Two contributors to my next book, Making Sense of Proxy Wars: States, Surrogates, and the Use of Force (Potomac Books, 2009), have just submitted their draft chapters. I’ve read the first, and I’m delighted with the quality of it. Now settling into the second chapter, and it’s on a par with chapter one.

For the 26 Nov Battlespace/s public lecture, we won’t be able to webcast live, though we will have a post-event streaming video capture on the CTlab site. We’ll also be holding another online symposium, this one built around Antoine Bousquet’s book The Scientific Way of Warfare: Order and Chaos on the Battlefields of Modernity (Hurst 2009), as follow-up to the lecture. The prelim announcement and Battlespace/s artwork is up, as well, and can be viewed here. Over the weekend, I’ll be querying potential participants, so we should have a better idea within a week or so what that’ll look like.

Still toying with a couple of ideas. One is to use a second, separate blog module for CTlab symposia, instead of conducting them through the main blog – which would make it easier to categorize, track and feature content without altering the main blog’s own structure. The other idea is develop a separate events/symposium page, ie. not embedded within the main blog page or as a subset of it. I suppose the former would require the latter.

The discussion with the publisher went well last week in London. With our respective schedules, we’re a few months away from ideas becoming plans becoming action, post-February 2009 being the most likely time frame for formalizing the relationship between publisher and CTlab. Meanwhile, refinements to the symposium approach will function as experimental, proof-of-concept exercises.

I’m off to London for the day. Among other things, I’ll be sorting out the A/V and podcasting requirements for our upcoming Battlespace/s event with Geoff Manaugh (BLDGBLOG) and Antoine Bousquet (Birkbeck College); discussing the possibility of recruiting interns from among UCL’s student cohort; and talking to a major publishing house about CTlab sponsorship.

I thought it was about time to establish a personal web presence and blogsite, so here it is.  Up to now I’ve been doing all my blogging at The Complex Terrain Laboratory. That project has evolved to the point that my writing output would disrupt its normal flow and distract from its thematic content (not to mention the great work being done by Tim Stevens as Managing Editor, and the thoughtful pieces being generated by its many contributors). So here we are, a new day, a new blog, a new personal site. I’ll still post off-the-cuff commentary and analysis at CTlab. Here, I’ll post comments, notes, updates and the like on various research, writing, and media projects that I have on the go, that are in development, or that I’m considering.

I’ve been toying with foretitling the sanctuary book “Location Zero” instead of “Global Roaming”. The latter has a hook to it, and implies a strong technology angle, but also suggests the book is about globalization and mobility – which it is, to a degree, but I don’t want that to be the point of it, or to raise those kinds of expectations in potential readers at the expense of the book’s core subject. The former was something that came to me on a flight back to Brussels from London. I don’t remember the stream of consciousness that took me to it, but the conceptual linkages include the obvious patient zero, the index case in any disease control investigation, and Suspect Zero, the 2004 movie built around an intriguing idea but flimsy storyline.