Another ‘note to self’ tech post — have been trying to get the Windows build of Emacs to use the cygwin bash shell for a while. The final solution seems to be setup-cygwin.el — also needs cygwin-mount.

I’ve been working on some SNA code — there seem to be some bugs in the SearchApiQuery.pm module of the WebService::Technorati perl modules. Haven’t checked the others — the Cosmos module seesm to work OK, but I’ve had to hack SearchApiQuery.pm to get it work properly. Replace the one in the distribution with this one.

For starters, drop the idea of a single rigid taxonomy — there are too many ways through, even assuming that canonical representations are possible. So we’re probably looking at something at least personal, possibly community-based. Folksonomic tagging would be a start, but how to navigate in a neatly glanceable fashion?

I’m thinking of building a personalised acoustic surface, where patches of looped sound are snippets representing genres and subgenres, and which morph into one another ‘at the edges’ so you end up with a navigable 2- or 3-space which is a musical patchwork. ‘Drill down’ into any patch and explore the subgenres under it. Everyone (or their software) could generate their own personalised surface — which would keep things small enough to be navigable — from a CDDB-style online database of user-contributed, tagged patches. Easy to make, with a few rules and some code to allow individual people and their software to stitch them together seamlessly into their own personalised surface. And would appeal to long-tail passion: people who care about genres would be motivated to have them well-represented by nice patches…

So. Sometime soon, broadbandwidth and QoS sufficient to stream 16/44k1 audio reliably, longhaul. And at some point a bit later, maybe, OMD aggregators which will be able to provide access to most of everything that way.

On my mind at the moment is the question: how to navigate the whole of music space, in a glanceable fashion: minus clunky jogwheels and textual taxonomies. I’m thinking, as rules of the game, to allow only a 5.1 surroundfield and a remote useable one-handed, without any interactivity built into the remote itself — effectively a system which could be used in the dark, or without a screen visible. How to make such a thing that would, with a ‘reasonable’ amount of time/effort spent on interaction, get to the specific tracks anyone wanted, with the whole of world music as the source? It feels possible. More soon.

Yesterday, we took some time out for a deferred Valentine’s Day Out: Lunch at the Seven Stars — a recent discovery and now one of our favourite London pubs: lovely atmosphere, well-kept Adnams on tap and decent wine, friendly staff, enormous & very serious food, and Tom Paine the pub cat, who yesterday was looking fierce in a ruff collar, and then round the corner for a pilgrimage to the Hunterian Museum, which has to be experienced, if only for the Evelyn Tables:

The oldest surviving anatomical preparations in Europe, which were bought in 1646 by the diarist John Evelyn. They consist of full-size dissections of the nerves, arteries and veins of the human body pasted on to wooden boards.

Amazing.

[We've been kicking this around for a while -- interested to see what you all think.]

In any corporate workgroup environment — and even more so in asynchronous, loosely coupled networks of workgroups, it’s a nightmare trying to maintain oversight of project-related workflow. Attempts at solution generally try to impose a systems structure which straightjackets process, or which stamps out nuance and ingenuity.

At the worst — and all too often — this can result in what we call a diorama intranet: the metaphor relating to those awful museum displays of ‘life on the veldt’, wherein, to illustrate the lives of wild creatures, those same creatures are hunted down, shot, stuffed, and arranged, thousands of miles from their homes, into ‘lifelike’ tableaux. Documents in a diorama intranet have similarly been hunted down in the working environment where they are part of a dynamic process, tagged, bagged, and placed carefully on view in some other place where it’s an effort to access them, and where they are immediately out of context, out of date, and generally meaningless.

In the real world, we all know documents have legs — the ‘current final final approved’ version of the pitch might well be on someone’s desktop, rather than on the server ‘where it should be’. The challenge is in tracking the little devils down to whatever digital corner they’re hiding in, digging them out, and then tagging them so they can go back out into the wild and get on with their digital lives — being modified, shared, presented — while still being trackable and accessible by others when needed.

We’re believers in the small pieces, loosely joined approach — if we acknowledge that documents are lively members of a dynamic ecosystem, that they have legs, and that they’re hard to herd, then logically we should be more interested in having a way to grab hold of their tails when we need to know what’s going on, than in stuffing them and mounting them in the glass display case of some convoluted intranet.

Lately, we’ve been playing with simple ways of doing just that — and the prototype we’ve got couldn’t be more simple — implementing a simple trackback in MS Office documents via an open source XML-RPC stack, some VBA code, and using a WordPress-based blog as the central tracking mechanism, which gives us for free all manner of slicing, dicing and aggregation goodness on the reporting side.

Currently, it works like this: when users create a document, they are prompted to fill in as much metadata as possible — client, project, author, and so on. Then at each save- or close-point, the save dialogue box includes the option of ‘reporting back’ the document status to the central blog — where status can be as simple as ‘change’/'milestone’/’signed off’ — with the last adding a write lock so the document can’t be changed further. The data sent back to the blog can be as simple as the document status, or as in-depth as the entire document contents. At first check-in, each document is assigned a unique code and an individual post on the blog. This makes it very easy for glanceable updates on project status, for example. Crucially, it also informs without interrupting workflow, and keeps people in the knowledge loop — if someone wants the actual document, it’s not sitting stale and stuffed in an intranet: they have to contact the last modifier themselves, which potentially gives them access to other tacit knowledge, or at least initiates a conversation. Better all round.

Of course there are flaws in this — what of modifications done offline? What of documents which get deleted? And so on. We’re working on that. At the moment, we’re more interested in the feeling of what happens working like this, as opposed to the central command-and-control of rigid workflow systems and/or diorama intranets. More on this soon.

