I am leaving my job as general manager of public participation for ICANN on 25 November.

Yesterday, the COO sent round a note to staff; this morning I find myself elevated to the point of wanting to dance. Whenever I leave a job, I get the feeling of a weight being lifted off my shoulders and, shortly after, feel the excitement of future possibilities. This time, it is particularly strong.

I still have a busy meeting in Seoul in just over a week to deal with, and then more work for the Internet Governance Forum in Egypt two weeks after that. But from December I will be free to apply my energies wherever I wish and man does it feels good.

I’ve learnt a hell of a lot over the past two-and-a-half years but with the ending of a big agreement between the organization and the US government (and they said it couldn’t be done), with my boss heading back to Australia, and with a feeling that my ability to effect changes has passed its peak, it is definitely time to move on.

Update: I just found my original post on taking the job. Pleased to see I have managed to stay true to myself, although I may have to evaluate performance against my own goals in December.

What will I be doing?

I have a long list of things that has been building up for a while. My Sex.com book and its film rights, a book on the domain name industry, a book on the cutting edge and revolutionary uses of the Internet. I may write my Great Drunks book. I may write my Rockall disaster book.

I have two business plans. And I have my beloved journalism: the new Internet extensions will be fascinating; I am absolutely itching to get stuck into electric car technology. Two people have been asking me to build their websites for a while. I definitely want to do some consulting on participation and the Internet to save people huge amounts of time and trouble figuring it out for themselves. And I have an overriding desire to do some real good in a broader sense – maybe get into some of the gov2.0 stuff going on.

My head is buzzing with plans; just need to take a week off surfing and fixing up my van and it will all come clear. I’m also getting married to Sapna in April in San Francisco and we will probably move up there in the new year, which I’m also excited about.

So great opportunities lie ahead. In the meantime I need to stop writing this post and get back to the unbelievable list of things to do for the ICANN Seoul meeting.

Below is the note that the COO generously sent to staff yesterday re: my heading off.

Hello all,

Kieren McCarthy has decided to leave his role as general manager of public participation at ICANN.

Kieren has been with ICANN since February 2007, initially working from the UK and then moving to Los Angeles. In that time he has worked tirelessly and won frequent plaudits from the community and Board for improving ICANN’s interactions with its community and lowering the barriers to participation in the organization. He will be leaving at the end of November, following the ICANN Seoul meeting and Internet Governance Forum in Egypt.

Some of Kieren’s achievements have been to revamp the ICANN website, restructure the public comment process, greatly expand and improve remote participation at meetings, produce monthly magazines, encourage and assist the production of a range of other newsletters and updates to the community, introduce professional photography and video, create a meeting question box, and oversee many of ICANN’s web presences including the blog, public participation site, meeting sites, mobile site, and the front page of the main ICANN site.

Kieren has been pivotal in the introduction of ICANN’s translation and interpretation programs, its consultation principles, and its document deadline policy. He has also introduced ICANN to a range of social networking tools, used to improve interaction and communication with the community, as well as a number of innovative sessions at international public meetings, including a joint meeting of representatives of all ICANN’s arms.

Kieren is leaving to work on a range of projects. He will be partly returning to journalism and will continue to cover Internet and green technology issues within California for the foreseeable future.

I’m sure you all join me in wishing Kieren great success in these next projects.

Thanks!

Doug

I’ve always thought Eddie Izzard was supremely funny but I didn’t realise that he’d be a really nice bloke just to know and have a conversation with until today.

I embarked on some rather silly Twitter-following very early this morning (all sparked off by Stephen Fry tweeting about Trafigura) and ended up discovering that Eddie Izzard was in Los Angeles for a documentary about his life. I missed a Q&A he gave earlier this week at a screening (bloody shame) but he tweeted that he’d be on some chatshow I’ve never heard of – Kevin Pollak.

As it turns out this is a low-budget, Internet-only chatshow that makes me want to call a few mates, drive up to Hollywood and completely overhaul because there have been some interesting guests but the format is painful. Kevin, bless him, needs an audience to be funny (plus there is a reason canned laughter tracks exist) and he is a truly dreadful interviewer, but if you press play on the show (embedded above) and come back 17 minutes and 20 seconds later you’ll find Eddie Izzard giving a really interesting interview.

Far from going off on his surreal semi-structured humour bursts, Eddie Izzard was actually in a relaxed and chatty frame of mind. I’ve no doubt that having watched a documentary about his rise he had been pondering about his life and existence and clearly had some thoughts running through his head.

