Just a quick note to point out Adrian Miles recent quicktime experiments which really do appear to riff on the nature of photography and the possibilities of a meditative interaction . one clouds I think that they also point to the potential for a meditative visual dialogue/multilogue/collaboration that looks toward the kind of chance that a tag based slide show benefits from. The joy here is the possibility of setting very focussed points of coalescence and projection. Simple elegant and expressive these experiments plumb for unforeseen potencies or virtualities expressed through, propelled by, the communality of a word, form, or point of perception.

Click movie to play full comment This is a quick test to check the functioning of Josh Paul s video commenting implementation - it looks quite neat - I ll post some more ideas about it in the next couple of days - this is just to see if it works. You can submit a video comment here

Click movie to play full comment This is a quick test to check the functioning of Josh Paul s video commenting implementation - it looks quite neat - I ll post some more ideas about it in the next couple of days - this is just to see if it works. [...]

Survey.* Explanation writely word processing and collab Writely is a full featured word processor constructed as an online app. It also has a publishing feature and collaboration/editing facilties with version tracking. The collab features don t appear as feature rich as writeboard but the word processor which has many of the features we expect form a desktop word processor. All my comments re: 37Signals apps applies here: why move something that works perfectly well at the local into a proprietary online system. If you are working alone you write in word and upload for editing in a wiki with decent version control. If you are writing in collaboration write in a wiki installed on server you have some control over . Many of the sites that serve these apps suggest that the principle benefit of writing online is having the work accesible on numerous computers (as long as they are connected to the network) but given I write locally on a lap top and rarely use anything else I am not sure what I would achieve . Of course collab features are nice and that s why I can see the value of a wiki but not a proprietary system whose longevity is all but assured There is a tendency to call any web-based app web2.0 but if this shift is indeed a major upgrade then I hope it does more than strip back my desktop apps to make them fit as net based models and offer a little more in terms of networked porosity or other forms of generative potency than what we are seeing in the bulk of these sites. There are ways that we could radically shift the network dynamic of a writerly environment but writely doesn t achieve these Plenty of ideas about how we could develop a writerly collaboration app writely.com is ideed missing more than one letter if this is what you are after ..I ll write those ideas sometime but not under the guise of this survey. If you re a developer and interested then email me or comment

This raised a smile .. Drunken Rampage Thanks to jill/txt

a tag cloud of my interesting feeds This is a fun little engine that genrates tag clouds for a web page. I had no room in my side bar I could post a weekly cloud though. Of course they are tags parsed from the text of the RSS feeds that I add to it but still quite a different way of looking at the data aggregated from the collection of blogs I subscribe to. Had to remove the Engadget feed and the News feeds in order to get an interesting result - my firstcloud was full of mobile phone brands and violent crime this is a cloud of the more topical feeds.

http://cloudalicio.us/ A really interesting look at evolving folksonomies .charts del.icio.us tags associated with a URL over time. Its creator makes an interesting claim about tags that they mark the popular perception of a site and therefore are essentially anthropological interest. It occurs to me some way of organizing folksonomies might evolve from these collections of metadata about tags hmmmm tagging about tagging again?? Not quite .because here we have a method of abstraction capable of automagically culling metadata that has no reasonable incidence or reinforcement overtime. Really useful and shareable metadata is derived from the movements of bodies. Metadata needs to be elicited and involuntary (see: Massumi) in order for it to forge un-thought connections - to mine the virtual (the classic/simple example is an early one - theyrule.net - the complex more recent one is last.fm). The form of analysis that cloud* does takes the incidence rather than the oft confused and schizoid semantic of the tag itself. It treats the act of tagging as a reflex response not essentially a rational categorization so that only after time the tag can be understood as a normal response - or more essentially a normalized result Of course this requires some organized approach to folksonomies that is perspectival .by this I mean that tags require something like the dynamic provided by amazon.. People who tagged this cognition also tagged this cognition and this generative - from here we can truly begin to develop relevant and dynamic folksonomies .perspectival and incidental are the keywords for developers .anyone requiring an explanation or help developing such a system should email me.

Survey.* Explanation http://www.taggling.com Taggling appear to be a site that aggregates a tag search over delicious, technorati, flickr .. If anything this is a testament to the meta-noise created by the tagging phenomenon .I mean this is great for what it does - and an example of so-called web2.0 because it adds nothing ..nothing at all

Hilarious look at the tagging phenomenon. http://www.tagtagger.com/ TagTagger a Web2.0 Ajax and Ruby app for Tagging your tagged tags of pictures of cute sunflowers Looking for initial VC funding now for all you keen bubble investors .

