There is a great article in this Sunday's Observer by John Naughton entitled 'The internet: Everything you ever need to know'. It gives 9 points of understanding that really get to the meat of understanding the Internet without getting overly technical. There is also a strong cultural/historic rooting to the piece that gives good context. I do recommend reading the whole article, but I also wish to comment on one point he makes about ecology:

I'm always interested in the ideas of technologies that are inspired by nature - and not just one feature or item, but by technologies that take on ecological principles to better interact with their environment and look to sustainability. With that in mind, I was reading about some new technologies around the corner... (all from Economist issue June 12th-18th 2010)

The huge news of the creation of the world's first truly artificial life-form is currently creating lots of news and comment - as you might expect:

Hi - the content for this talk has move to my now blog.  Click here or on the link below to see it.  Thanks.

http://agreatbecoming.wordpress.com/2010/05/01/talk-notes-technology-and-evolution/

Thanks! You can follow my research via Twitter (@arclightfire) 

I am excited to read about the forthcoming (fall 2010) book from Finish media theorist Jussi Parikka, Insect Media: An Archaeology of Animals and Technology. Here's the info that he posted on his blog about the book:

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.

We are used to seeing family trees in biology.  For example this is the human family tree:

I am currently reading Digital Biology by Peter J Bentley.

Here's a flavour of it..  This is how he justifies the application of evolution to areas outside its traditional biological role;

Listened to a very interesting talk by Ray Kurzweil where has says that biology is fundamentally an information process.

This is an interesting interview with Niles Eldredge of the City University of New York.  It's a very good account of looking at both the parallels and the differences between biological evolution and the idea of cultural and/or technological evolution.  First off he takes on the issue that in biological evolution we have DNA linking and encoding the information from one generation to the next: