Blackbeltjones/Work “The cosmos is a deeply dangerous thing to think about - into it, vacant minds expand” - Dr. Jonathan Miller

Tanya Pixelcharmer has dug up a bunch of stuff on ‘Social Informatics’. Queued.

&#187 Pixelcharmer: Field Notes: Social Informatics

Filed under: Blog watch
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Warren Ellis reviews one of the most beautiful considerations of human creativity I’ve come across: Snakes & Ladders by Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell.

It’s a wonderfully sensitive illustrated adaptation of a talk Moore gave at the Conway Hall, Red Lion Square (which I walk through on the way to work every morning) – using the square’s history, it’s inhabitants and their encounters with the muse as a basis for the investigation of dna, magic and the creative urge.

There’s a PDF preview [c. 500k] to give a flavour.

» artbomb.net: Snakes & Ladders

Filed under: Book reviews
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Short, thoughtful recap of a lot of the memes around wifi vs 3g by the old man of the seachange, Nicholas Negroponte:

“In the future, each Wi-Fi system will also act like a small router, relaying to its nearest neighbors. Messages can hop peer-to-peer, leaping from lily to lily like frogs — the stems are not required. You have a broadband telecommunications system, built by the people, for the people. Carriers are aware of this, but they discount it because they do not feel there will be sufficient coverage. They are wrong.”

» WiReD: Nicholas Negroponte: Being Wireless
[via warchalking.org]

Filed under: Ubiquitous computing
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Just spent a couple of hours hacking together my entry in the Viridian BioFuture Robot Dog Contest, based on some doodles and sketches that have been mounting up over the last month. Here he is below, along with some of the sales-blurb that goes along with the entry…

“Introducing Von Neumanns best friend.

A self-replicating, self-structuring nanodog system designed to be fun for all the posthuman family. Advanced ‘stinky-sneaker-simulant’ tail-bonds ensure structural integrity whatever the game – from chasing a stick to digging tunnels through gas-giants.

Von Neumann’s best friend is a canine companion that will last you from now until way after the singularity. He’ll be your pal no matter what scale or how distributed your consciousness is.”

» BioFuture Robot Dog Contest: Von Neumann’s Best Friend

Filed under: Product design
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From McSweeney’s interview with Kurt Vonnegut:

‘Q: It is a weird moment in history, don’t you think?

Kurt Vonnegut: Well, my late brother Bernie, who was a great expert on weather — at one point he knew more about tornadoes than anybody else on the planet, I imagine — was always approached by people who knew his background and wanted him to be an expert about it. “Bernie, isn’t this weather unusual?” And he would say, “The weather is always unusual.” I mean, this is a very special time in history, but every time is.’

» McSweeney’s: The best jokes are dangerous: interview with Kurt Vonnegut, pt. 1

Filed under: Society and culture
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The Observer interviews various leaders in their field about what creativity is, their creative processes and inspirations. Some heroes of mine in there:

J.G. Ballard

“If you’ve got a strong imagination it’s there all the time, it’s working away. You’re kind of remaking the world as you walk down a street, sort of reinventing it. I have a walk every day and a good think about things. I sometimes think maybe this town is a complete conspiracy, or maybe it’s a very advanced kind of psychological experiment – all these ideas occur to me and every now and again I think: ‘Hey, that’s not bad. That’s worth pursuing.’”

Jan Kaplicky

“Architecture is generally presented by one name, but it’s a fantasy and very 19th-century to claim it is a one-man product. A lot depends on the people you have around you and how good they are.”

Peter Saville

“Ideas never come out how you first imagined them – something else happens along the way, and if you’re lucky it turns out better. For me the process of thinking about things goes on all the time. I’m very often quite happy to sit down and watch some football, or pornography, late at night, in order to avoid thinking about things, to avoid reading another interesting magazine or journal or a new book.”

Some good quotes in the intro to the interviews by Guy Claxton, a psychologist:

“Essentially, creativity is all about learning to listen to the unconscious and being able to cultivate that relaxed and alert time that is typical of meditation and dreaming. Very creative people may be able to do this intuitively, but it is important to realise that we were all born with creative minds.”

