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:

The OKCon 2010 has come and gone - it was a great event and I really enjoyed attending and talking at it. The organisers have posted a resource page with links to presentations, images and more: http://www.okfn.org/okcon/2010/after

. So this is me (below) talking at the event...

I was happy to discover that this blog has a Technorati Authority of 401! As the score runs from 1 (lowest) to 1000 (highest), I am quite pleased with that. So what is this Authority?

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

There is another story in the media about the ongoing debate about what (if anything) the government should be doing in response to online piracy;

A rift has opened between music's creators and its record labels, with a broad alliance of musicians, songwriters and producers fiercely criticising the business secretary Lord Mandelson's plans to cut off the broadband connections of internet users who illegally download music.

The CatBot project has two strands of activity - the practical development and the theory.  Both matter, but the theory is the one that needs lots of work for my PhD... One of the things that has been important to my work is framing paradigm shifts.  What I mean by this is, that to understand what is happening around us, we need to take a step back from how we are used to seeing things and reconsider.  For example;