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:

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

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

There is an interesting post on the blog Why Evolution in True - interesting because it points to an interesting idea for those of us looking to biology for tools in other realms (such as media in my case aka media ecology).  First here is a quote from the post;

OK, so a couple of the concepts that are key to understanding - and that came up in a cross-faculty discussion at UWE t'other day - was the idea of where you can draw the line between the human and the technological.

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:

There is an interesting article in the current issue of New Scientist, an essay by W.Brian Arthur on his theory of technological evolution;