What you myspace will be held against you

The New Scientist reveals that the Pentagon's NSA in the form of ARDA (Advanced Research Development Activity) are interested in the information people post about themselves on social networking sites like myspace and are funding research into it's mass harvesting. A paper entitled Semantic Analytics on Social Networks presented at the W3C's WWW2006 conference revealing how data from online social networks and other databases can be combined to uncover facts about people was part-funded by ARDA. ARDA according to New Scientist is an organisation whose role is to spend NSA money on research that can solve some of the most critical problems facing the US intelligence community principally the problem of how to make sense of the massive amounts of data they collect.

The Net Art Open 2006 call for entries

I have just launched the 2006 call for entries for the Net Art Open. The Net Art Open is an open submission exhibition for internet based artwork which accepts all valid entries. I first created it with Artie Doyle in 2002 as part of the Irish Museum of Modern Art.com intervention subsequent editions took place in 2003 and 2004-5

Click here for more information on how to participate

Goodbye Bitch!

The breakup letter generator, is there nothing the interweb can't do for us?
via eyebeam

The Roy Keane Bridge

Proving they've learnt nothing from previous online votes the London Development Agency has launched a competition to name its new state-of-the-art footbridge in Wembley. Roy Keane is fighting it out with Scottish footballer Jim Baxter. Vote early, vote often.

Media Lab Europe to close

It's just been announced that the Media Lab Europe is to close. Not surprising news but disappointing, especially for all those who will lose their jobs.

Glorianna Davenport - The Storied Machine

Glorianna Davenport's RTE science lecture The Storied Machine will be broadcast tonight at 7.30 on RTE Radio1 and wiil be available on the web here. I attended the lecture last week in RTE and while it was a fascinating talk about the future of interactive narrative it seemed to miss the central point, that is that art moves us because it takes us out of our experience and we see how someone else sees the world and this can be surprising, shocking or even alienating, but it forces us out of our comfort zone or presents us with a wonderful viewpoint we could never achieve alone. This is why I love art and great art can change the way we view the world for ever. Of necessity this is a top down process not an interactive one.

Sorry Everybody

The website in which Americans apologise to the rest of us, nice try but I think I'll continue being snooty to them unless they have it tatooed on their foreheads (just in case).

goth research & punk babies

Federal funds into researching goth culture, punk baby clothes ( well one thing leads to another), yes the killer app of the internet is wacky links. These are from the wacky page at Disenchanted

top links for weblogs

The top 40 topics among webloggers today in one click, think of all the time that saves.

Fridges and streets

A fridge is timeless. It hums always the same as it could have hummed yesterday or will hum tomorrow.
A street is defined by time.
Walking around in a city I encounter many different things going on.
Birds are singing, or it is raining, a car or pedestrian is passing,
someone is playing music, a house is being demolished ... things rarely
happen twice.
Ward Weis, Fridges and Streets

The sound of the streets and fridges of Brussels. When I first moved to Brussels I spent a lot of time walking the streets with my camera a great thing to do to get a feel for a city. This site reminded me of that.