A perspective from Red Herring on WaveMarket that helps me better understand the potential value of blogging by phone:
Using a cell phone with a camera, the tools lets consumers annotate their environment with information that others can access and use to find parties, events and share information in the context of the what [are you doing] and where [are you doing it] the people the user cares about. This allows people to publish information that is useful in context and that may rapidly lose its value. [emphasis mine]
If WaveMarket really does take off, it is easy to imagine an extremely cluttered geocoded blogosphere, unless care is taken to provide easy-to-use and effective ways of filtering posts. Or perhaps a capability will be offered for specifying lifespans for posts, which of course would have to be accompanyied by a suitable incentive scheme, e.g., allocating higher priority or prominence for shorter-lived posts. [I recently read (via Anne Galloway) a post in the Urban Tapestries blog about the filtering issue, wherein Giles Lane and his colleagues are grappling with the problem of cutting through the clutter generated by a mere 100 people each spending two hours generating content (during their public trial) while still maintaining an openness to serendipitous discoveries. I think the answer lies in an integrated solution — having a more holistic digital representation of selves (not just location-based blog posts, and not just for two hours) available for use with collaborative filtering techniques. Perhaps the longer term longitudinal study being planned for the next stage of Urban Tapestries will permit this kind of approach.]
Back to WaveMarket:
The company also demonstrated how an apartment searcher can share photos and location information for a spouse back home, so that “not only can she see the bedrooms, but the park the kids will play at and how far it is from each apartment [her husband] is looking at.”
This scenario of remote monitoring by loved ones reminds me of a scenario enacted (or at least envisioned) years ago by wearable computing pioneer Steve Mann wherein his wife, who was at home, was looking over his shoulder (so to speak) via his wearable computer, to help him choose a tomato that was ripe while he was shopping at a grocery store.
This got me to wondering, I wonder if Steve, or other borgs, blog? Googling on “Steve Mann blog” brought me to a reference to an article in Salon (referenced in Smart Mobs (referenced in Loic Le Meur’s blog (which has a great summary of blogging and other digital augmentations of the O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference (which I’ll get to in a future post (ah, I love serendipity (and parentheses)))))). Answer: of course they do, or rather they glog (short for cyborg log) — and in fact, the borgs were glogging long before nonborgs were blogging. Although there are examples of brief periods of glogs that are posted on the web (and thereby transformed into blogs), I cannot find any current glogs; I guess a full-time, continuous glog would soon collect an overwhelming amount of content … unless, of course, there were a mechanism to ensure that the posts were short-lived.
And, continuing back toward the original thread, I particularly like the quote from Tasso Roumeliotis, CEO of WaveMarket:
“What we do is turn every cell phone into a location aware media broadcasting device.”
Stream-of-(de)consciousness logging for the masses.