Note on posts marked Survey.* 37 Signals http://www.37signals.com/ 37 Signals make proprietary versions of what are now very common wiki style tools. I am a bit miffed at what people actually get out of such applications perhaps that is because I don t write collaboratively and I m to disorganized to use To-Do lists and so on. I really don t under stand the benefit of outsourcing my word processing to the web when I have very stable and feature rich options locally that are portable. In terms of collaboration I think these tools are great but would much prefer and feel more confident with a non-proprietary system such as a wiki that I can host on my own server. Giving ultimate control and security over to a third party gives me the chills for a number of reasons. Not sure what the business model is here as I can t see pepole subscribing in great numbers when many of the features are offered free. Applications: Writeboard: http://www.writeboard.com A straightforward feature poor web-based collaborative writing tool. Very straight forward. Email to invite collabs and import/export. Nice interface. Nothing innovative in terms of networking and nothing added to wiki model other than nice clean interfaces and icons. Backpackit/Basecamp http://www.backpackit.com Web based organizational tools. Collab To Do Lists, Notes, Editing, Contacts. Not had a great lookbecasue as with Writeboard there is nothing terribly new achieved by moving this form of app online - indeed what is needed are offline and local clients to make sure these tools are useable when away from the network. Apples ical model seems pretty smart in terms of date sharing -ie. I can publish and download form the local app. Campfire: http://www.campfirenow.com/ A Message Board App integrates well with other apps above but once again the model is a little odd. I want local mirrors in dedicated apps so I can continue my discussion off-line. Nothing added to the chat/message board model really .in terms of functionality I can do everything here on a mailing list in a more flexible manner. Of course as with all these apps the knowledge produced in conversation and the process of editing is very well documented .but of course mailing lists and wikis have better integrated third party plug-ins have greater transparency and probably greater longevity and redundancy .. All of the above represent a move that seems destined to be followed by Google and Sun with more comprehensive desktop software remediated for the the online environment

Some of you early vloggers saw Tamlyn @ 3 months. Heres the update. Tamlyn rose @ 13 months. This is her version of a sing and dance.