What came out though was what a smart, driven person Eddie is. He has retained copyright on his DVDs (he did accounting exams), he carefully and methodically approached his career of choice, he has interesting insights into his profession. And he was clearly willing to talk about personal details: the death of his mother when he was six which, apparently, the film goes into in some detail and is the main driver in Eddie’s life; and the fact that he had had a relationship with the film’s director.

I really wish it had been me interviewing him because he was relaxed, in a small room and willing to open up. It’s rare that such a practiced and polished performer is willing to let his guard down that much. Anyway, we shall never know. It does make me want to get into Internet video though – and do a really professional journalistic job of interviewing interesting people.

Eddie Izzard’s film Believe is at Laemmle’s Sunset 5 cinema on Sunset until Thursday and then it moves to New York. Initial reviews have been very positive.

Is this a flower reaching out of my Bird of Paradise – or just another leaf?

One of the things I love about Los Angeles (well, Southern California) is the abundance of the Bird of Paradise and its extraordinary bright orange (though sometimes black) unfurled mohican flower.

So when I moved to my new flat and had room, I bought one, with the salesman telling me it would flower in July/August (i.e. a few months’ time). It’s now mid-September and nothing. But the plant(s) do occasionally shoot out a long green stem that promises to provide one, only to unfurl across its length rather than at the top and reveal another enormous bright green leaf.

Anyway, the shoot in the picture looks promising to me and I am keeping my fingers crossed. Incidentally I am thinking of using the first flower from my plant as the buttonhole thing for my wedding. Not sure how that works – presumably it would have to be very fresh.

One more vaguely interesting thing – this whole post has been put together through a Wordpress iPhone app – interested to see how it fares.

Today’s my 34th birthday and I’m writing this post the evening before because I think I might give myself a break from all electronics for the day.

This time last year I took the day off and went surfing. I think I might do the same tomorrow. I have taken the day off work and made it as plain as I can that I won’t be doing any work at all. That’s what I think your birthday should be for – to take a day in the year for getting on with whatever you want to get on with.

Currently I’m thinking: surfing and then fixing up my van. Or I may just hang out by the beach and do little, have a few beers and talk to a few of Venice’s lively locals.

Why should any of you care about this? You shouldn’t. And if you are reading this, thinking how lovely it sounds to have a day to spend how you wish. Well, then you need to take a day off. I guarantee you the world will continue to revolve when you get back.

So one of the many questions rolling around my head, particularly since living in the United States, has been: why is American beer so bad?

It really is bad. I know Brits get mocked for flat, warm beer (I love it – the taste is terrific), but American beer – your Buds and Millers – really is absolutely dreadful. Tastes of nothing at all, doesn’t refresh or quench or present any of the pleasurable qualities that beer has brought to me many, many times over the past 20 years. In fact, just about the only thing American beer does do is get you drunk – if you can stand to drink enough of it.

Well, I have found out the answer. There was a History Channel documentary on US brewing history at the weekend and it was pretty easy to divine the historical and cultural reasons behind this peculiarity that an entire nation loves drinking rat’s piss while everyone else in the world has spent centuries savouring their beer.

And this is the three-part answer:

1. It wasn’t always like this. Americans used to love decent tasting beer. But during World War One, there was a massive backlash against the Germans in the US. At the time, most of the breweries were German or based on German beers or called German names. They took a massive hit and new “American” brewing companies appeared and prospered amid the patriotic fervour.
2. Before this had time to shake itself out, Prohibition kicked in. From 1920 to 1933, it was illegal to produce alcoholic drinks. So the brewing industry used its factories to produce other sorts of goods instead. Not only did this cause serious brewers to up and leave the country but it effectively hit reset on the nation’s palate. After Prohibition ended, all that was left was a few giant American breweries able to effectively shape a nation’s taste.
3. Before great beer was able to make its inevitable way back into people’s lives, America went through the Second World War and then, crucially, entered the great modern era of advertising. The best example was Miller Lite – which was originally a diet beer aimed at women. The ads – with the still-used tagline “Great Taste…Less Filling!” – were hugely successful and showed working men enjoying Miller. It became one of the first lifestyle approaches to advertising. And, in the way that the greatest ads flip reality, it sold a dreadful tasteless liquid as possessing a “great taste”. Miller Lite and Bud Lite continue to be advertised with unbelievable logic-altering force to this day.

