serial consign

Given the past examination of topics such as large-scale conversations and corporate anthropology here at Serial Consign, I thought I'd share a few videos related to community and the mapping of networks. These two videos serendipitously arrived in my news reader at approximately the same time today and provide an infrastructural and aesthetic window into collaboration, communication and connectivity.

First up is an interview with Anton Kast conducted by Kevin Rose. Anton is the lead scientist behind Digg, the "often imitated and never duplicated" community news portal. In this ten-minute conversation he provides a fascinating window into the logistics of information management at Digg, the site is currently in the process of launching a new recommendation engine in a (needed) effort to provide users with the most relevant content given their past interactions with the service. Kast is quite articulate and it is very interesting to hear his descriptions of the "correlation coefficients" that connect and quantify the interests of various users. In listening to his explanations of this new feature, I couldn't help but smile and think of the several hours I've wasted over the last two years staring blankly at stamen design's brilliant Swarm visualization at digg labs. [via david cohn]

Thankfully, this second video is far removed from the noise of the commercial web world and comes to us by way of the Netherlands-based interactive designer Jori de Goede. As evidenced by the video above (and his Vimeo channel), Goede has a keen interest in the visualization of conversations and speech. This particular video is an elegant representation of the types of social geometries that can emerge from a relatively small group of participants. I'd be curious to see the results if Goede applied this methedology to a larger group of "conversation participants" in the future. [via processing blogs]

The digital arts gateway Turbulence recently launched a new project called Continuum. The piece is by UK artist Michael Takeo Magruder and it could be described as an abstraction on the flow of news information. The meditative piece reminds me of the infamous quip by New York Sun reporter James O'Malley that "life is just one damn thing after another."