Recently won a Tag McLaren AV32R on eBay. Admittedly there’s very little official technical support for these now, and given that mine is the single processor model, there aren’t really a whole lot of upgrade options, even should I find someone to install them for me. And the VFD display, being a VFD display, is a bit tired. But it’s all about the sound, and the sound is excellent.

I’ve been most surprised to find that I’m actually using their proprietary DSP when listening to music, as most DSP programs for spatialising stereo just turn the music to mush. The AV32’s gets the balance just about right — using the centre channel to firm up the soundstage, while adding just a whisper of depth from the surrounds. Originally I’d intended to just use the AV32 for multichannel content, and continue as before, feeding my music direct over balanced XLR from my music player to the Bryston. At the moment I’m routing through the Meridian 518 into the AV32 — the sound is just too much fun. Maybe I’ll get bored of it. Doesn’t matter. Cat Power’s The Greatest is luminous, with real space around the rhythm section. And that’s what it’s about.

In the roar of Spring, transmutations… [Charles Olson]

We could be wrong (wouldn’t be the first time!), but after much coffee, we think we’ve glimpsed the mechanism via which the new dotcoms plan to rule the world. To work towards our conjecture, we need to start with a little network theory and a spangle of geometry.

Nothing too painful, we promise.

Step by step, then:

1. The Web is not the Internet
   The Web is one thing built using the Internet. Post 1994, and pre-prevasive broadband, the Web was the set of protocols through which most people have experienced internetworking. But it’s just one kind of experience possible through internetworked media — chances are your cable TV is delivered over what is effectively an Internet spur run by your provider, and that doesn’t involve the Web at all. That’s important: our final conjecture applies to any media which can be distributed digitally.
2. Networks (Can) Grow Exponentially
   Here in the UK it’s almost Spring — take a look at anything deciduous outside your window and examine the structure of branches — root to trunk to branch to twig: one trunk and a few birfurcating levels of branching and there’s room, come Spring, for those twigs, together, to support thousands, tens of thousands of leaves, which fill space and present an enormous surface area to suck up light and nutrients. Hold that image: a seemingly inert structure of branches suddenly bursting with ways to capture energy.
3. The Surface of a Network Can Fill a Hyperbolic Plane
   Imagine trying to draw the Internet on paper. A few branches out from wherever you start, there are simply too many sub-branchings to fit on the paper — networks (can) grow faster than the surface available on a flat sheet of paper grows.One way to represent networks has been to project them not onto a flat sheet of paper, but onto a hyperbolic plane — a ‘Non-Eucledian‘ geometry in which space expands the further you move out across it, unlike the flat (Eucledian) space we’re used to. There’s a lovely introduction to hyperbolic planes — and some crocheted models, over at Cabinet magazine, but for now, imagine:

   One way of understanding it is that it’s the geometric opposite of the sphere. On a sphere, the surface curves in on itself and is closed. A hyperbolic plane is a surface on which the space curves away from itself at every point.

   So, on a hyperbolic plane, which expands exponentially out from wherever you start, there’s exponentially more space to draw the roots and leaves of a fast-branching network, like the Internet.

   Why does this matter — the Internet is virtual: it’s a configuration of things, not a space-occupying thing in itself, right? Surely the space-filling challenges of drawing it are only challenges for anyone stupid or bored enough to try? The Internet itself doesn’t take up any space!

   Wrong. It matters. Look out that window again — think of naked branches and twigs as you see them now, in Winter, as the Internet. What matters is that, come Spring, buds burst with life, and the whole space defined by the network of branches and twigs is suddenly green with purpose: to absorb energy. The potential inherent in the structure of the network (branches) bursts into exponentially space-filling reality when the nodes (leaves) suddenly occupy real space to a real purpose.

4. CONJECTURE: Dotcom 2.0 Makes For A Hyperbolic Media Surface
   See where we’re going? We believe that the Dotcom 2.0 pioneers have seen the (virtual, spaceless, inert) structure of the Internet, which has grown over the past decade through the success of the Web, as the dormant, Winter version of a hyperbolic media surface, which, come some dawn, will burst into Spring. And when it does, the leaves of media sprouting from the lifeless branches of the virtual network will fill a very particular space — that of our attention, via the very real, space filling agency of computer, TV, mobile phone screens, ePaper, video games: the full range of interfaces for digital content.
5. If the Conjecture is True, Traditional [Flat] Media is Doomed
   How does that work? As we’ve pointed out before, the generous gifting of cool tools to the community by Google, Flickr and the like generally provide for the originators of the tools to claim a little space for media on any resulting innovations. Think of each of these tiny presences, each tiny media presence — be they used for ads, video, whatever — as taking up an incremental attentional space. Like a leaf, these individual spaces might seem insignificant — but in totality constitute a vast new, hyperbolic media surface which will eclipse the reach of any traditional flat media.

So how has this escaped notice? We think first, because the Dotcom 2.0 Spring is as yet still a potentiality, though close to fruition. Second, to learn a little from the geometers: locally, a hyperbolic plane appears flat. From any particular perspective — that of TV, the blogosphere, whatever — the nascent new media surface appears to be an incremental threat: a PVR technology here, a streaming Video-on-Demand service there. It only when you look at the shape of the new media threat that the sheer audacious scale of what Dotcom 2.0 may do to media is apparent. It’s not an order-of-magnitude bigger in potentiality than traditional media, its an order of scale: exponential rather than linear growth.

Actually, we didn’t need to bring in the bit about hyperbolic space at all — the space-filling should be terrifying in itself to anyone used to buying attention programme-by-programme, or channel-by-channel. But the idea of this strategy requiring space which itself has to grow to accomodate the channel is an easy way to visualise the magnitude of the threat!

[See also the stuff we've been writing at BigShinyThing recently... ]