ptolemu's Journal: Multimedia thesis project - early early ideas...

This is my first of hopefully many entries regarding my upcoming multimedia thesis project. I hope to have comments posted to my notes in hope that they will help me bring a stronger focus on the subjects I wish to examine. I will try to update these notes on a regular basis and I would greatly appreciate any commentators to do the same. This is of course experimental and may totally flop, however I am very interested in seeing how this will turn out. The format will be fairly informal, notes being organized on an entry/comment basis. I will try to keep my comments readable but I can guarantee a number of spontaneous notes that will be purely stream of conscious style. That being said, I will make an effort to revisit my notes in order to clarify the idea(s) I was trying to express. Comments are open to everyone so don't feel that you need permission to post, just try to keep any contribution on topic. This is a growing journal and will continue to expand over the next year until the project is complete. Below are some topics that I am considering to include in my thesis.

Topics I am interested include:

• open source
• complexity
• emergence
• chaos
• the Internet

Books I am currently reading for informational, inspirational and sourcing purposes include:

• Just for Fun, by Linus Torvalds and David Diamond
• The Cathedral & the Bazaar, by Eric S. Raymond
• The Hacker Ethic, by Pekka Himanen
• this list will inevitably expand...

Thesis

[grockwel]

Remember to think about multimedia and interactivity for your thesis. I think the idea of a blog for the project is excellent - open research! not just open source. You might look at stuff on cybergeography - visualizations of the internet. There are two books out and a great site full of examples. Suppose you were to try developing a suite of open tools for visualizing web phenomena?