This comes form Georgia tech via McGeeZone . There is a lot of talk in the blogosphere, as is always the way, with robots and perhaps new music tech, and technology generally, about what this robot is doing, what its capable of, and most important what its limitations are. There is an interesting hermeneutic involved in the reactive/analytic discourse that emerges in response to the emergence of new robotic programs. What is the robot programmed to achieve? If the program is conceived as humanoid in its program or even perhaps if the robot merely takes a humanoid or anthropomorphic form we immediately fall back into a form of reflexive, mirrored, and comparative analysis. Recall Bladerunner. We need to shore up the ontological anxiety provoked by the robots similitude by singling out the difference that it always fails to erase. The robot tells us who we are by always being what we are not - quite. Of course, so called new robotics tries to show us what we (or life, or intelligence) could be by showing us that simple rules and interactions beg/invoke anthropomorphizing interactions and identifications. That is to cite an increasingly common dictum (that I think has been popularized by Rodney Brooks) if it looks like intelligence it probably is intelligence (substitute life, mind, for intelligence if you like). Richard Doyle s terrific book entitled Wetwares has a great section on a kind of sexual selection occurring in the field of artificial intelligence in which attractive representations of artificial int. or alife prosper and proliferate. Obviously the inverse applies to robots or forms who threaten us either at a physical or ontological level. Remember Asimov s Laws of Robotics which exemplify a kind of codified selection. A series of laws that ensure certain possibilities for the development of robotic phyla are always excluded. Count the ways I love Bladerunner. Roy Batty is the perfect antithesis of a human robot. He is physically threatening because barring incept dates and the mortality they dictate he supercedes the human- he is so much more (more human) than Deckard. What this more actually is needs to be pulled apart- in what would be the inverse of the rhetorical ploy/tendency I referred to above. This more, or maybe, this excess is tied up with the immanence of Batty s mortality and the intensity of living , the desperate intensity of his becoming. It is tied up in the mode of relationality that his circumstance, that his body, dictates. Will write more (or post old stuff) on this sometime. Back to the improvising robot. I began by signaling that defensive maneuver that anxiously shores the human against the non-difference of the robot. Of course this is what has made the robot (and its rhetorical kin the vampire, and the werewolf) such a powerful rhetorical and epistemological vehicle; by gradually eroding the differences between human and machine via the construction of plausible similitude we reach the point at which either the difference that makes the difference is either isolated and revealed or is otherwise completely erased. The first outcome represents a kind of problematizing vehicle in that it defines the ongoing project for humanoid robotics - to whittle away at difference in order to more thoroughly define those differences and their antitheses. Anyway, to get back to the point at hand - while the robot jam in the video is really amazing I am more interested in what might be happening in terms of the recursive flow between the bot and the human. I find it really interesting that the ability to improvise is selected as a robotic program because I think that there is an interesting kind of rhetorical slight of hand being deployed here. The last frontier of robotics is to build a robot capable of manifesting what I will call a creative intelligence (we could also call it an active intelligence). This is to say that while robots and their software-kin (generative algorithms and the like) are capable of the achieving complex tasks sometimes at tremendous speeds (particularly the software-kin) they are yet to be endowed with what Vincent Descombes identifies as an instituting ability - that is the capability of formulating their own set of symbolic interactions beyond the dictates of their mechanics/biology/program. Note that a robot can be programmed to play in a manner that may indeed evoke indeterminate outcomes (potentialities) from the environment (where play is to move beyond a predetermined need and utility in terms of an interaction within its environment). What the current crop of robots and intelligent algorithms lack is the ability to recognize the potential manifest in this play - where potential is defined as unrealized possibility - what philosophically speaking we might identify, inline with Brian Massumi, as a subset of the virtual . To boil this down a little we might say that the human is capable of realizing the potency of the robot and the algorithm but the robot and the algorithm are incapable of realizing the potential of the human. This sounds like a form of humanism. In actuality it is the antithesis of a naïve humanism because it posits a human intelligence based in the tendency for incorporation of exterior contingency as technical possibility (see Hayles for an interesting cross-link on incorporation/inscription that really resonates with Clarks world as its own best model and Descombes instituting ability ). The human is capable of translating what is a rather unintelligent (and consequently beyond intent/determination) poking and prodding of both body and ecology in the service of manifesting potential previously unrealized as technical possibility. A creative intelligence is one capable of realizing the yet-to-be determined potency of the ecology, and the body s interactions as an element of that ecology, as technical possibility and consequently as an intentional relation - as a newly instituted symbolic relation. This is a really important point and one that seems largely ignored perhaps in part because of the utilitarian nature of robotics research and engineering and science disciplines - but that is another point entirely. The example of the improvising robot is interesting because true improvisation must necessarily entail an ongoing evolution of form in the realization of the potential in a playful exterior. An improvising robot must be capable of realizing the expressive potential of an external rhythm and be able to respond with a variation on that potency. It must be capable of creating a difference that makes a difference. Of course the robot here doesn t realize anything- it simply recognizes (a predetermined set of perceptual possibilities) and responds accordingly. The slight of hand that I conjectured is in the fact that the human sits there and plays with the robot. In the feedback loop constructed here it is of course the human that realizes the potency of the robots expression and thus responds in variation. The variation allows the response of the robot to vary its programmed reaction and the result is a form of improvization. What we might recognize here is an extension of the recursive duration identified by Massumi in his Parables for the Virtual . In effect, and all that is claimed by its creators, is that the robot acts as a form of instrument capable of realizing new expressive potential (just as any other instrument does) in the body of the musician. On one site which posts this video a comment asked what would happen if we had two robots interacting with each other. I would conjecture that the ensuing form would probably end up something a kin to a cycle of increasingly interjected triplets that reach saturation before dropping back to a bare beat - more to the point they would perform the same improvisation each time or each set of times they performed. What would we need to ensure an truly improvising robot? We would need an instituting ability - the ability to realize an expressive potency (a musicality) in the body of the robot. The improvising robot must be able to incorporate a rhythmic and melodic semiotic based on their relation to the ecology - to realize the musicality in their clockwork hearts, the falling energy of a waning battery, the hiss and whir of their servos, and the clunk of sizzle of their bodies colliding. For now it seems the improvising robot will need us to fulfill that end of the improvisational bargain .

Snow in Blackheath 22nd June 2005 - It snowed in Blackheath for a couple of hours - snow is rare for us so its always exciting. Deb has only seen snow falling twice (3.5 meg).

Our Wedding Click above to open the video (2.2 meg). On February 26th Deb and I finally got married. It was a terrific day. We had a naming ceremony for Tamlyn and our closest freinds were there to help us celebrate our new family. Thanks to everyone who helped make the day the second happiest day of our lives.

Tamlyn Rose Wall-Smith @ 3 Months

Where do memories lie?