Emerging Technology 06

		<p>Trapped in the Neue Zealand ghetto region, and can't even fly to Auckland at the moment, let alone San Diego... But I'm keenly interested in a couple of presentations in particular:</p>

• Firstly, Sam Ruby, who has quite a reputation for mind-bending presentations, is talking about neurotransmitters, cells, and trust boundaries. I'm kicking myself for missing out on this - it's directly related to a key area of my research, and it's exciting to see these ideas about cellular architecture reaching a wider audience. I've believed for a while now that biological cellular metaphors have the potential to radically alter the way we think about programming languages and server architecture; it will be fascinating to see how Sam contextualizes this.
• Then the two Mikes - Migurski and Frumin - will be talking about attention and semi-structured content, using Reblog as a case study. I've been using Reblog from the first version onwards, and it keeps improving. The latest version supports an event driven plugin architecture, which opens up a world of decentralized publishing possibilities, breaking away from the traditionally closed route of the CMS. The relationship between this and the bio cellular themes may not be immediately obvious, but it's important. Reblog is based on the concept of a web application functioning as a data de-entropizer - it positions itself in the space between publishing outputs and the wider web, greatly lessening the amount of energy needed to move content between these sources.

We're now at the point where server and interface technology has matured; at least far enough that I can tenatively say most major technical problems with web communication have been fairly well resolved in recent years. It's time to work towards understanding social software and internet communication in the wider context of information and entropy.