This blog went missing yesterday, for reasons that were entirely ridiculous, not to say predictable: it was moved to a different server. My web-hosting service had, of course, alerted me well in advance that this would happen but — well, you can guess the rest: the email got swamped in the tide that floods my inbox and…

After I’d reset the DNS pointers, it took 24 hours for the change to ripple through. If you’re a regular reader, please accept my apologies. As usual, incompetence rather than conspiracy provides the best explanation.

No, not a picture of a Jubilee dinner, but of something far more moving and significant. Some months ago, a lovely young man who was a classmate of my daughter at secondary school — a clever, charming, athletic undergraduate — had a terrible accident while on a sporting trip abroad. He fell from an hotel balcony and suffered horrendous head injuries. When they got him to hospital, the medics thought he would die. He was in a coma for weeks, had emergency brain surgery and was eventually flown home to our local hospital where he is beginning to make a slow — but in the circumstances miraculous — recovery. He has a wonderful, supportive family but they’re not rich, and this catastrophe has obviously stretched their resources, so many of us have been wondering how best we can help.

Then two of their closest friends had an idea. Why not organise a “benefit evening”? So they set about it. A dinner in the village hall, cooked by volunteers, with everyone paying a lot more than they would in a restaurant. And an ”auction of promises” afterwards.

So last evening we drove through what VS Pritchett once called ”the most gardened country on earth” to the village hall. It was the kind of beautiful English summer evening that George Orwell (and John Major) would have recognised. The only thing missing was those old maids cycling to Evensong. When we got to the Hall, we were directed efficiently into a field specially set aside for parking. Our stewards were young men — some of whom I recognised from the primary-school gate when I used to meet their parents as I picked up my own children. Then into the Hall, which was packed to the rafters. Long trestle-tables with white linen, glasses and cutlery. Legions of the injured boy’s classmates recruited as waiters and dressed neatly in black trousers and white shirts. Guests of all ages, including many grandparents — and villagers who hadn’t known either the boy or his family but felt moved to put their personal weight behind this gesture of solidarity. Lots of parents I hadn’t met for years. Introductions which went, ”Hello, I’m JP’s Mum. You must be Annie’s Dad”. Teachers from the (terrific) school that so many of our children had attended. And the injured boy’s twin brother.

Then the meal: excellent boeuf bourgignon for the carnivores; and an equally delicious vegetarian option. And lots of dessert, with each table taking its turn to collect it. All in good order and with much cheerful jostling. Afterwards a few short speeches: from the boys’ rugby coach; then the sparky teacher who taught our children English for GCSE; and finally the injured lad’s identical twin.

”Some of you won’t know my brother”, he said, ”but now you do, because usually people cannot tell us apart”. He spoke movingly but without mawkish sentimentality, and left us marvelling at the capacity of human beings to rise above adversity. He and his brother are as close as it possible for two people to be; so in a way part of him was down the road in hospital as he spoke. Listening to him I felt that, for once, Hemingway’s definition of courage as ”grace under pressure” was justified.

And then the auction of promises. People had come up with an amazing array of offerings. Numerous tickets to rugby Internationals (for sums ranging between £120 and £280); a round of golf with the school principal (£120). Tickets to cricket Test Matches. Paintings by local artists. A week in an Alpine chalet (£1200). Another week in a Portuguese villa. A meal for two in a local restaurant (we went to £100 on this and were outbid). A free annual tax return by a local accountant (a snip at £35). And so it went on and on, with the audience being continually amazed — and delighted — by the frenzied bidding.

What fuelled the event was a shared recognition of how fragile is the thread by which life hangs. Here, after all, was a family which had done everything right: brought up two lovely lads who had the world at their feet — boys who turned out to be not only nice people and terrific athletes but also had won places at Oxford. And then — bang! — in one fateful moment, it all disintegrated. They had experienced the terror that lurks at the back of every parent’s mind. There but for the Grace of God and all that…

It was one of the most heart-warming events I’ve ever attended, an affirmation of the power of friendship and human empathy, a reminder — against the horrifying evidence of our capacity for inhumanity that is currently on display in Syria — of the better angels of our nature. And it was all so very English, somehow: no histrionics; no tears; just a quiet, determined pragmatism. As we drove home in the dark I was reminded of why I love living in this country.

Here’s the first page (of five) of Thomas Edison’s To-Do list for January 3, 1888.

Hmmm… Wonder what David Allen would have made of it. Edison breaks all the rules of his system.

From the Edison Papers at Rutgers University. Thanks to Brain Pickings for spotting it.

I’m not what you’d describe as a natural Facebooker. Sure I have a FB page and a bunch of ‘friends’ but I visit the site only rarely, and that’s mainly to find out what my kids or my friends’ kids are up to. Some Facebookers make the mistake of thinking that I’m an active user, but that’s because I’ve arranged for Twitter (of which I am an active user) to feed my tweets to FB where they appear as Updates.

