{ 2003.04.24 } Whoa. Alan Kay does what looks roughly like a Powerpoint presentation about the history of computing (the coolness leaks through once, when he authors a little in the middle, but not much). Half-way through, they begin to demonstrate Open Croquet, a 3d collaborative environment on two screens. Screen left is travelling around a tabletop world, looking in portals to different 3d scapes. Pretty cool. Then Kay, on the right screen, zooms out: the entire presentation has been in a scape, a window in this collaborative environment. !

{ } At the end of the first day of sessions, my Emerging Tech Conference 2003 notes (see also, my 2002 notes and roundup). The sound of keyboards in sessions is noticably louder than last year - more people typing - and it sounds like a summer rainfall, or a marina. But just the same is the constant darting, furtive glancing at your chest. Not tits, conference badge.

{ } Kottke's ultimate Emerging Tech Conference 2003 coverage. Excellent.

{ 04.22 } Two things.

• I'll be arriving at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference later this afternoon.
• The absolute utter utter best thing about San Francisco, we saw even before passport control. The corridor walls at San Francisco airport, from the arrival gate to immigration, are decorated with god damn Penrose Tiles. Alas I have no photographs. But shit that's cool.

(See also: Previous post about Penrose Tiles.)

{ } Small world systems and power laws. This paper reviews some early papers about "small worlds" -- what they are, and how they arise. Social networks are often small worlds: you can connect yourself to any other person through a surprisingly small number of steps, given you don't already know everyone! Also explored is how to search such a network if you only have local knowledge: ie, who you are connected to by the first or second degree and nothing else.

{ } Short (good!) Introduction to Social Network Analysis, covering the various metrics used to talk about people in networks, and the network itself: degrees; betweenness; closeness; boundary spanners; peripheral players; network centralisation.

{ 04.21 } Recently I read somewhere, I'm not sure where but that's not important, about the early vocoders, and about how they would not record the voice, but write out symbols that represented the phonemes of the speech. So playing back the symbols would not be the voice, but be recognisable. A stream of modulated sound, yet speech.

Then I was asleep in the park a couple of days ago (and got sunburned, yes, enough of that) and I dreamed of social networks but from the inside/ locally/ embedded in the network, with the perspective of a node: what would my environment look like? I saw a kind of coloured globe, the surface of which represented my surroundings.

The next day, after a few drinks, I saw that social networks - nodes and arcs - were a lossy compression of how people actually formed networks: that groups, interactions, etc were multileaved; that the data recorded was just the stuff most easily recorded, and that what was really important was how people move and think together [like flurries of snowflakes]. But so much is obvious.

In the same bar, the phonemes being captured by the vocoder and the social features of the rhizome became similar. Institial agents could filter my personal input/output streams and bind to certain patterns of interaction; customised for important structures (loosely bound stable groups; couples; tightly bound short-lived groups; adversaries) my social life could be constructed as a series of symbols. A recombinant grammar that would still lose the truthly complexity of my actual life, but would replace it with a map/ a toy social life, one that could be analysed.

[The local life is all that matters. Why should I care about conversations three degrees away from me? If I want information, timely or otherwise, I'm not interested in personalities (although I am interested in what they would give me: reputation, etc); if I want conversation I want it to be local, and then I won't demand the high correspondance to my interests. I'll pursue serendipity.]

In my head: a brightly coloured sphere, its surface a symbolic map reflecting the important features of the social landscape in which I live, cartographically captured from the inside; like a large room with a sphere at the middle, where you can't tell whether it's the sphere that is a mirror reflecting the room about it, or lit from the inside, projecting its surface pattern all around.

{ } A chat with the man behind mobile phones: "Something that would represent an individual so you could assign a number not to a place, not to a desk, not to a home but to a person".