But there is good news.

Micro-brewers save the day

Over the past 15 years or so, there has been the Great Rise of the microbrewery with the United States. With no calamities in between, the American public slowly began to realise its palate and good beer began to find more and more of a market.

Although the light beers still take the majority of the market, the microbreweries are growing in strength and you can find a lot of decent beers in the US these days. Although you may have to seek them out.

I can recommend Anchor Steam from San Francisco. I also tried Brooklyn Beer last weekend in New York, which was pretty good. Sierra Nevada is widely available in Los Angeles and is very enjoyable. And my new favourite is Arrogant Bastard which I had at Baby Blues BBQ on Lincoln the other day. The writing on the label was worth the cost itself. Another good location is Father’s Office in Santa Monica and Culver City which specialises in very, very good beers from the US and elsewhere.

More importantly there are beer festivals across the year. I just missed the Los Angeles one. And there is a Great American Beer Festival. Also, according to one local, who was listening in to my explanation of the above at the LA Galaxy match on Saturday and turned around and told me he was pleased I recognised the microbrewing industry, there is a beer festival coming up near Los Angeles in the next month (may have to track it down).

Anyway, so there you go: an explanation of why American beer is so bad, plus an optimistic ending.

So after 18 months of retaining my UK phone while living in the US, I finally got tired of paying £30 a month for absolutely nothing and killed the contract. It ends next week.

Why did I keep it for so long? Well, for one, I didn’t expect to stay in the States all that long. I figured ICANN would drive me nuts within a year and I’d move back to Blighty. Plus I didn’t want to rely on just a work phone for contact with friends and family. And lastly I didn’t want to lose my telephone number – 07932 783686 – which I have had for over a decade.

Well, I am still at ICANN and so still in the States and I didn’t use my UK phone because to use it over here was prohibitively expensive. I don’t rely on just my work phone for contact – I mostly use Skype to contact friends and family (it’s free and it comes with moving pictures). And as for losing the number… Well I am the proud owner of a .tel domain name.

In fact, due to my name being slightly unusual, I have kieren.tel.

TLD innovation

The .tel top-level domain is a novel and interesting use of the domain name system (DNS) in that it stores information directly in the DNS i.e there is no website associated with it. You go through a special admin system that .tel runs and stick up your contact details – phone numbers, addresses, websites etc – and it sticks it directly into the Internet’s infrastructure.

The beauty of this is that I can update my contact details very simply, it updates very quickly, and all the details can be accessed by anything whatsoever that can connect to the DNS (which is basically every modern electronic device). What’s more, the download is very, very small so it is very, very fast.

And so that’s how I plan to keep in touch and how I hope everyone will be able to keep in touch with me. Just go to http://kieren.tel and you’ll see all my contact information.

Problems

All that said, I do foresee some potential problems with .tel in the future. For one, I’m not sure what impact having my details out there will have. Because it’s in the DNS, it is searchable and scrapeable. I am monitoring to see if I am swamped with spam (or the mobile phone variety).

I wonder if it will make my websites a target for automated spamming and so on. There may be some issues with privacy. But so far it’s worked well and I am confident I’ll figure something out.

Another problem while I’m here was that Vodafone – my UK mobile provider – was an unbelievable pain in the arse while I was trying to end my contract. It took me literally two weeks, six emails and three phonecalls to end my contract. And even then they kept insisting that I might want to reconsider. I don’t know whether their system has broken down, or if management is purposefully turning a blind eye to a system breakdown (or not fixing it) because it means profits in hard times, but I am not happy about it.

Incidentally, Vodafone also accidentally forgets to take things off your bill with remarkable consistency. Add-ons are something that is charged and then automatically refunded on your bill if you don’t want them i.e. there is the implicit assumption of being charged for services unless you actively say no.

Anyway, that gripe aside – go to kieren.tel And ponder if you want to get a .tel domain too. They are more expensive than a dotcom – typically around $20 where as dotcoms are usually half that (if you can find one you want). And not every registrar sells .tel domins (around 150 or the 950 or so registrars do – full list here).

But you don’t have the hassle and expense of building a website, and it serves a useful purpose. Plus, if this takes off, I can foresee people building apps for it that link into iPhones etc. We shall see.

We first learned that the domain name market was far from stable around eight years ago when the dotcom crash turned a booming market into dust in just a few months.

