It has been too long since I’ve updated the cyborg institute, and arguably, too long since I’ve been able to seriously dedicate time to Cyborg Institute projects, but things have happened. And, I think there’s worth in outlining some of these developments and projects.

The biggest project that I’ve been working on for a while around these parts has been to simplify and consolidate things. When I started at this project a bit more than a year ago, I had scads of free times, broad unfocused interests, and I desperately wanted to play with the cool technology and website that I had at my disposal. The end result was a site that had lots of infrastructure, but nothing of significant consequence. Breadth without depth is a leading problem, and I think this has–over the past year–made it hard to really answer the question of “what the Cyborg Institute” really does.

I’ve consolidated most of what I think of as “blah blah blah” pages in the wiki, into a few overview pages, covering software freedom, Cyberculture and theory, and technological practices. Perhaps I’m still attached to the “bla blah blah” content, but I’ve made a big point for using the wiki to do other things, which have purpose and direction, and are (comparatively) concrete. This is progress.

The biggest projects at the moment are: Sygn, my plan for a distributed database system to support some kind of awesome federated social networking directory, job listing board, or other massively distributed database/content system. For more information regarding Sygn, consider these external discussions. Then there’s the Tumble Manager project, which is to be a system to sanely automate the publication of tumble-log, in a way that emphasizes the sense of play in the form and the important editorial purpose that such sites might play in the “independent Internet content” space. My goal, is also to have a system that generates websites in a lightweight, minimalist manner. These are big projects that will require more of my time, as I have it, and some help from awesome people.

I’ve also done some moving and shifting. The “Cyborg Institute” blog, is now located at http://www.cyborginstitute.com/blog/, and the http://cyblog.org domain now points to another project here. That project, is to build a piece of software called “Cyblog” that will replace Jekyll with a more efficient and easier to use system for generating static sites, like the Cyborg Institute (minus wiki), tychoish.com, and other related projects. If you’re interested in contributing to cyblog, please get a git checkout and be in touch with us regarding your work.

And that’s about all that’s going on around these parts. In the life of Sam Kleinman, I’ve been working a lot on “tycho garen” projects many of which can be seen on tychoish.com, day job projects, and there’s always fiction writing, folk dancing, and Sacred Harp singing. Such is the life of a cyborg.