This is great. I can’t stand it when people maintain that “creativity”, especially in the field of design, is some special exclusive right of those in the mysterious turtle-necked/expensive-vintage-t-shirt caste, and any idea originated outside of “the design team” is automatically to be discounted.

To paraphrase Arthur C. Clarke again, creativity isn’t magic, it’s just indistinguishable sufficently-advanced thinking; and anyone can do that.

» Observer Magazine: “Here is the muse”

Filed under: Strategy and process
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Half aide-memoire, half-call-for-participation: things I have a burning need to write about/remove from my head by typing – but don’t have the time to address right now. Outboard-brain-dump begin.

• Product-placement in MMORPGS
  
• More on the UK TV industry, risk, reward and creativity.
  
• Steven Pinker, s0cials0phtware and ‘telempathics’
  
• Matt Webb’s wondering what comes after the oyayubizoku + txting: is it Picting?
  
• Urban space, le parkour, yamakasi and impending superhumanity.
  
• Creating webservices for boot-strapping an online comicsphere.
  
• Victor’s appeal for a digital design strategy plan from now till the Singularity.
  

Dump ends. Begin prioritisation. What first? If you get to any of them before me – let me know! la la la… i found my sooooldier girl... she’s so far away… she makes my head spin around… la la la… BZZZT. End of line.

Filed under: Misc.
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Meatball may be my new favourtie thing:

“Really, it’s dangerous to even cut the marble and say, “Here, this is what Meatball is about.” Having done that before, it was a mistake. Like any community, it defines itself by being itself. The direction is only an illusion of consent amongst its members.

That being said, there need to be defined goals to direct our efforts. MeatBall is about…

People and People and Computers and People.“

Meatball Wiki: MeatballMission

Filed under: Strategy and process
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Skimming the surface of social-software research and thinking, there is a lot made of the the things that we are ‘hard-wired’ to do – for instance the notion of the “law of 150”, and other anthropological rules of thumb. Steven PInker’s new book ‘The Blank Slate” delves into this area, with mixed results according to the Guardian review:

“The notion of the tabula rasa, ‘the blank slate’, is utterly wrong, he insists. Human nature is not ‘unbelievably malleable’, as anthropologist Margaret Mead once claimed, but contains a set of inherited neurological instructions that direct us to seek status, to fight and to make peace, to make weapons and tools, to acquire a spoken language, to gossip, to use common facial expressions, to admire generosity, to adorn our bodies and to worry about the weather.”

Going to see Pinker debate “Social Nature vs Cultural Nuture” with Ian McEwan tomorrow evening. Should be a blast – I’ll try and get some notes up here.

» Guardian Unlimited Books | Hoist by his own polemic

Filed under: Book reviews
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Film at 11.

“Mr Verwaayen believes it might not even be content that drives take-up of broadband.

“Communication is the first driver. A killer application is never a pre-cooked meal invented by someone else,” he said.”

What is it with broadband and cooking metaphors?

Filed under: Strategy and process
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Matt’s on a remote Scottish island, enjoying a holiday without his iBook. So how come he’s still posting morsels to his blog? As Tom points out, the timings of the posts is suspiciously non-human.

Webb’s talked about setting up BlogVatars before, and it looks like he’s gone and done it. Nice.

Filed under: Blog watch
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All words inadequate.

Phil. Mefi. Doc. Chomsky. Yahoo. Noah Johnson. Hitchens. A Welshman in NYC. Tom. Schama. Haughey.

Filed under: Misc.
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Dave(s) Gibbons and McKean, two pre-eminent UK artists hold forth on comics.com at the ICA in London. I just got my tickets.

“Dave Gibbons, artist creator of the seminal graphic novel Watchmen heads an illustrated conversation about this turning from old techniques. Does the computer bring with it a loss of soul, or actually a greater expansion of the medium? He will be joined by Dave McKean, acclaimed for his covers for the Sandman series, who uses painting, sculpture and the computer. Matt Smith is the editor of the UK?s Number 1 comic, 2000 AD; comic book artist Tom Gauld draws a weekly strip Move to the City in Time Out. Tonight?s Chair, Paul Gravett, has been graphic novel consultant for Penguin books, director of the Cartoon Arts Trust and co-publisher of Escape magazine.”

» Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA)- – The Mousetm vs The Mouse

Filed under: Visual and graphic design
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Towards a toolkit for smartmobs. Geoblogging/swarming/referring-mining and other little mindbombs in this post:

“A strange little idea I had on the way home today: Movable Type on a Sharp Zaurus equipped with wireless ethernet? Or maybe Bloxsom if/when it has static publishing? Just use rsync to publish whenever the thing finds itself on a network, wireless or otherwise. Maybe that happens while you’re out Warwalking – better yet, maybe that wireless network detector you cobbled together autoblogs what it finds while in your pocket.

But, beyond that, I wonder what else having your blog in your pocket might give you?”

» 0xDecafbad: Zauri, BlogWalking, Smart Mobs and other oddities [thanks, Marko!]

Filed under: Blog watch
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The design principles and evolutionary forces that begat the net, in 10 bullet points from Scott Bradner, as reported by Dan Gillmor:

“How did technologists, government officials and a host of other early players turn something with no obvious business model into a system that has become so intrinsic to the new century? A series of decisions proved critical—choices that helped turn data transport into a commodity business and put the power in users’ hands, not in the centralized telecommunications companies’ controlling grasp.”

These designed-in qualities that respond and unpack under environmental pressure are what Matt Webb calls “Secret Properties”. Learning to design them in is the challenge of social software.

» Siliconvalley.com: 10 choices that were critical to the Net’s success [via tomalak]

Filed under: Misc.
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From a brief IMconversation with Kai this morning regarding the noosphere:

“if I discovered we were in the Matrix I wouldn’t try to destroy it, I’d apply to become a designer.

Filed under: Society and culture
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I’d be very scared of Matt Webb. A long and thoughtful post about games and rulespaces at interconnected.org/home

Filed under: Society and culture
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Those marvellous people at BBC News have public-beta’d some RSS feeds for us all to enjoy:

BBC News Frontpage Index
http://www.bbc.co.uk/syndication/feeds/news/ukfs_news/front_page/rss091.xml
BBC News Technology Index
http://www.bbc.co.uk/syndication/feeds/news/ukfs_news/technology/rss091.xml
BBC News UK Index
http://www.bbc.co.uk/syndication/feeds/news/ukfs_news/uk/rss091.xml
BBC News World Index
http://www.bbc.co.uk/syndication/feeds/news/ukfs_news/world/rss091.xml

Filed under: Uncategorized
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Bill Thompson’s set something off again:

“I have to end with a whinge – as a technical pedant, I’m annoyed at the use of the word broadband for what is really just a moderately fast, always on connection, but I can live with it.

It does not mean fast, but when the marketing droids at the telecoms companies were looking for a word to describe alternatives to dialup connection, it was the unlucky victim and is now a ruined word.

I think this is a shame, and wish we had a better word for a fairly fast, always-on connection. Any suggestions? “

Here’s the thing. Bill’s “former audience” have come up with a great suggestion for rebranding broadband.

Scroll down the bottom of the story, and 8 posts there’s a suggestion by “Daniel, UK”. He suggests that we no longer refer to “broadband” but instead…

“Permanet”

I love that. It describes what’s best about having an always-on connection – being permanently connected to your friends, your community, your favourite sources of information and the potential of the internet; and swipes away the marketing-notion that it’s all about having fat-content pushed at you.

I’m not buying broadband – I want my Permanet!

Thank you “Daniel, UK” whoever you are!

» BBC News: Riding the internet’s fast lane

Filed under: Strategy and process
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DJ Adams posts a nice little statrer-kit of FOAF links. FOAF stands for ‘Friend Of A Friend’ and amongst other things, enables the encoding of social relationships on the web:

“Good grief. Anyway, this exploration is certainly opening more doors than it’s closing. Actually, that’s not quite right. It’s showing me new doors that I choose to go through. This one had FOAF written on it in shiny brass letters.”

» DJ’s Weblog: “From REST to URIs, the Semantic Web, RDF, and FOAF”

Filed under: Taxonomy and metainformation
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