afluxstate

For the second in my third series of podcast interviews I spoke to Internet veteran Ivan Pope. I’d first met Ivan back in the early 90s when he was working as a part-time techie at Goldsmith College while studying for his masters there. He showed me the pre-web Internet, which proved to be a career changing moment for me and others who’d encountered his evangelical fervour about global networks back then. He went on to be a driving force in the early ‘daze’ of the UK Internet, including: setting up the  World Wide Web Newsletter (later 3W magazine); coining the term cyber café and helping set up the UK’s first at the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) in London; becoming key contributor to the UK’s first consumer internet magazine, .net; co-founding the UK’s first web agency, Web Media; founding the Netnames domain name registration service; and helping form the UK’s namespace organisation, Nominet.

By strange coincidence we now both live in the same area of Brighton, and I catch-up with Ivan at the local deli to regularly to find out what he’s been scanning on the horizon. We also discuss our shared passion for camping, which we blog about over at alifeoutthere.com. In this interview Ivan talks about the Fab Lab movement, the indie publishing revolution and how crowdfunding is relevant to both.