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:

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:

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...

One of the authors of the p2p paper I looked at in my last posting emailed me with an update of thier work worth sharing with you..

P2P algorithms can offer robustness and communication efficiency over more centralised GRID methods. So authors compared to p2p algorithms performance searching in large-scale and unreliable networks.

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

I've been made aware of a new torrent indexing website, TorrentFactory.org - it's interesting as a development as it seems clear that the PirateBay is under severe threat this year - so the question arises; what will replace it?  I don't mean this question in the sense of what will replace it as the the bogey-man of copyright, I mean the question more in a technological sense; where next for torrent indexing.  I mean this beca

The blog TorrentFreak has got a few interesting stories up both looking back at the last decade and also forward into 2010.  A couple of things caught my eye...

One was the article talking about ways that users in France may use to avoid the new '3 strikes' law;

I'm speaking at an event next week at the PM Studio in Bristol on Wed 16th at 4pm and the event is free!

Software Paleontology - Tomas Rawlings (Fluffy Logic & DCRC PhD Student)
Tomas is on a GWR PhD scholarship applying evolutionary theory to peer to peer networks. As part of this research Tomas has developed a unique methodology of ‘software paleontology’ comparing the change logs of P2P software versions to the fossil records of  biological evolution.