A thoughtful restaurateur makes it clear that the network weather's blowing out there: "Whether or not your restaurant is an OpenTable customer, it’s impossible not to feel its impact."

Cassim did a great job of editing my two 1,500-word texts into a single 1,000-word piece. The essential points are intact; the voice is mostly preserved. Enjoy.

Anab's great talk from WCIT2010 last week.

Concretized desire lines, walking through walls, and like that...Chicago style.

Regrettably commerce-oriented, but otherwise absolutely right-on. "Inhabit the city as though it were your house." NB There's no reason why the plug-in services here specified as commercial ventures couldn't be swapped out for free or non-cash-economy alternatives.

Via Metafilter: "Carl Zimmer explores the implications of network design versus evolution, suggesting that a more modular architecture in bacteria leads to a rugged (i.e. robust) system that does not "crash" like a computer."

Can we have a moratorium on anything "2.0"?

Via Anne, useful mostly for the statistics & what they imply.

Daniela Fabricius on Rio's favela archipelago and the various strategies used to return it to the map. Via Mario.

QFMFT

"80 percent of the initial 20,600 bicycles stolen or damaged": Compare to the considerable success of Barcelona's technically all-but-identical Bicing system. A perfect case study in the locally differential adoption of technologies; namechecks Bruno Marzloff.

Good news, everyone! Peer-to-peer ad hoc connections are in the offing at long last; kiss Bluetooth goodbye.

Here's my talk from dConstruct in Brighton a few weeks back. My goodness, I do go on. This is an absolutely sprawling talk! Check the tags for some idea of content.

The implications of a globalized electronics industry. Via Nurri.

The new hotness. Also, I am now apparently an adjective. ABOUT TIME. /hooah.

"Republican politicians on Thursday called for a sweeping new federal law that would require all Internet providers and operators of millions of Wi-Fi access points, even hotels, local coffee shops, and home users, to keep records about users for two years to aid police investigations." Not even sure this could be implemented, let alone enforced; either way, awful precedent.

Via teh Migurski.

Transactions in context, and the specter of cascading EPIC FAIL via preemptive purchase heuristics.

The problem with paving the cowpaths.

EarthLink's Rolla P. Huff has a lot to answer for.

"A space-aware and resource-aware dynamic network architecture."

Saffo: “The value of a social network is defined not only by who's on it, but by who's excluded." YES.

Very nice thinking here, ties together a lot of threads I'm interested it. Deeelighted to see thought like this in the software domain, so rarely interested in the outside.

[this is good]

Profound and important. For that other project.

"Evidence that humans are optimized for small groups," via S&W. Source of the infamous Dunbar number ("150").

RAND's, um, insights

Interesting support for that piece about the de-classing of Bluetooth headsets and Sidekicks I keep threatening to write.

Conference 28 and 29 Apr

Home of "the invisible tail"