Synchronous Surfing
February 26, 2008 – 2:59 pmLast night I stayed up way too late trying to bring scuzzlebot back to life. He’s not there yet. He’s nothing more than a chatterbot who reads gossip news feeds and automatically posts new derivative drivel of his own on a stochastic schedule on his own wordpress blog. Anyway - I was trying to get the wordpress version of reblog to work and finally did. (See this post if you are trying to do the same thing. There are two unrelated errors in the reblog code that I’ve found and documented here). Then this morning, while performing my daily internews ingestion ritual, RWW reminded me about Visual Complexity, that astounding archive of various network visualizations. I followed the link and randomly, the first one I clicked turned out to be a project called backchannel, “a real-time view of the conversation happening in the #etech IRC channel at O’Reilly’s Emerging Technology Conference,” by stamen design, who also developed reblog... weird, right? And then I took a closer look at the image and noticed the nick, justatheory:
The nickname “justatheory” is familiar because it’s David Wheeler, who is on my “blogroll” and who wrote Bricolage, an enterprise level open source CMS written in perl/mason with a postgres backend, and something that I became quite familiar with over the last three years working at Entertainment Tonight and The Insider. I guess David just happened to be on irc in #etech channel at the conference when the Stamen people decided to start capturing data for their visualization, and futher his nickname just happened to be among those shown in the screenshot they took to be the representative image of the project.
