious body of international law.

The first is the establishment of global rules or “supranational” laws. The second is the harmonization of national legal rules. And the third is the mutual recognition of laws by differing countries as is illustrated by the EU passporting mechanism.

Supranational laws are in some ways optimal. They provide clarity consistency and a comprehensive judicial and enforcement mechanism. But for businesses there are often many drawbacks. Supranational laws are slow to adopt slow to adapt to change and by definition not well tailored to local needs.

However one promising example of a supranational legal initiative is an effort to establish a global privacy regime led by the Spanish Data Protection Authority (AEPD). In an initiative approved in Madrid by data authorities from 50 countries regulators are attempting to integrate legislation from all five continents and propose international minimums including a set of principles and rights.

Having these principles and rights would achieve a greater degree of international consensus and would serve as a reference for those countries that do not have a legal or institutional structure for privacy. Notably the initiative recognizes that the current approaches in reality provide less protection for individuals and more complexity for businesses.

Given the complexity and time it takes to adopt supranational regulations internationally-minded statesmen are often attracted to the process of harmonization. This process is probably best seen in action through the work of international organizations such as the IMF the International Organization of Securites Commissions (IOSCO) the WTO (and its predecessor the GATT) and the G20. And these groups can point to some real achievements.

So intergovernmental organizations can be a net positive in achieving harmonization of laws and regulations. But they also have limitations. To start a state belonging to them can be selective in which rules it chooses to follow. Timeframes can often be lenient and states will often stall in adopting regulations that may not be politically popular at home.

Furthermore such systems can also be slow to make progress – just think of the failure of the Doha round of trade talks to achieve its objectives. And importantly as with supranational legislation they can lead to a democratic deficit as they increase the distance between a citizen and the laws and regulations with which they must comply.

Finally the concept of one-size-fits-all has shown in many cases to be problematic as it sets standards which cannot adjust to local needs and diminishes the element of regulatory innovation that in turn can spur economic growth.

An alternative to this approach may be found in the extension of the principles of mutual recognition. The best examples of this can perhaps again be found in the European Union where goods and services which are lawfully produced in one member state cannot usually be banned from sale in another member state.

The main advantage of mutual recognition is that it removes the need to harmonize all national technical rules. In the case of goods this means companies no longer have to worry about conflicting national regulations relating to weight size composition labelling and packaging which can prove a serious hurdle to companies operating internationally as I discussed earlier.

Such mutual recognition can also be applied to professional qualifications so that a lawyer or doctor trained in one country may have her qualifications – and by extension the regulatory body that determines those standards – recognized as competent by other nations. And there are a number of additional areas in which such a doctrine of “equivalence” could and should be applied especially in international finance.

Ultimately it is likely that we will need a combination of all three approaches to solve the problem; either on a one-off basis or as part of a natural evolution that starts with mutual recognition leads to harmonization and finally supranational law.

What is clear to me is that our challenge will only grow more acute. The shift from a single superpower to a multilateral world coupled with the digitalization of an increasing proportion of commerce will demand an unparalleled level of regulatory cooperation if we are to tackle the economic energy environmental health and other challenges of our young century.

Our hosts Oxford Analytica have already foreseen this challenge and the required openness to new ideas to rise to it. In fact the founding principles of Oxford Analytica state and I quote “that the frontiers of enterprise and progress are only pushed further out by accepting the challenge of change be it political economic social or technological and that this is best done by understanding change and harnessing it.”

I couldn’t agree more and hope that we as an international community can begin to adopt concrete mechanisms and not just vague expressions of intent to harmonize international laws and regulation.

We should accept no lesser challenge as descendents of such great free-trade economists and legal philosophers as Adam Smith John Locke and Alfred Marshall each of whom studied at this grand institution.

Our children expect – and deserve – no less of us.

One of pleasures of re-reading great books is that you see different things. Not just because we miss certain things the first time around but because our intervening life experience including our intervening reading gives us new context. So for example a second reading of Salman Rushdie’s great Midnight’s Children revealed many more insights and pleasures after my extensive travels through India.

