Let me just get this off my chest before I begin... I don't like Mashable!

I find the regular stream of sensationalist link-bait to be no better than the bile that spews forth from "newspapers" like the Daily Mail, or the thankfully-deceased News of the World. Ay benefits or insight that it offered the social media community have long passed.

When the French MEP Kader Arif stepped down last week from scrutinizing the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, declaring that he "would not participate in this charade", it was the culmination of eight years of political lobbying, back-room deals and undemocratic conniving that now threatens to undermine the entire global Internet economy.

Two weeks ago, I stood in Civic Center Plaza in San Francisco with a group of Internet entrepreneurs, Venture Capitalists and journalists. Among them were Craig Newmark, founder of Craigslist; Caterina Fake, co-founder of Flickr; Ron Conway, the legendary Silicon Valley VC; and nineties pop-rapper MC Hammer, now a startup entrepreneur.

As the year closed, I asked this question on my blog:·What image made the most impact on you in 2011?

It was a simple question, which I elected not to expand on. There were no rules, but reasons for the choice were invited.

Everyone wants to be an online marketing agency, except this online marketing agency.

I recently read a great post by a local marketing agency, talking about the fact they'd settled on calling themselves a 'marketing agency'.

Oh, how times have changed. Before the Internet, people in marketing were never as exact as they are today. Remember the old days of direct mail campaigns? When you sent out leaflets with different scratch codes (remember them?) and the campaign's ROI would depend on how many order forms you got from that particular scratch code? At that time, if there was no other marketing activity around, you could usually attribute sales around the time of the campaign to the direct mail piece.

I get a lot of gip about my Twitter account. I swear, make bad and often off-colour jokes, troll major brands and social media consultants for kicks and generally refuse to play the “game.” Considering a history of working in marketing and dealing with brand and PR, am I just killing my personal brand?

I certainly hope so.

Around 10 days ago, I was sat at home with a glass of red wine in my hand. And I had a thought. Inevitably, in this day and age, I shared it on Twitter first.

Within half an hour, I had bought a domain, set up an email account, a Tumblr page and began what is now known as My Earliest Memory.

I then tweeted about it again...

Almost instantly, I had a submission. It was then I knew I might be on to something interesting, so I blogged about it.

Are you sitting comfortably? Then I'll begin... Once upon a time a man called Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone. It was 1876 and blah blah blah yadda yadda yadda. That's not the interesting bit. What's interesting is that Bell himself, despite predicting the immense social consequences, never owned one at home.

The reason was generational: having grown up with nothing more than telegraphs and morse code to communicate further afield than the next town, the need for these new forms of communications had not really touched his own life. He just didn't feel the need.

The power of money and the conditioning of business tends to led us all down a path of doing 'good enough'. In some cases, less than good enough.

• Good enough to earn a living
• Good enough to pass
• Good enough to get paid
• Good enough to sell
• Good enough to keep the client happy
• Good enough to get away with it

Good enough. Just good enough.

The title of this piece disgusts me. Marketing people are always telling you how products will change lives for the better; usually such positive changes are evident in the swelling coffers of their and their clients' bank accounts. The level of self-regard and rampant egotism in marketers is not something I try and subscribe to - but bear with me, I think I'm onto something here.

Firstly, we all know London and parts of the UK "erupted" in riots in August 2011. This caught everyone by surprise except, say, people that actually lived in these areas who feel the boiling, feral emotions of everyday urban life day-in day-out, and were waiting to see how and when the volcano would erupt. In the immediate aftermath, it was a race to apportion blame; facts, evidence and calm heads at this juncture become irrelevant – it's a big ol' game of point-scoring and the first to come up with a cosy-sounding theory that fits with people's pre-existing prejudices is usually the winner.