u/Mikesoft

Hi all. A mod kindly said I could share my comms Substack, White Wiki, as it seemed relevant to the discussions here.

https://www.whitewiki.org/

I recently published a piece on June's tech conference season that drew a fair bit of industry reaction. The short of it: for a month, the sector argued about AI, trust and reputation, particularly across the UK and Europe, and communications was barely on the stages. The headline theme at London Tech Week was "sovereignty," and it was treated almost entirely as a question of capital and infrastructure. Having been on the ground, I think it is a communications problem first. Three things stood out:

1. Sovereignty is a reputation risk before it is an IT one. The platforms your organisation runs on are controlled by a handful of mostly foreign providers. If access or terms shift, your ability to operate and to communicate shifts with them.
2. Where your data sits, and who can reach it, has become something stakeholders judge you on. That makes it a trust question, and trust is our department.
3. AI systems increasingly answer for your brand when you are not in the room. If you are not shaping what they learn, your story gets told without you.

Full write-up here: https://www.whitewiki.org/p/ai-where-was-pr

Substack has been a good place to meet other comms people this year. Worth a look as a network, whether or not you read mine.

I also interviewed Jimmy Wales about trust recently. Free to subscribe, and if you are also on Substack, say hello 😄

90% of the content is free, and if you're a student I'll give you paid access - just drop me a message (I think I need an email address? I'll work it out!) Thanks.

I was very lucky to buy many of these pieces from an estate auction in the UK. Snapped a few shots for a recent Substack article (won’t post here as don’t want to be promotional). I understand this stuff is common in the U.S, but it’s quite rare in the UK. Hottest piece is around 4 usv/h

Bit of a fun one. I picked up an empty tube of Doramad, the WW2 German "radioactive" toothpaste, which contained thorium. The seller mentioned a Geiger counter read nothing off it, and he was right, there's so little left in an empty tube that it doesn't budge above background.

So I ran it on my Radiacode 102: an hour of background, an hour of the tube, then subtracted one from the other. From this I could see a faint thorium fingerprint. 80 years in the ground and the residue dried to the tube walls is still quietly ticking over.

I ended up writing the whole thing up on my RadiumQuest.com blog if anyone fancies the history and further detail 😊