"Here there are feedback mechanisms that produce more affect and pleasure – for instance the feedback involved in tuning a musical instrument, sound system or a radio. Gardening also seems to be a rich area for examination – where there is frequent work, but the sensual and systemic rewards are tangible." Beautiful work, as ever: I really liked the rewards-for-effort they point out.

"I wanted to talk about the Occupy $CITY movement here (in fact, that’s where this post started); a protest movement that is not about the event, or the movement through the city, or even the disruption per se. It is protest as part of the fabric of the city; a constant questioning and reassessment of a conversation with both the fabric of the city physically, economically and politically; taking the concept of Wall St and Main St and making it suddenly concrete, forcing a conversation to take place."

"On my way home from FOO I sat staring out the car window, all of these impressions, ideas, and seeming contradictions bouncing around in my head. And then something occurred to me. O’Reilly’s human-centered approach is still a kind of systems thinking. O’Reilly is still building a model of what the geek world is working on. They’re just doing it through the social relationships that their employees form with other geeks. The “data” they gather is stored in their employees heads and hearts and in those of the wider community of geeks they bring to events like FOO. Instead of trying to live in the model, O’Reilly tries to live in the community."

"Twenty-one years later, an anonymous software engineer pulled together various digital artifacts to create a multiplayer game for his son.

Tonight, while playing that game, I ran into my 15-year-old self."

What magic smells like.

"if the Choose Your Own Adventure books are just another Finite State Machine, it should be possible to use some of the same techniques to examine their structure." And so begins a lovely, lovely post on data visualisation, and what visualisation can tell us about the changing editorial strategy of CYOA books. Be sure to check out the "animations" at the top of the page. It's all very beautiful.

"...halfway through the film, the Ghostbusters realize that NYNEX isn't a phone system at all: it's the embedded nervous system of an angel – a fallen angel – and all those phone calls and dial-up modems in college dorm rooms and public pay phones are actually connected into the fiber-optic anatomy of a vast, ethereal organism that preceded the architectural build-up of Manhattan. Manhattan came afterwards, that is: NYNEX was here first." There is no way this wouldn't be awesome. And: a great write-up from Geoff.

"A summary of what those of us who are thinking, writing and speaking about networked urbanism seem to be seeing: fourteen essential transformations that, between them, constitute a rough map of the terrain to be discovered."

"The question of responsibility and accountability gets sticky here - especially if we consider that technologies are too often viewed as neutral tools or isolated artefacts. If we draw out these flows, these networks, these interconnections, we find ourselves faced with the possibility of being connected to people/objects/places/activites/ideas that we may never see. And with intimacy always comes risk."

Some interesting visualisations of the way forum threads on dpreview - which has nested threads in posts - grow and progress. Interesting for the patterns it throws up, and somewhat useful, if only for rough, high-level analysis.

Absolutely excellent. A little depressed but also pleased at the overlap with my NLGD talk. Here's hoping I can munge together something good. And give credit where credit is due.

"...the same topic kept coming up, over and over... you can think of it as an amalgamation of crowd theory, human terrain mapping, and social simulation. It is the science of groups; it is a new kind of quantitative political science."

"From where I stand, the only sane response is to keep our conceptions of friendship and affinity from being polluted by technical metaphors and constraints to begin with." Superb post by Adam Greenfield. Makes me question a lot of my recent design.

My research is concerned with algorithms that exploit the combinatorial structure of networks and information.

Ooh. Ooh, ooh, ooh. Large scale persistent fictions? Distributed serial narrative? Awesome