In a similar vein the events of our time can add color and depth to even historical fiction if the author has captured timeless features of the human condition. Let me be less abstract. This past summer I picked up a new translation of Gogol’s Dead Souls a wonderful story set in mid-nineteenth century Imperial Russia about a middle-ranking civil servant who invents what on re-reading today seems to me to be a very modern form of financial engineering. In doing so Gogol’s anti-hero Chichikov gives nothing away to Fab Touré of synthetic CDO fame.

Chichikov’s web of transactions worked like this. In mid-nineteenth century Imperial Russia the ownership of serfs (often counted in terms of "souls") was the norm among landowners. There was also an Imperial tax levied on a per capita or soul basis. However in a wonderful Imperial bureaucratic twist this annual tax was still payable even if a given serf had died because the official headcount was only taken once every fifteen years or so via an official census. Conversely newly born serfs also did not count on the tax rolls until the next census. Finally as with all systems of slavery the serfs were the legal property of their owner and could be bought and sold or used as collateral for borrowing. And herein lies the arbitrage opportunity spotted by Gogol’s Chichikov. He went about the countryside offering to purchase the dead souls of local landowners and then used these notional serfs as collateral to borrow large sums. While somewhat incredulous at first the landowners were only too happy to sell Chichikov their dead souls thereby also ridding themselves of the obligation to continue paying taxes on departed workers until the next census. How brilliant of Gogol. One hundred and fifty years early he invented the ultimate sub-prime transaction: Packaging worthless collateral pools and then borrowing against them from unsuspecting lenders/investors.

After this well- timed re-reading of Gogol I can’t wait to re-read Crime and Punishment and see what I learn anew from Doestoevsky

I’m now on vacation which means this blog is too. Although I enjoy writing I turn off all electronics for 10 – 14 days a year. As this blog should attest I’m no Luddite but the best way I can relax and also give my family my full attention is not to be reaching for my array of vibrating devices every 30 seconds. Those who really need to reach me can. Most discover that they can get on just fine without me. As a wise Frenchman once said "the cemeteries are full of men who once thought themselves indispensable." I hope you all enjoy a good break.

I have been reflecting for a couple of weeks on the significance of some of the young companies that presented at this year’s Sun Valley Conference always hosted so professionally and graciously by Allen & Co. Thingd presented its vision of the internet of things with crowd-sourced taxonomies of the attributes of these items. Square demonstrated how to extend mobile credit card payments to smaller transactions. Pandora showed its user-programmed internet radio service and the database of musical attributes that drives it.

More than ever these presentations got me thinking that all the pieces of internet infrastructure are falling into place to enable some truly fantastic services in the years to come. It is often said in tech circles that we overestimate what technology can do in the next year or two and grossly underestimate what can be achieved in the next 10 years. This results from the uniquely iterative nature of technology to build upon the foundations laid by the last innovation. Each generation stands on the shoulders of those who preceded it or more accurately each new services-oriented architecture subscribes to and builds upon a set of services introduced by the prior generation. Thus the pace of science progresses not linearly but exponentially as Ray Kurzweil has observed.

So what does this really mean in practice? For example the mobile e-payment system built by Square can rely on the location-specific service available for the iPhone or Android platforms to identify where a given transaction is taking place without having to spend the time or money to write that code itself. Similarly if you want to add mapping capability to your new service you would be well-advised not to go out and try to re-map the world from scratch; instead you would likely incorporate Google Maps or another service available to you through a programmatic interface. Almost none of these new companies build stand-alone datacenters populated with separate servers for each application; they simply subscribe to the Amazon Google or other cloud for commodity computing services. Cloud providers in turn rely on many of the technologies that preceded them virtualization software in particular.

This phenomenon of building upon the efforts of our forbearers is not unique to computing. Biochemists now routinely use gene sequencing and monoclonal antibody technologies pioneered by others and artists regularly "sample" and incorporate the works of their masters. However like the early and powerful computer language LISP in which a given line of code could be both instruction and operand digital technology permits much faster and richer iteration. So the next time you think that the digital generation has ruined our lives by speeding everything up just think of the amazing advances that you are likely to live to see. We are blessed to stand on the shoulders of giants.

"Workflow" is defined by Wikipedia (the term is shunned by most established (read print) dictionaries) as "a sequence of connected steps … a sequence of operations declared as work of a person [or] a group of persons."

