There’s been a hiatus here, mainly because it’s been all go for what seems like forever.

Work with GigaOM is proceeding well. Project Alika is making progress, and the way it’s pulling together surprises me on a regular basis. Meanwhile I’m hoping to get Project Ele, a great story that I’ve been circling around for a while, commissioned in the next few days. Lots happening with work and personal life (let’s call it Project Kika — and we’re trying to enjoy the summer and our new house in Brighton.

Amid all of this, I can’t stop thinking about a couple of (slightly related) things.

First: the rise of the angry young man of the internet. There’s this range of people appearing who are (largely) angry young white men who harbor great animosity towards the establishment and use technology as a weapon to lash out.

At one end, there are political protesters or Bradley Manning; then there are piracy activists like the Pirate Bay; then there are script kiddies and such as Lulzsec and Anonymous. And then, at some bizarre and much more advanced level of crazy, you have the killers who are aware that technology is part of their arsenal: the likes of Anders Behring Breivik or Seung Hui Cho (the perpetrator of the Virginia Tech massacre in 2007, who was immediately known as the YouTube killer).

There’s something to be written about this new breed of “disenfranchised” man, one who feels like an outsider but is also entitled and technology-enabled. I wonder if their emergence is what makes the internet such an unpleasant place.

And then at the same time, there’s prevalence of copying around us that just seems to be growing all the time (something I’ve been thinking about a lot since working on the Copy Continuum talk). They are the fake Chinese Apple stores and the copied Chinese cities. They are everywhere. We live in a very interesting age, when it’s possible to try and replicate entire huge, complex ideas. This is worth exploring more.

And if I wasn’t already flat out, I’d be trying to write a book about one of these things. But you know me, perhaps I’ll try anyway.