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Pictured above is a screen capture of Intersections 2, a flash sketch by interactive designer Jonnie Hallman. Launching this mini-application yields a simple workspace that contains three adjustable circles. Each of these circles has a pair of white sliders (vertices) that allow you to pivot and scale the entity. You can also create new points with which to generate vectors that run across the canvas. This all sounds simple enough, but what is so engaging about this application is the manner in which the interface tracks the interaction between geometric entities. Each intersection is represented by a yellow marker that highlights the point in question - if you pivot a circle "through" another, the point(s) of contact will slide along to trace the movement. Modulating the arrangement of these shapes feels like calibrating an abstract instrument of some sort. This experienced is no doubt enhanced by the sharp visual language of the piece.

Jonnie Hallman has a variety of experiments, including more "intersection" pieces in his archives. Hallman also authored the recent DestroyFlickr application, which is a widely noted alternative interface for the photo-management service.

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]