"I think that the physical and the digital are inseparable in culture in the same way that waves and particles are inseparable in light." This is great, and reminds me how Berger-esque some of James' art-writing is getting.

"The whisky social network". Ooh. Has potential, at least.

"I'm sorry to say that Demiforce is canceling plans for Onyx." This is a real shame, because I was somewhat excited that Demiforce wasn't just ramping up for "another game", and was instead building something that might benefit the platform. As it is: oh well. Those Apple T&Cs are killer, it seems.

"One Amish-man told me that the problem with phones, pagers, and PDAs (yes he knew about them) was that "you got messages rather than conversations." That's about as an accurate summation of our times as any." A wonderful quotation in the midst of this dense, fascinating article.

"[The modern supervillain's] hidden fortress is in the network, represented only by a briefcase, or perhaps even just a mobile phone.... for a “4th generation warfare” supervillain there aren’t even objects for the production designer to create and imbue with personality. The effects and the consequences can be illustrated by the storytelling, but the network and the intent can’t be foreshadowed by environments and objects in the impressionist way that Adam employed to support character and storytelling." The network as fortress and ideology all at once.

"Content is an expensive, messy business and fraught with quality risk. Network resources like minutes and texts are an attractive commodity and one where the wholesale price is falling all the time." Interesting analysis of Blyk.

"Dolores Labs paid MechaTurks to apply labels to 10,000 color swatches." Then they built network graphs out of them. Very nice.

"The value lies in the network of people and how they illuminate the things I don’t know." Rands hits the nail on the head. It's about who you know, and how you make use of them. Just like real-world friends. Hint: Scoble is using it wrong.

"Your lists of friends and connections on the social websites that you use, sometimes called your social graph, belongs to you. No one company should own who you know and how you know them." This could be interesting!

"This code, extracted from the Rails codebase of dopplr.com, extends your User model with methods to pull in social network information from sites such as GMail, Twitter, Flickr, Facebook and any site supporting appropriate Microformats."

Great selection of links to Raph Koster's "Design For Everywhere" - a talk at GDC to the games industry about designing games (and, by inference, software) for use in any context. Important!

$99 desktop that has 4gb of internal storage and uses S3 for the rest. Distributed thin-ish clients, much like were promised in the golden age of Java. Etc, etc, etc.

'"Friends" still isn't the right word.' - Kottke on Twitter, with much strong truth, notably this.

Matt Webb's notes on "The Semiotcracy". I always misplace this whenever I need to refer to it.

A perceptive and detailed analysis of the Dunbar Number - and why some of the hype around it is misguided.

Lots of useful information in here - but implementing it is more problematic, depending on your setup.

"What one will then wear on the wrist will be, not a mini-computer, but a computerized dialling system to the big hook up." Jim R on fine form, on one of Brian Aldiss' many visions of the future.

The network is not about the applications. The network is about the glue. (I will be repeating this mantra in future).