I met Stephen Bates � he works for IF (my employer) but is on secondment to DTI � and Helen Lindsay who is the research head at the new Science Engineering and Manufacturing Technologies Agency � SEMTA. We had a good discussion on how SEMTA might do some survey work for its new role. Stephen kindly agreed to give me a lift up to Nissan and back tonight.

He mentioned that the site which I invested in � in my old job � was now up to around 75000 sessions a month in year 4. The target for the first year was a 1000 users a month which is roughly where www.kwase-kwaza.com is now (although in fact autoindustry exceeded its target). I got the user chart from the site and tried to find some clues about how the sustained growth had been achieved. There are definite plateaus and surges. The first plateau ends about two years in and then there is a year long surge to another and then another surge � each of the surges brings in 25k new users per month by the end of the period � so three surges takes the figures up to the current total.

The great writing spree continues � I found myself yesterday writing about celtic fringes in 1985-1995 eg artists like Katherin Tickell � and then about Detroit � there s always something underneath the surface in Detroit. I think yesterday it was a compare and contrast of Debbie Harry and Patti Smith as exemplars of NYC artrock in the 70s. I am also dabbling a bit in Britart. I suppose it would do me no harm to try and put this in a nutshell. Here goes.

While the blues plus artistic culture of London in the fifteen years from 1955 was tremendously strong and productive it was not deep rooted � not as deep rooted as in New York for example. In the ten years from 1975 to 1985 a number of important practitioners withdrew � especially to the Celtic Fringes. There were various onslaughts � especially the punk movement which went for a year zero cultrural manifesto in the UK and then Thatcherism which derided everything which didn�t make money and especially when those things came from the 1960s.

An acoustic based counter culture began to emerge on a regionalist agenda especially from the extremes � Cumbria, Northumbria and the Deep South West � around 1990s. This was essentially communal and preservationist � and as such quite different from the more existential art fuelled agenda that had flourished on the metropolitan scene.

In NYC on the other hand you can find people on a continuity agenda � for example taking the microtonal discoveries of the early 60s and pushing them through into punk/thrash derived forms in the late 1980s. Punk was less of a decisive break � just one school amongst many and therefore much more open to blending and innovation. The USA is more federal and patronage and self-help have stronger roots. At heart this means that certain kinds of avant garde community and artistic practice are more deeply embedded and can survive a change in political culture.

Detroit suffers to some degree from marginalisation but has at its heart a tremendously innovative culture and can be a place of retreat from NYC. Taken with its Michigan hinterland and its (for the US) relatively long history, since the late 50s it has been consistently innovative and indeed there has caused repercussions as far away as Italy in the Arte Povera period. Isolated from the excesses of the 1980s a small team of visionaries changed the musical universe drawing on a prior tradition of elctronic experimentation.

In the UK art at last managed to fight back in the 1990s by integrating the discoveries of Warhol, Graham and the conceptualists with punk attitudes and 80s market attitudes. There was a temporary flurry of interest in music from the 60s.

So there.