Now that I've got your attention, it's time for a rundown of musings from the corridors of Cogapp in our latest and greatest Internal Digest. Aside from the surfing dog above from Tristan, here's what else has been captivating the collective Cogapp mind of late:

Joe dug deep into the back-end of Google Maps, scouring miles of code and a nigh on infinite amount of pictures to find the deeply hidden algorithm that reveals how Google Street View works according to Google Japan:

Some of us here at Cogapp were lucky enough to get tickets to Friday’s sold out dConstruct conference, just down the road from us in Brighton. It was an extremely inspiring day…

Adam Greenfield kick-started the morning with a detailed and compelling study of the role that ubiquitous computing is/can/will play(ing) in large cities (there’s no avoiding a capricious use of tenses when discussing the near-future). His talk was fuelled by the fact that, as of last year, most human beings on planet Earth live in cities. This comes at a time when we’re in the process of shifting from a state of having hundreds of people per computer to hundreds of computers per person, so it stands to reason that the laws and trends that have governed cities of the analogue past will not be relevant for modern/future times.

Information, argues Greenfield, is becoming ‘persistent’ - offered to us at every waking moment, whether it is desired or not. When surrounded by statistics on every object and person in our vicinity, people begin to cluster into groups of common identity, avoiding encounters that do not seem desirable in advance. Ubiquitous computing is likely to usher in mind-boggling efficiency and agency over our environment, but we are at risk of losing a textural, unplanned, helpless quality that has previously made cities such ‘centres for human vitality and creativity’.

Greenfield’s thorough account of possible urban conditions of the near future felt neither pessimistic nor naively utopian, but underlined our need to be fiercely conscientious and adaptable.

A couple of chaps from Stamen Design talked us through the creative process for some of their celebrated data visualisations, ranging from busy, data-rich apps like Historical Hurricane Maps and Oakland Crimespotting...

Something that keeps cropping up whenever I meet with museum and gallery professionals is the tricky issue of Authorial Voice (caps added to make it sound more... er... authoritative).

The traditional model has of course always been: we tell you what we believe... and you (the public) believe us.

photo by thornj I’ve just returned from MIPTV the AV and digital content market held each year in Cannes. It’s a vast event – over 13,000 delegates attend – and the buzz of trade inside the Palais des Festivals is matched, if not outstripped, by that of the deals being struck and contacts made in the many coffee shops, bars and hotels along the Croisette. While there to build on Cogapp’s links with TV indies and broadcasters - and to explore the creative opportunities of convergence and multi-platform - I made sure I found the time to attend a number of conferences. The MIPTV programme gives a useful insight into what are currently felt by the industry to be some of its most pressing challenges and opportunities – and so I’d thought I’d pick up on and summarise a few themes that kept cropping up: the growth of online video, monetisation and how to measure engagement. Or, media, money and metrics…

Last week, I had the good fortune to be invited to speak at the Over The Air conference at Imperial College. Organised by Mobile Monday London, it was focussed on mobile phone development, and had a great lineup of speakers as well as lots of techy fun including an all-night hackathon.

Journalism professor, Jeff Jarvis, has written an interesting piece in this week’s Media Guardian, provoked by the New York Times’ decision to abandon its policy, after two years, of charging for content online.

If engagement is the key to the Web 2.0 (and Media 2.0) world - and that's what we believe - then what are the implications ? What are the rules of this new world ?

Reviewing our own experience (over twenty years and hundreds of projects) and what we know of the industry at large, we have developed a proposal: four rules for success in the world of Web 2.0 and Media 2.0.

Our four proposed rules are as follows :-

1.