All of which is by way of saying that my views on social networking are not based on deep personal experience and so should be taken with a pinch of salt. But, hey! this is a blog and blogs are places for unfinished thoughts, work-in-progress and the like. So here goes.

At the moment Facebook has two distinctive features. The first is a huge subscriber base — 900 million and counting. The second is a higher level of user engagement than any other service on the Web. Something like half of the users log in every day, and when logged in spend more time on the site than users of any other site. so the key question for anyone wanting to understand the Facebook phenomenon is: what’s driving them to do this?

I think I know the answer: it’s photographs — photographs that they or their friends have uploaded. Two reasons for thinking this: (1) the staggering statistics of how many photographs FB now hosts (100 billion according to some estimates), and the rate at which Facebookers upload them every day; and (2) personal observation of friends and family who are users of the site. Of course people also log into Facebook to read their friends’ status updates, newsfeeds/timelines, messages, wall-posts etc. But more than anything else they want to see who’s posted pics from last night, who’s been tagged in these images, and where (i.e. at which social event) the pictures were taken.

Hold that thought for a moment while we move to consider the speculation (now rampant) that Facebook is developing a smartphone. Henry Blodget thinks that this would be a crazy idea for seven different reasons, and I’m inclined to agree with him. (But then I would have said — probably did say — the same about Steve Jobs’s decision to enter the mobile phone market.)

Zuck & Co aren’t crazy — not in that way anyway — so let’s assume that they share Blodget’s view — that building a phone qua phone would be a daft idea. And yet everyone’s convinced that they are building something. So what is it?

Dave Winer, whom I revere, thinks it’s a camera. And not just any old camera, either, but what Dave calls a social camera. Here’s how he described it.

Here’s an idea that came to me while waiting for a train to Genova. I was standing on a platform, across a pair of tracks a man was taking a picture of something in my direction. I was in the picture, the camera seemed to be pointed at me.

I thought to yell my email address across the tracks asking him to send me a copy of the picture. (Assuming he spoke English and I could be heard over the din of the station.)

Then I thought my cell phone or camera could do that for me. It could be beaming my contact info. Then I had a better idea. What if his camera, as it was taking the picture, also broadcast the bits to every other camera in range. My camera, sitting in my napsack would detect a picture being broadcast, and would capture it. (Or my cell phone, or iPod.)

Wouldn’t this change tourism in a nice way? Now the pictures we bring home would include pictures of ourselves. Instead of bringing home just pictures that radiate from me, I’d bring home all pictures taken around me while I was traveling.

Of course if you don’t want to broadcast pictures you could turn the feature off. Same if you don’t want to receive them.

A standard is needed, but the first mover would set it, and there is an incentive to go first because it would be a viral feature. Once you had a Social Camera, you’d want other people to have one. And you’d tell them about it.

Dave wrote that in 2007, which is 35 Internet-years ago, and I remember thinking that it was a bit wacky when I first read it. But then I’m a serious (or at any rate an inveterate) photographer, and for me photographs are essentially private things — artefacts I create for my own satisfaction. Of course I am pleased if other people like them, but that’s just icing on the cake.

Over the years, though, my views changed. I bought an Eye-Fi card, which is basically just an SD card with onboard WiFi. Stick into your camera and it wirelessly transmits the images you take to a computer on the same Wi-Fi network. It’s fun (though a bit slow unless you keep the image size down) but can be useful at times — e.g. in event photography.

And then came the iPhone. The first two versions had crappy cameras, just like most other mobile phones. But from the 3S model onwards, the iPhone cameras improved to the point where they’re almost as good as the better point-and-shoot digital compacts. Given the First Law of Photography, which is that the best camera is the one you have with you, and given that most people always carry a phone whereas only hardcore snappers like me always carry a separate camera, it was only a matter of time before the market for compact cameras began to feel Christensen-type disruption. And so it has proved, to the point where the most popular ‘camera’ amongst Flickr users is now the iPhone 4.

Now start joining up these dots — as Dave Winer did in this blog post — and you can see the glimmer of an intriguing possibility. Consider: if we accept that (i) the Facebook geeks are smart, (ii) social photography is Facebook’s addictive glue, (iii) cameras have morphed into cameraphones and (iv) Facebook recently paid an apparently insane amount of money for Instagram, then maybe the device that Zuck & Co are incubating is actually a camera which has photo-sharing built in. And if it also happens to make phone calls and send texts well, that would be a bonus.

Neat, eh?

Dave Winer (one of my heroes) has been programming for 37 years. He writes about that in reflective mood:

Some conclusions may be in order.

First, most people don’t program that long. The conventional wisdom is that you “move up” into management long before you’ve been coding for 37 years. Only thing is I don’t see programming as a job, I see it as a creative act. I drew a big circle shortly after I started, and said I was going to fill the circle. So until the circle is full, I still have more to do.

Aleks presenting, originally uploaded by jjn1.

Aleks Krotoski, by far the most elegant presenter at the Google Big Tent event yesterday.