Internet Technologies

Copenhagen.


The post-lunch session at COST298 kicks off with Lilia Raycheva, who notes that TV is still the most significant source of nformation in European households; they view an average of 3 hours per day, and by 2010 there will be some 120 HDTV channels. Analogue switchoff is supposed to be complete by 2012, but a number of European countries are lagging behind and may not meet that deadline. There is also a question whether current content regulations (diversity, local programming, etc.) will be able to be sustained in the new DTV environment.

Copenhagen.


And this pre-lunch session here at COST298 ends with Chantal de Gournay and Frank Thomas, who approach digital cities from a different perspective. Amongst the key issues for them are how to combine real, virtual, and social spaces, how to address local and global identities,communities, and neighbourhoods, and how to understand different modes of participation in the digital city.

Chantal highlights the possibility for a fifth screen (after TV, PC, videogames, and mobile phones) as urban spaces become augmented realities through the introduction of digital screens that allow both more traditional forms of broadcasting and new forms of 'egocasting', perhaps in response to people in the vicinity. This ubiquitous paradigm creates the 'seamless city', in which real and virtual life merge and different times and spaces blend into one. Potentially, in such spaces, everywhere is nowhere, and there is no sense of the here and now.

Copenhagen.


The first main session at the COST298 conference is on interdisciplinary design, and begins with a presentation by James Stewart and Laurence Claeys. They ask how speculative research for innovation can be conducted within interdisciplinary frameworks. Problem here include that different disciplines work within very different time scales (e.g. rapid prototyping vs. long-term observation of users), that they use different mental models, and that disciplines tend to under-value one another and misuse one another's research approaches.

Copenhagen.


Following the next09 conference last week, I've now made my way to Copenhagen, to attend the COST298 conference with the somewhat unwieldy title "The Good, the Bad, and the Challenging" - don't hold that against it, though: the actual theme of the conference (and of the COST298 EU research programme) is participation in the broadband society, so it should be interesting. (The two-volume proceedings alone are going to seriously push my luggage weight over the edge on the flight back.) Also, erm, interesting is the choice of location, at Aalborg University's campus in Ballerup on the outskirts of Copenhagen, almost an hour's metro ride out of town - I must say I much preferred the IT University campus, just cross from the city centre, where we held the AoIR conference last year.

Hamburg.


The next presentation here at next09 is by Rafi Haladjian from Violet, a company founded in 2003 in Paris. He says that the new frontier for future developments is no longer cyberspace, but meatspace - the physical world. There is a life after the PC...

But how do we get there? Violet's first step was to create the world's first Internet-connected, wi-fi, toy rabbit (think robotic, not fluffy). This also demonstrated that everything is now possible, no matter how absurd - if you can network rabbits, you can connect anything. In effect, the rabbit blinks, moves, speaks, reads, sings, hears and 'smells' (using RFID); it is an ambient information device which acts as a spontaneous information provider for short 'goot to know', real-time, information and snack media, and as a multi-expression messenger which can be controlled over the Internet.

Hamburg.


Day one at next09 ends with a humorous review of tweets on Twitter, by the team from TwitKrit, a German blog offering 'literary criticism' of Twitter posts. Those of you who are so inclined will know how to find #next09 comments on Twitter - or otherwise, pop in to the next09 community at SixGroups.

(Speaking seriously for a moment, though - a conference presentation compiled from random Twitter users' outstanding tweets raises some very interesting questions about the boundaries between public and private. Discuss.)

Hamburg.


The final keynote on this first day of next09 is by Matthias Schrader of next09 conference organisers Sinnerschrader, who brings us back to the conference theme 'share economy'. What can we share, what do we want to share, what do we get out of sharing?

In the share economy, what we share are in the first place the tools we use; using (physical, mechanical) tools, of course, has long been seen as a uniquely human trait (although that belief has now been shown to be mistaken - other animals use tools, too). Perhaps the next step from here is the belief that only humans use tools to create other tools - that is, that only humans innovate by combining small, modular, commodity tools into more complex, composite, cutting-edge 'meta-tools'.

Athens.


The final full session here at WebSci '09 is on (Greek) politics online, so of course I'm here. It's another session with live interpretation from Greek to English - hopefully she's done chewing gum now! We start with G. Alexias, who introduces us to the performance of Greek political parties online (and he does so in English, actually). Does the online presence of Greek political actors lead to the formation of online political communities? His study examined this in the wake of the 2004 parliamentary elections, and performed both a quantitative analysis of social software features of these sites and a qualitative analysis of the sites' characteristics.

Athens.


The cultural convergence session at WebSci '09 continues with a panel composed of Greek musicians, actors, and directors. Electronic musician Konstantinos Bita, who began his work on Ataris and Amigas, reflects on his introduction to digital technology, and the gradually growing importance of electronic networks - using modems at first, and then connecting more directly to the Internet. In the early days, access was often free, but then commercial interests began to build their walled gardens with the aim to enrich themselves; with Web 2.0, Konstantinos believes, a further change will occur which further isolates people and locks them into online pursuits without providing real sociality.

Athens.


The second and last day of WebSci '09 starts with a session on social networking, although the first paper in this session, by Yorgos Amanatidis, has the somewhat technical title "Kernels for Complex Networks" - we'll see what that's all about... Visual network graph models, apparently, for graphs which represent relational data in an abstract way. Such graophs can be used in the analysis, simulation, and prediction of network topologies, focussing especially on aspects like scaling, clustering, and node centrality.

What can be observed in real networks is the degree distribution: as the Web grows, the average degree is constant, but there is huge variance and no concentration around the average; indeed, we see the small world phenomenon which produces networks with small diameter and strong clustering tendencies (the friend of my friend is likely also to be my friend). Kleinberg, for example, modelled the fact that in small world networks there are not only short paths between nodes, but that these nodes can find such paths effectively using local information.