I'm downtown at what's being called an historic event: a real time, intercontinental collaborative construction of an Internet Bill of Rights which is taking place in New York and simultaneously in South America. This collaborative effort to create a consensus of agreement on a set of essential rights for the Internet was done using custom software that allowed the participants, working in small groups, to make suggestions for inclusion in an Internet Bill of Rights, edit each other suggestions, and then 'endorse' any groups contributions by adding their group's icon to any of the suggestions. The collaboration was also faciliated by simultaneous machine translation between English and Spanish.

This isn't the first time an alien has visited earth on a fact-finding mission. They've been coming here for hundreds of years, studying our planetary communications systems. The alien is grey with elongated fingers and toes, has an insatiable curiosity, and is the star of the CUP produced film "The Internet is Serious Business" which had it's premiere at Anthology Film Achives tonight.

I'm at the HD Expo today. It's the first time it's been held in New York (it will also be repeated in LA next month<>) and is happening at the Waterfront, which you seasoned NYers may remember from it's halcyon days as The Tunnel, and scene of more than a few filmings. Whenever a TV show (or film) needed to have a scene in a club, they invariable filmed it in The Tunnel.

Using Intermapper to visualise all the nodes of the network here produces a pretty picture, though logically it doesn't have a *lot* of resemblance to the actual network topology. It's really just mapping nodes. (Though I was surprised to notice it recognises devices by protocol, well, printers anyway.)

The crescent on the upper right are the existing streaming servers in the DMZ, although Intermapper is oddly assigning them staff network IPs as well. Hmm, I should probably look into that. And I will just as soon as Intermapper finishes... mapping our entire class B network. Of which we are using fewer than a dozen addresses. (Picture after the jump…)