Norlonto

1999-2004

When I came to London in 1999, my friend Jim and I pooled our ideas and came up with Norlonto. Named after the near-future anarcho-capitalist autonomous zone, North London Town, in Ken MacLeod’s novel Star Fraction, it aimed to further our respective publishing efforts, using our increasing professional web design and development experience to create an alternative online publishing community.

In the end, neither of us really had the energy or inclination to really make it work as a collective project. Unpaid contributors are few and far between unless you have a good amount of time to badger people, because these days most people have their own website for publishing their thoughts on. We never got any discussion areas off the ground, which was probably the biggest single reason the community thing never gelled. On top of that, we were pitching blindly into a niche well served by Disinformation (a well-established sub-culture portal that’s now a limited company) and Barbelith (a thriving online community created by a well-respected innovator in social software).

Towards 2012-style themed books were planned over pizza and pipes, but nothing materialised.

Small successes included anticipating many of the design innovations of the much-lauded Wired.com redesign, and getting this feedback from someone the week before the site closed down:

I have just read the article on Sacred Clowns [Peggy Andreas' Path of the Sacred Clown]. As a professional clown and dedicated Spiritualist I often wondered if there was a link between the two as I feel most at peace when either dressed as a clown and hearing people laugh, or sitting in the quiet of my church. I give philosophy in church from time to time and often start off by telling a joke so that the vibrations of love and laughter can be raised. The article opened my eyes to the truth of what I do and the realisation that I am not as strange as some people would have me believe. Thank you for giving me back my belief in my sanity.

Slightly odd, wonderful and heartening—that’s what we wanted.