The naming of parts
Some people have enquired about the name of this blog. Here goes.

Sunny Brighton - I use the adjective advisedly, though we do see the sun more than most others on this gloomy isle - has of course recently become an official 'city', so declared by the Queen of England - conjoined at the waist with its near but different neighbour, Hove Actually. So we now live in a double-barrelled city with the moniker 'Brighton-n-Hove': the building in which I'm sitting looks out to Brighton to the front and to Hove to the rear. City of two bits.

City of Bits was of course the title of William Mitchell's 1998 book subtitled 'Space, Place and the Infobahn', addressing the idea of a new type of city based on virtual spaces. Do we have that here in Brighton yet? Although Hove and Brighton still occupy distinct virtual spaces as well as physical ones, at least there's Wi-Fi on the beach these days. City of potential bits. Or potential city of bits.

Down in the town - Brighton, actually - hovers an agglomeration of new media firms, mostly offshoots of the digital explosion and of the great exodus from London at the height of the .com boom. It's a sector that's fragmented, populated by micro-firms now struggling to survive in the downturn, furiously networking though the local bitsphere. A city of a million underemployed bits.

And all the foregoing is fed in human terms by the local digital intellectual furnace, the School of Cognitive and Computer Sciences (COGS) at the University of Sussex, where neural networks people fraternise with philosophers of artificial intelligence, natural language processing types, experimental psychologists and those Laura Ashleys of the computing world (according to AI types), the human-computer interaction mob, all seemingly bent on avoiding interaction despite their collocation. Academic bits.