All posts made the week commencing Sunday 6 Apr., 2003:

22:39, Wednesday 9 Apr., 2003 Link

A couple of personal notes:

• Given what's happening where I work, I'm prudently putting myself on the job market. If you've a London-based project happening - involving any of technology, government, society, or anything else in which I may be interested - please read my CV and drop me a line for a chat (ah yes, and to let me know about typos).
• I'm in San Francisco from the 17th till 28th of this month for the Emerging Tech Conference and some general mooching around. Let me know if you fancy meeting up -- I have no plans.

My email address is matt@interconnected.org.

22:18 Link

The New Media Reader: "The new media field has been developing for more than 50 years. This reader collects the texts, videos, and computer programs-many of them now almost impossible to find-that chronicle the history and form the foundation of this still-emerging field".

I wouldn't usually mention marketing emails, but this is a well-targeted marketing email (and I like that). Check out the list of essays -- an absolute string of classics (Borges, Bush, Turing, Engelbart, Ted Nelson, Marshall McLuhan... just to start). I'll report back once it's been bought+read.

22:09 Link

This is good, tasty words. Geometry, and our descriptions of networked space: "In the first stages of public understanding of the net, it was important to describe it as a space - to map its topology and the geometry in a way that elucidated its similarities and differences with 'real' space. As it has matured as a medium and become integrated into social behviour patterns, the dynamism of these social behaviours creates centres of 'gravity', and this creates warps in the abstract maps we have of the topology of the net. A non-euclidean geometrical paradigm is needed, and I think the interest in Power Laws and related network-theory has started to provide this. These geometrical paradigms factor in dynamics, so the static topology of the net is curved according to the patterns of behaviour that occur within it.

"If we follow the historical development of geometry further, what would a relativity theory of the net look like? How would it help us describe the effect of social behaviour as a gravity-like force within the topology of net-space? And further still - what about a string theory of the net?"

21:47 Link

The magic number 150 "seems to represent the maximum number of individuals with whom we can have a genuinely social relationship" -- perhaps (for example) it's the tipping point between a band and a tribe (one having formal leadership, the other tending not) in Jared Diamond's Types of Societies. Anyway, this number could arise from the cost of maintaining the network versus its complexity. An interesting thought.

21:30 Link

So SmarterChild is back online (and surprise, back on AIM! Their message last year about technology costs looked pretty bitter. I wonder what happened?) -- with a raft of new abilities and a $9.99 annual subscription. Some of the features look pretty interesting too: Polls and Surveys; Leave a Message; Send a Crush. Nice and viral. Not as interesting as the subscription though. Good price point. I hope it doesn't go up too much once the introductory period is over.