Friday, 9th February, 2007

Social Network Implosion

friends social FOAF serendipity

A sort of 'Kevin Bacon' moment, if you like...

I'm a smoker, this we all know. What we probably also know is that as a smoker, I'm perennially forced to leave the warmth and cosiness of my Room Of Macs™ in Leeds, scoot down in the lift to the second floor, and huddle with the other social outcasts in the nooks and crannies afforded by the revolving door outside our building to suck deeply on our scraggy roll-ups in order to refill our systems with the nicotine and tar that we crave.

I do it so regularly, that for some, the steps outside our building are known as my "second office".

In the Spring and Summer months, this is all fine and dandy — in fact, I often prefer to have tutorials out there in the sun, sitting on the steps, chatting away, imparting Great And Bountiful Snippets Of Knowledge™ and watching the world gradually crawl past in the continuous snake-like monodirectional glory of Woodhouse Lane's one-way traffic.

(I saw someone go the wrong way down it once. Oh how we laughed)

But in the Winter, it's grim. Mostly it's duffle-coated solitary puffers, stamping their feet once in a while to revive their already fag-depleted circulation. Sometimes the occasional 'occasional' smoker ventures out, unprepared for the weather in a ridiculous t-shirt — arms tightly wrapped around themselves, shivering like an idiot as the full futility of their addiction rubs home, and any semblence of 'cool' they might have once imagined that the Little Sticks Of Happiness™ imparted on them evaporates as quickly as the shredded leaves burn their way out.

But still. That's completely irrelevant.

I was stood outside yesterday afternoon, As Is My Idiom™ when I became very aware that I was being stared at.

"Excuse me", said the starer. "But you look very familiar"

Aha! (I thought) At last! Someone's about to come out with the phrase I've been waiting five years to hear ... "Aren't you Siobhan Curran?"

...

But no. Nowhere even close

As it happens though, the conversation that followed dumbfounded me in how despite there being millions and millions of people in this country, you can still find yourself connected to various people through almost immediate degrees of seperation...

"Didn't you used to be a student here?"

"Um, yeah — back in 1999. I lived in Sugarwell for a while"

"That's it — you lived on the floor above me"

"Ha! No shit! So you lived on the floor above Ricky then?"

"Yeah, went out with him for a drink last night — they're doing a gig here tonight I think. So what have you done since then?"

"Well, I did a couple of little things with Will..."

"I see him all the time still — he's round the corner from me"

"...and I was going to go and work for the Beeb, but I ended up teaching here instead"

"Cool. I ended up working for the Beeb — in their interactive music bit"

"Hold on, you don't know a guy called Tom Coates do you?"

"Yeah, but he's left now and gone off to..."

"Yahoo — yeah, I know"

...

It is, perhaps, not surprising that things like that happen — I mean, after all (and despite what I said about "millions and millions of people") the Creative Industry is just a subset of society, and there's every chance that someone you know will have worked with/be friends with someone else you know.

It's just that, I suppose, I had it in my head that my social networks were random spiders' webs — strands eminating out and touching on other people's networks ... but never folding back in on themselves.

And I just find it a bit odd — or a bit serendipitous perhaps — that through seemingly random choices to do or get involved in seemingly random things, there always seems to be someone at the end of those things who knows someone at the end of one of the others.

Psychic museum closes due to unforseen circumstances

link funny quack

"If you are asking me [...] when exactly it will open up again, then it is hard to say" — Ah, too funny [El Reg]

A Series Of Tubes

XML internet blog metablog

Various feeds from my RSS list pointed me this morning towards Tim O'Reilly's piece on Yahoo!'s new Pipes service the other day. It's something that I've lodged into the Must Read Up On That™ corner of my brain, but it got me thinking about something.

Firstly, though, as an aside, am I the only person in the world who thinks that both Yahoo!'s and Google's user interfaces (which I've been happily making use of recently on a couple of projects) are great in their functionality, but ghastly in their visual design?

No?

OK, just me then

But yeah, it occurred to me that it would be a fun little project to try and generate a proper XML version of my blog — not an expanded RSS feed, but a full-on semantic XML version. With proper nested comments and stuff.

The "why?" (as usual) never occurred to me — it just seemed like a fun thing to do ... but the recent (and increasing) bouts of Offline Erin-ness™ have been irritating me (to say the least), and gradually it occurred to me that there might actually be some merit in doing it.

I go on and on about the uniquness of hosting my own blog — probably to the irritation of everyone who chaces this way. But it is quite important to me — the idea that when you're reading this, you're somehow 'inside my house'. If I move my leg just a little bit to the left, then it's almost as if every single "GET / HTTP/1.1" is a tantalising stroke up my thigh...

(Sorry )

But I do (I must confess) find it irritating when she goes offline and I'm not here to reboot the router, and what with the imminent and mouth-drooling-with-anticipation arrival of what I'm mentally dubbing "Erin 2.0", I'm wondering if a complete restructuring of the way that I do things — with one server acting as a front-end for the other — might not be a bad idea.

One for the backburner. I'll revisit that idea at some point...