I have always found the term to be a sadly overused example of marketing doublespeak — what’s wrong with just saying "the pattern or method of work" in plain English. However it does capture one of the few ways in which companies such as Thomson Reuters have been able to make money on and with the internet.

Substantially all of our products combine information and software to support professionals in doing their jobs. This is as true of WestlawNext for the practicing attorney as it is for Thomson Reuters Eikon for the swaps trader. It is this tight integration of content and instructions which we have labelled "intelligent information."

Another company this time from the consumer world which is routinely (and legitimately) praised for its tight integration of media and software is Apple. In Apple’s case it goes further to include the tight-coupling of elegant hardware as well but at base what they do supremely well is meet the media consumer’s needs or "workflow" or perhaps "playflow." Because Apple makes it so easy for me to synch my iTunes library with my iPad and iPhone (4.0 of course) I don’t bother integrating diverse content myself onto a Zune (if you can still find one) or other generic MP3 player.

Similarly it has always struck me as ironic that the same kid who would not dream of paying for a full 4’33" song through iTunes will happily pay $1.99 for a 10 second ring tone drawn from the same track. Is the reason not again "workflow" or convenience? Unlike me this user is happy to go to the trouble of downloading "free" music (and likely violating copyright in the process) but when it comes to then editing the track down to the key ringtone-perfect refrain and synching it to his phone he is happy to pay for the convenience.

So what we are left with in the end is that user convenience drives a significant portion of consumer and professional consumption of content. And come to think of it what’s so terrible about making money giving customers what they actually want?

Here I am at 33000 feet again (legally thanks to Cathay Pacific) listening to one of the truly great jazz compositions – Sketches of Spain by Miles Davis. Perhaps it was my recent culturally-rich trip to Spain or my brain-jangling Lost in Translation jet lag coming back from Asia that made these mellifluous notes sound so sweet and pure to my ears but I think the root cause lies elsewhere. Re-discovering this modern masterpiece was like being re-united with an old friend. Someone you know well and with whom you can celebrate a shared past while still offering fresh perspectives to the careful companion.

While on that trip to Spain last month I attended a session of the executive education course Thomson Reuters offers in conjunction with IE and Tuck business schools. It is always a treat to attend these courses which combine 40 or so of our most talented executives along with a world-class faculty. On the day I attended a wise and mischievous Welsh professor with musical tastes as deep and soulful as an abandoned local mine referred the class to the Miles Davis Sketches album.

I found myself nodding judiciously at this musical reference (CEOs make a point of only nodding judiciously) but later when I tried to listen to the tracks from my iTunes library I realized rather guiltily that this masterpiece had not made the transition from vinyl to CD and from CD to MP3. Many were the LPs in my collection which died an appropriate death along this journey. I don’t shed a tear that The Monkeys The Commodores or Plastic Bertrand fell prey to musical euthanasia but every so often a great work also failed to cross the digital abyss.

Such was the fate in my collection of Sketches from Spain which I quickly rectified upon my return from Spain. Listening to it again on the long way back from Asia was like being reunited with an old friend. With fellow passengers and crew as witnesses I vowed not to let the sublime Concierto de Arunjuez and other tracks miss the next journey from MP3 to whatever lies beyond.

I often get asked when do I find the time to blog. The answer rather self-evidently is right now. I with the not inconsiderable assistance of a 747 and trained crew am flying at 31000 feet en route to Singapore. Whichever direction one leaves from New York it is a long flight.

So the question might more provokingly be asked why don’t I write War and Peace or A Rembrance of Things Past rather than a measly couple of paragraphs. Well again the answer is obvious – because I can’t.

I have previously written on why I started and continue this blog (see Recursive Loops: A Blog on Blogging); today I simply tackle the "how." I write mostly on airplanes and occasionally on the ground late at night. I typically write the prospective piece as an email to myself these days on my iPad. This provides me a ready spell-checker and an easy means to later upload to the server that hosts this blog. I am not a brilliant time manager but I get a lot done because I am not lazy and at work I have an outstanding team.

When I started blogging over five years ago one of my staff suggested that it could be ghost-written and then run through Legal Marketing Communications etc. With the exception of good ideas which I borrow freely the text is unfortunately all mine. This certainly means that it will never rival Tolstoy or Proust but at least it is faithful to my voice.