Over the years, that market has grown in strength: its stability saw people invest in advanced systems for buying and selling domains, and the never-ending demand for Internet sites, coupled with the fact the the number of top-level domains stayed the same and so the domain space became smaller, meant that prices increased steadily to the point where tens of thousands of domains became worth tens of thousands of dollars.

Well, the DOMAINfest domain auction has just demonstrated that the domain name space may be more stable but it ranks alongside art, rather than houses, when it comes to property.

In short, the auction was a bit of a wash-out, with none of the 200+ domains available exceeding expectations; most hitting the bottom-end of their estimated value; and a very large number meeting no bidders and being pulled off the floor.

The big names were especially badly hit: zimbabwe.com was slated for $100,000+, no one would touch it and it went unsold. Monalisa.com – possibly frivolous but clearly memorable – also went unsold. Rather worryingly for the blogging community, weblog.com – a snip at $500,000 – has very solid traffic – 700,000 visitors every month. It went down to $200,000 and still failed to sell*.

Strikingly, sleep.com – a domain I wouldn’t mind having – went unsold, failing miserably its $1 million to $5 million price tag. Screensavers.com – which purportedly has made more than $13 million in revenue and boasts 5,000 downloads per day – did slightly better and was sold for $800,000.

Publishing.com was also in the $1 million to $5 million bracket. It opened at $500,000 and no one went for it. Unsold. And spotlights.com suffered the same fate. Jet.com started at $200,000 and saw no bids.

So the big spending is out on domain names. But how about the smaller fish – the day-to-day businesses?

Well, they fared better, but no one was leaving with a windfall today. The exceedingly well-priced fly.travel went for a measly $2,500 – with the auctioneer practically pleading with the sole bidder. I nearly bought it myself. Inventions.info – which strikes me as a good long-term bet – went for just $1,250, but at least that was within its expected range.

The “.me” domains – which are currently being extensively marketed following the registry’s purchase last year – did better than expected, but I still think that $10,000 for contact.me is going to be widely seen as an incredible bargain in just a few years’ time.

The domain name market certainly seems to follow the vagaries of the wider economy. Digitalnotebooks.com – a dotcom! – went from $5,000 to $4,000 to $3,000 to $2,000 to $1,000 to $500 and still there were no buyers. Seems no one wants to buy laptops and no one wants their respective domains either.

All that said, there was still a lot of money flying around for what remain largely intangible names on an invisible network. No one believes the Internet is going anywhere soon – and .me’s comparative success shows that marketing breeds confidence – but now is not the time for flashy auctions it seems.

I’ll be taking pictures at DOMAINfest today and sticking them on Flickr – and possibly here – with a CreativeCommons license (free non-commercial use; attribution required). The stream is below:

One of the bizarre but wonderful things about living in Los Angeles is that when all your friends are freezing cold or trapped under the snow in January, you get to walk in the sun and witness the most extraordinary sunsets.

Last night I saw the makings of an extraordinary sunset and jumped on my bike to Venice to get some snaps. Here’s one and under that, a Flickr feed of the rest:

It’s been six weeks since I last posted here. That can’t be good. And I have a ton of stuff to get out of my mind through my fingers. The one-day trivia brain of Los Angelenos; the US presidential election process; the insane bureaucracy and mind-control of this peculiar and remarkable country. Plus, lots of pics – some with world famous stars of the screen. And the tale of trying to get hold of my possessions after 16 weeks now.

Why is this material still in my brain and not on the page? Because of work. Too much work. Far too much work. This job is a constant invitation to burn-out. I think it is the three international meetings a year that is what really makes the workload impossible: there is never more than a week in which you can get on with all those things that need quiet periods to get done. I thank god that the cycle ride home (along the beach – it’s nice, even in crap weather) is 35 minutes. It’s the one conscious hour of the day I can’t be at my laptop. Although I did take two phonecalls on my way in this morning. How long before I’m balancing the Dell on my handlebars, trying to pick up WiFi signals from the beach houses?

Still, I’m going to Delhi in a week’s time. It’ll mean 37 hours in economy there and back (I’ll be in London, Paris and Vienna briefly if anyone desperately wants to meet up), but I should have time to go see the Taj Mahal at some point. And I’ve always fancy seeing that and India. The urge to take off a month and travel the sub-continent is pretty intense, I have to say. Anyway, more work, then sleep, then more work…