Category: Web/Tech
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Getting Technical Again, with Head First Java
After 9 years of little or no programming, I’m taking the plunge and getting technical again. I’ve been threatening to do this, regularly, throughout this period, but ever since I finished graduate school, I’ve had the mixed blessing of working with very talented people who were more technical than I was, and so I instead…
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The Invisible Hand of RFID
"Privacy Invasion as ROI", by Ross Stapleton-Gray of Stapleton-Gray Associates, is an interesting article that might be characterized as the Internet of Things meets the Invisible Hand, Metcalfe’s Law and the Law of Unintended Consequences, arguing that the deployment of RFID readers and tags is likely to evolve in a bottom-up way that will ultimately…
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More Cybershaming via Cameraphone on a Train
Another recent incident of cybershaming, involving a subway passenger in New York who used a cameraphone to create and share a photographic record of shameful behavior, was reported in the New York Daily News yesterday. On August 18, Thao Nguyen was on her way back from an interview when a man sitting across from her…
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Roadcasting: All the Road’s a Stage
Roadcasting is a prototype (really, a meme) in which people can share music in and through wirelessly networked car audio systems. The concept was articulated by a team of graduate students at the Human-Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. There are some graphical and textual descriptions available at the Roadcasting web site, and a…
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Cybershaming and cybercompassion
Don Park reports on a woman whose dog defecated on a train in Korea and refused to clean up the mess. It began in a subway train with a girl whose dog made a mess on the train floor. When nearby elders told her to clean up the mess, she basically told them to f[***]…
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Wirelessness and Shamelessness
I met Rick at The Lyon’s Den coffee shoppe this morning to talk more about my business plan(s). In addition to enjoying our conversation (he offered lots of great suggestions), the cozy atmosphere of the place and my first taste of Keemun tea, I was struck by a sign I saw posted on a meeting…
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Meetro: Proximity-Based IM
I discovered Meetro, a proximity-based instant messaging service, while browsing around the Where 2.0 conference pages. The system shows other users who are logged in and "near" (within a mile, 1/2 mile, 1/4 mile or "other") in addition to IM exchanges, it allows the creation of dynamic groups based on interest and location. I don’t…
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Free WiFi Zones vs. WiFi-Free Zones: Virtual vs. Physical Communities
The Victrola coffeehouse in the Capitol Hill neighborhood of Seattle has shut down its free wireless Internet access (WiFi) on Saturdays and Sundays, in part because people were squatting in — and tuning out from — the physical place, and using WiFi-enabled laptops to instead tune into their virtual worlds. Glenn Fleischman has an excellent…
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Object-centered Sociality: Digital Affordances in Physical Spaces
Jyri Engeström claims that the problem with some social networking services is that they focus solely on people and links, ignoring the objects of affinity that those linked people share. He invokes the concept of "object-centered sociality" (borrowing from Karin Knorr Cetina) to explain how the inclusion of shared [digital] objects, such as photos, URLs,…
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Call of the Mall: Mobile Phones + RFID = New Shopping Experiences
KDDI recently announced a pilot program in which their RFID-enabled mobile phones can be used in a shopping mall to provide information about stores, products and sales campaigns offered there. The program, developed in conjunction with Oki Electric Industry Company and iNAGO, is being tested at Stellar Mall, using KDDI’s new mobile phones with embedded…