Category: Web/Tech
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Surfing the Net … from a Surfboard
BBC News reports on an Intel innovation: a tablet PC, augmented with solar panels and a video camera, embedded in a surfboard. The surfboard was to be showcased by professional surfer Duncan Scott at the Intel Goldcoast Oceanfest in North Devon, UK, last weekend. Some people bring their laptops to the beach, and there are…
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BEDD: Multidimensional Social Software for Bluetooth Phones
John Sherry sent me a Yahoo News article about BEDD, a Bluetooth mobile phone application launched recently in Singapore that allows users to discover things about and interact with the other BEDD-enabled phone users in their immediate vicinity. The application brings together a number of proximity-based features that have been explored in separate applications (e.g.,…
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Alphabet Billboard Cambridge: One Week of Fame via Cameraphones
Alphabet Billboard Cambridge (ABC) is a 7.5-meter electronic display that shows images submitted by residents of Cambridge, UK, via cameraphones. Each week for a 3-year period, one resident is given a cameraphone and offered the opportunity to submit as many photos as he or she wishes during that period; the participants are chosen according to…
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CNN on Joi Ito on Blogs
CNN has a nice article on Joi Ito, and Joi’s views and use of blogs. Among the most interesting highlights (for me) were Joi’s blogtime — 5 hours per day, including reading 190 blogs (reminds me of a NYTimes article on blog addiction I read about on Sean’s blog), his emphasis on the use of…
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Photo Tote Bag: Plausibly Ignorable Revelation in the Physical World
Friends from Illinois were visiting this weekend; Joanie had a photo tote bag with five photos of her family nearly covering one side of the bag. She said she got it primarily to remind herself [regularly] of what is really important in life, but it has also resulted in several unexpected but welcome conversation opportunities…
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VeriChip-Implanted People (VIPs): Walking Internet Cookies
I’ve often heard the claim that the "price" of privacy, i.e., how much people want in return for revealing private information, is a 10% discount. However, it’s hard to put a price on convenience. New Scientist reports that some people are willing to have RFID chips implanted subcutaneously as part of becoming a VIP member…
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Technorati Adding 12,000 New Blogs A Day
JD’s New Media Musings has some notes from Technorati’s recent Developer’s Salon in which it was claimed that Technorati is adding 11,000-12,000 new blogs a day to the list of blogs it monitors. Disclaimers are made about the fact that some bloggers maintain more than one blog and some people don’t maintain their blog at…
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Whither Trepia?
Reading & thinking about the debate about content vs. connections, I was reminded of Trepia’s proximity-based instant messaging application, where the “buddy list” is really more of a “neighbor list” representing other Trepia users who are logged in nearby. My initial impression of the tool was that proximity is based on a common wireless access…
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Social Currency: Content vs. Connection
Continuing my effort in catching up (blogging up?) on some recent readings (of “old” material), I recently read Douglas Rushkoff‘s article in The Feature on “Social Currency” (from September 2003) with great interest. Rushkoff argues that “in an interactive space, content is not king. Contact is … Content only matters … because it gives us…
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Shyness: Psychology & Technology
I saw a reference earlier this week to an article on “Shyness: The New Solution” from the Jan/Feb 2000 issue of Psychology Today that presented some results of a survey on shyness — high order bit: 48% of people are shy, up from 40% a decade earlier — and discussed how technology has impacted shyness…