There is an interesting discussion going on about how the flow of data moving around the internet gives it a 'shape' and what that shape means. You can see this discussion written up in an interesting article in the New York Times; 'Scientists Strive to Map the Shape-Shifting Net'. So what is mean by the 'shape' of the Internet?

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;

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;

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

Defining what a network is, is a huge topic.  It is one I engage with to some extent in my research and you can boil a network down to two components - links and nodes.  The beginnings and ends of the network is a more complex matter.  For example with the Internet, it is less one big network and more a series of networks united by common protocols.  (There is a good discussion of mapping networks using Actor-Network Theory in chapter 4 of Murdoch's book Post-Structuralist Geography.  But networks ar

Am at the eComm and have just given the planned talk.  Seemed to go well - my notes are here.  There is one blog post up about the talk already (but it is in Dutch) on the site dutchcowgirls.net which is cool.  Also there is a Google Wave for the whole event, including one for my talk here.  There are also