Serves 5

• 1 tsp fennel seeds
• 1 tsp cumin seeds
• 1 tsp coriander seeds
• 1/2 tsp ground cinnamon
• 1 cardamom pod
• 1 thumb-sized piece of ginger, peeled
• 3 red onions, chopped
• 5 garlic cloves, smashed and peeled
• 2 red chillies chopped
• 1 tbsp olive oil
• 1.5 kg lamb shanks (somewhere around 4 shanks)
• 75g butter
• 1x 400g tin chopped tomatoes
• 2 tbsp tomato purée
• 350ml vegetable stock
• Rice, mint and yoghurt to serve with

Warm up the spices on a pan to release the oils. Mmm. Throw in a mortar and pestle and crush, or spread on a cutting board and whack the spices with a pan. Point is to break all the kernels apart.

Prepare meat by cutting away unwanted bits. Make sure to keep all the fat around though. Just debone and cut meat into finger sized pieces.

In a blender or with a magic wand thing, blend onions, garlic, spices and chilli until you get a smooth paste. Heat a pan with butter and combine, on the pan, with the curry paste. When whole kitchen smells with curry aromas, move pan off heat and prepare a new one to brown meat in oil.

While browning prepare stock if you don't have it at hand. Dissolve a vegetable cube in warm water.

In a casserole combine meat, curry paste, tomatoes and purée. Whack in the oven at 180° for 2.5 hours. If you have a pressure cooker you can get away with less.

Serve with rice, mint and yoghurt.

Google have really messed up with Reader. Instead of simplifying it and integrating it into Chrome, they chose to bloat it with features. Thankfully it has a decent API for client authors. Reeder for iPad, a Google Reader frontend or client is a beautiful experience. But its long term value is only as good as the feeds you put into it. And that's where it kind of falls apart, since you still have to deal with google.com/reader at some point. At least 90% of people have no idea what the benefits of a feed reader are. And a hard to underestimate sized portion of those would appreciate an aggregator of their favorite sites and a way to manage their content flow. Twitter proved that. People like their heroes of prose arranged in a continually updated stream of content. 

It makes no business sense to treat feed reading like a "prosumer" hobby either. A collection of feeds are an incredibly good source of data for target advertising. Partly because the feeds reflect people aspirationally. The things people follow and spend time to get inspired and informed could be better indicators of what advertising they would want to see, then for example their personal correspondence in Gmail. Publishers small and large should get a piece of that pie too. It has the potential to become, at last, a marketplace of internet publishing. Something along the lines of what Readability is trying to do.

If Google could pull it off, we'd reach an incredible tipping point where solo publishing could finally flourish.

UPDATE Google recently introduced some changes to Reader which I was unaware of. Nothing earth-shattering; more or less just Google+ integration. One could assume that this post was a riff on those recent developments, but that's not the case. Read Brent Simmons' take on things.

Plain advertising constructs a message, produces it eyecatchingly and buys the real estate to display it. The message is guesswork - as in; part of a doubtless imperfect strategy, with a target group and product usage in mind. This set of promotion of products, values and ideas is not going away. We need to start somewhere and that's more or less what we're going to do, conceptualize the message and deliver in a compelling, possibly entertaining way. But as soon as the lifecycle of a product or, perhaps the emotional connection to a brand begins, we need to be on our feet.

There is already a desire of brands to control and own the new channels. Facebook Pages and Twitter hashtags are good examples. A little piece of the interactive social pie. I'm not necessarily talking about Nike owning a social network. Well if successfully pulled off that wouldn't be so bad. But we can be more creative than that. Think of the frequently referenced Old Spice campaign. The spontaneousness of that campaign transferred into a proximity to consumers. A beautiful example of creating the channel with traditional advertising and then capitalizing on the reactions and emotions that rippled. We should have a long term strategy in place too. The sought after "brand fans" are little promotional engines and deserve to be praised and promoted themselves.

The reading experience on Kindle for iPad is surprisingly pleasant. You can point and hold your finger over a word to get its dictionary definition. Only a second away, displayed at the bottom of the screen. An especially clever sentence can be highlighted and shared on Twitter or Facebook. Instantly. It's like that impulse you get when your reading a book on a sunday afternoon with your girlfriend somewhere around and you pause to share something enlightening or relevant. But this time it's archived too so your Amazon Highlights Page accumulates these places and highlights from the book.

I think I prefer it this way, over printed books or the e-ink Kindle. Also, excited to see if these features are all in the new Kindle Fire.

This brings up an exciting idea. What if authors could choose to charge a little extra for the book, but readers can redeem up to a certain value percentage of the book by sharing sentences with their social networks? This way authors of good books can get rewarded, presumably, by bigger sales numbers as the reading experience turns into target advertising. I think it could work out quite nicely.

I once heard George Melly, on a programme about Louis Armstrong, do that dangerous thing and give his own definition of a genius. “A genius,” he said, “is someone who enters a field and works in it and when they leave it, it is different. By that token, Satchmo was a genius.” I don’t think any reasonable person could deny that Steve Jobs, by that same token, was a genius too.

Stephen Fry