Interrelativity

Interrelativity: musings about interrelatedness

  • Music ID

    AT&T Wireless recently announced a new music recognition service that will enable customers to use their mobile phones to identify music they are currently listening to. By entering “#ID” on the keypad and placing the phone near the source of the music, the service will send a text message with to the phone with the…

  • Thackara’s “Post-Spectacular City”: Close Encounters vs. Mass Marketing

    Alex Steffen cites John Thackara‘s vision for the upcoming era of the post-spectacular city, in which the focus of urban design will shift from “point-to-mass advertising, onanistic art, and big-ticket spectacles” (one-way messages) to creating capabilities for “collaboration, encounter, intimacy, and work” (interactions). Thackara describes the mobile phone as a device for creating new opportunities…

  • WiFi Bedouin: Proximity-based Wireless Access

    Just read Sean Savage’s post about Julian Bleeker’s WiFi.Bedouin project. WiFi.Bedouin is a wearable, mobile 802.11b node disconnected from the global Internet. It forms a WiFi “island Internet” challenging conventional assumptions about WiFi and suggesting new architectures for digital networks that are based on physical proximity rather than solely connectivity. Most significantly, WiFi.Bedouin facilitates the…

  • And to Think That I’ll See It On Blogstreet

    Just signed up for Blogstreet, but have to add a link to it from my blog before I can start discovering who’s in my neighborhood. Should probably add it to the template, but it’s simplest just to post something about it here.

  • Wherify Personal Locator for Children: Digital Pacifier for Parents?

    Smart Computing has an article about a field test of the Wherify Wireless GPS Personal Locator for Children, a wristwatch-style device with a GPS receiver and PCS transmitter that can be “locked” onto a child’s wrist and send periodic updates to a web server about the location of the device (and, presumably, the child). Parents…

  • Sometimes you get what you need

    [Moblog posted from Grand Illusion Cafe.]

  • Social Computing @ Social Computing

    There has been a great deal of discussion about the use of social computing technologies (primarily IRC chat) to create backchannels — for discussion — at the Microsoft Research Social Computing Symposium. this past Monday and Tuesday. Given the theme of, and participants at, the symposium, it is both ironic (or at least sweetly self-referential)…

  • Situated Software

    Clay Shirky describes social software, applications written for a particular situation — a small group of people, period of time and, possibly, physical space — contrasting this with the “Web School” approach where applications have to scale to large groups of people for long periods of time, and usually with out any space boundaries. By…

  • Serendipity: A Wireless, Proximity-Based Dating Service

    The New Scientist has a recent article on an MIT Media Lab project called Serendipity, which seeks to enable people to discover potential dates in their vicinity. According to the article, people would be able to subscribe to a service in which they would create a personal profile and then associate that profile with their…

  • Toothing: Mobile Phones as “Adult” LoveGety’s

    Once again, sex proves to be a driver for new applications of technology. A Wired article on "toothing" reports on a new use for bluetooth-enabled mobile devices: "strangers on trains and buses and at bars and concerts hook up for clandestine sex by text messaging each other with their Bluetooth-enabled cell phones or PDAs." [Gizmodo…