I'm happy to say that I am going to be talking at the 2010 Virt3c@Hull, at Hull University.  Keynote speakers include; Gabriella Coleman on 'Cabals, Crisis, and Conflict on the Virtual Frontier' (Friday) and Mathieu O’Neil on 'Theory and Practice of Online Research: Power, Expertise, Critique' (Sat).  My talk is part of the session entitled 'Conflicts in Open & Free Software Communities' on Sat 20th March, 12.00- 1.45:

There is an old (on the Internet) saying; the web interprets censorship as damage and simply routes round. This is a key point as the internet was designed to route around the damages caused by a nuclear strike - so routing around censorship is child's play. While the technical routing around damage/censorship is one thing, how people respond is not dissimilar;

This is an interesting article worth a read. One of the people behind The Pirate Bay is trying to apply the same ideas they used regarding sharing content to the income side of distribution:

A couple of very interesting research papers that I came across recently...both are looking at cross sections of complex data systems and how they interact and operate. One of these is old (in technology terms), from 1998 and describes the emergence of Google;

I read this story and was a little baffled by it's premiss. I think is misreads the situation to suggest a problem for Google that simply does not exist;

Anyone who's used Twitter much will have noticed the frequent service outages - aka Whale Fail - after the image us users see then this happens. Given Twitter's enormous growth of the past few years (sometimes exceeding 1000%!) then the demands on it's central servers must be huge. Which is where p2p technology could help - as it scales with demand because as more people join they also bring their capacity too;

I have written a guest post on the p2p foundation blog...

I've just been passed a couple of links to the code-swarm system. It's a method a visualising the development process of a software project – and it's pretty amazing looking! What this system does is use the commit process (aka check-in) of software development to track the additions to a software project. This is where a developer takes a copy from the central control one of the source files and adds to it, then places it back into the repository.

There is a considerable amount of internal competition in biology. By this I mean that internal to an organism, it can compete within its self to produce the best 'goods'. So for example some plants will abort the growth of fruit where it does not have enough seeds. One could see this as a form of internal-competition between possible fruits so that only the fittest has the resources to grow it to full term, is used.

When it is a real network...I have been using Actor Network Theory (aka ANT, not to be confused with ANTS, the very interesting p2p project) in my research (I'd recommend this and this if you are interested) and yet the 'networks' of ANT are not necessarily networks at all, but are networks in the other sense of the wo