I’m trying out Chrome for a bit, and liking it enough to get over my dislike of using products from the Man: it’s clean and fast, and seems to do everything I ask it well. It’s like a web butler. But one of the things I’ve noticed about it is that its default homepage is changing the way I browse.

Like Opera, the homepage has nine slots in it, for screenshots of pages you find useful so you can click on them and get going. I like it in Opera, and thought quite hard about which sites I wanted to include (mail and twitter, obviously, and this blog, and work webmail, and a couple of other things). But in Chrome I don’t think I have that choice: it looks at my history and decides which ones I like most.

And as a result I’ve noticed that I spend less time on trivial or just plain uncool sites, in case someone sees my homepage and thinks that what I like. I’m sure that over time my “most visited” will be a genuine reflection of the sites that are most useful to me. But in the meantime, I’m a bit disturbed to find how easily I regulate my behaviour if I think other people will see it.

The title is bigger than this thought: just want to get it down before it flies away. We can, with our location-aware devices and our addressable objects and our ambient interactions and our wireless connections and radio flying around everywhere, rid ourselves of screens and touchpads and styli and become the pointer ourselves. We can play the city with our bodies the way we can play a theremin with our hands: by being in this place and not that one.

When I was in Singapore working with the Zoo using mediascapes, I had a dream of marking out a giant touchscreen interface, with a start button and menus and buttons, on a football field, and using the software to let people become the mouse pointer, opening files by running across real space and clicking buttons by jumping on them (accelerometers in pockets).

I’ve been talking to various people about a game, Resonance, that involves arranging yourself in shapes with other people and casting spells using your bodies as glyphs on the nodes of the pentagram, weaving superstition and magic and the occult together through space and concrete. They’re not talking about exactly the same thing, of course, but Dan Hill and Matt Jones are lumped together by Bruce Sterling as being heralds of a new pervasive urban alchemy, an open sorcery revealed through lumps of plastic and metal. I’m encouraged by the sympathy between Resonance and their more thoughtful perspectives, but I kind of still wish I was the only person making Kircherian links between these technologies and older ways of knowing the invisible. I am rubbish at sharing.

(Do you know what, I just saw this post again for the first time since I posted it, and I’m sorry to say my first thought was that the author should count themselves lucky anyone wants to follow them at all. How prissy and uptight! Dear oh dear. Still, I can’t think of any other way of saying it. Never mind.)

If you ask to see my updates on Twitter, and I don’t know you as a friend in real life yet, then I probably won’t approve your request. It’s nothing personal. I’m sure you’re really nice. But for me Twitter has always been about friends I know, not work or celebrity stalking or accumulating vast numbers of webfriends or selling magazines. And I’m not making the mistake I did with other social networks, where I let other people dictate how I used them.

Also, I reserve the right to break that rule and to apply it inconsistently.

Also, this article describing Twitter as your house is a good read.

For the festival season: personal, inflatable stone circles. Perfect for making sure your tent circle benefits from maximal positive energy! Kit includes a compass and star map for correct alignment. No need to fumble around with your mobile if you want to know the time! Deluxe edition includes a radio receiver (and aerial antennae within the megaliths): with the help of your friends, turn the circle to the correct position for your favourite radio station. Or set it to “static” to listen to the sound of creation.

Extension kit includes RFIDs for your group to wear behind their wristbands (or in their hair), acting as individual proximity sensors and activating a personalised set of discreet LED patterns inside the stones when a certain distance from the circle. Useful for finding your way in the dark, or setting the disco tone if you’re all back for the night.

May not be compatible with existing ley lines: please consult your local dowsing group before construction. Use with mobile telephones may attract attention of dark forces from beyond our ken.