On a rainy Friday, here are some follow up tidbits to some previous posts that have been collecting in my mental Inbox. I think it’s a good practice to follow up on posts. In both blogging, even more importantly traditional journalism, the story after the story is too often neglected.

1. A few kind readers have asked me about the other youtube famed video, D.A.N.C.E., by French techno duo Justice. While it is a great track and video, I still like DVNO better. Superimposing motion graphics on a shirts is a brilliant idea, however the visual effects prowess of the creators overtakes the visual imagery. The viewers spends a lot of time thinking, how did they do that? and what a cool effect. DVNO required a similar level of design skill (with albeit less rotoscoping.) As stated before, in the case of DVNO, the technology is invisible and the viewer can focus on the imagery.

2. The game designer who created Passages, which I alluded to as work of interactive fiction, has created a new work called, Gravitation.

3. From March 1 to March 31, Google blog search reveals: 16,526 results for awesomenessand 706,055 results for awesome, which is lower than the results from my original post:February-2008: Awesomeness: 17,182 ; Awesome: 736,783 ; Are: 61,531,049
January-2008: Awesomeness: 9,627 ; Awesome: 429,769; Are: 57,214,958

Is the use of “awesomeness” leveling of?
I’m not sure. The results that Google is now giving me is different results for previous months when I first collected data, which is a little troubling.

However, if I really want to understand how search engines work, I may have to try to read this suggestion from Wojciech, Introduction to Information Retrieval, by Standford profressors, Christopher D. Manning, Prabhakar Raghavan and Hinrich Schütze.

Frank pointed out some clever research at Microsoft Research. Eric Horvitz and Jure Leskovec parsed through one month of MSN messenger communication, or about 1 billion conversations a day. Among the 240 million users, they discovered an average of 6.6 degrees of separation between any two random users. 6.6 is obviously close to the famed six degrees of separation found in Milgram’s 1967 study. Although, some debate still continues on the validity of that finding. Horvitz made the full paper available, and has really in depth analysis of the spread of MSN Messenger and the communication it facilitates. The image above shows the density of users. The numbers of user shift from high to low according to the light spectrum, with red as high and blue as low (think ROYGBIV.) Since this finding, Horvitz wonders if there is some larger phenomenon at work, with six being some natural average of social interconnectedness. More thoughts to keep me up at night.

Via (Roland Piquepaille’s Technology Trends)