I’m interested in ambient interfaces, unobtrusive data, and augmented reality, which is why this video, The Ambient Life, caught my eye over at johnnyholland.org. According to the post, The Ambient Life,
… was created for Freeband, a Dutch research program in which a.o. Philips and Delft University participate. The video tries to show a glimpse of the future they want to see, a future where you are ’surrounded by “intelligent” electronic equipment that can provide almost all of your information and communication needs on demand: an ambient intelligent environment.’
“Sa-weet!” I thought, as I clicked play.
The Ambient Life - have a gander at your future.
I’m jiving along with the peacefully groovy music, ready to pine for a future that isn’t yet here, but gradually, minute by minute, I become more and more alarmed.
When I think about the benefits and possibilities for ambient technologies, I think about weaving them into a world that is safer, more equitable, and more sustainable (if I’m going to envision the future, I’m going to really go for it). I’m waiting for that critical mass at which point our crazy world shifts, hopefully faster than ‘gradually’, to a path that is less insane than the one we are on now.
But this video, this imagined future, projects along our current path with nightmarish force. Security and safety, to the point of exclusion and isolation (I’m almost more interested in what isn’t shown, what kind of world this ambient life is built upon) seem to be primary concerns, and the incident at 2:27 really should have been re-thought, if not for the wtf of it, for the unexplained circumstances and unemotional reactions (I mean, calm and cool under stress is a great quality, but to achieve this level of detachment you need either brainwashing or drugs in the water).
It’s been quiet around here, and I only have World of Warcraft to blame. I still bathe on a regular basis and haven’t given up my day job (yet), but I forget to eat and am incredibly moody when the server is having problems (more often than not on Khaz’goroth).
Well, technically I’ve been legal for about a decade now, give or take, depending on what country you live in. But more importantly, as of Friday afternoon, I am playing World of Warcraftlegally.
Whether poorly-hosted illegal servers are part of Blizzard’s overall marketing scheme or just a by-product of primordial internet chaos (you know, sans-regulations and all), my experience on the Outofdate Private server was enough to convince me that a) I really wanted to play the game and b) WoW is worth the monthly fee (for now, at least).
Not only was I running around in the most hideous green biker pants imaginable, I was running around in what appeared to be a beta-release of the WoW server at best. Which is tolerable when you are playing for free, but when you lose your character not once, not twice, but three times, you know that the old cliche is true; there really is no such thing as a free lunch.
A little over a month ago I made a quickie-post on my Free Speech blog that made brief mention of a wiki for direct action, and a torrent site curated specifically for the activist crowd. In this post I’d like to flesh out those ideas more in as non-technical a way as possible. Where specific technologies are involved, I’ll do my best to offer an explanation of why the technology is important to the fundamental ideas of what I’m brainstorming. I’d like to emphasize that I’m at the brainstorming stage, so you might run into some half-baked (or not baked at all) ideas, inconsistencies and the like, so please don’t flame me if x doesn’t exactly make sense in light of y. Without further ado, let’s delve into the world of wikis, torrents, and useful content.
» Zed TV has been around the longest, I believe, and is a really well done site on top of an already well designed project. From their site:
“ZeD is a launch pad for independent creative expression that uses TV and the Web to seek out and broadcast the best new short films, videos, animation, visual art, performance and music in Canada and around the world.”
» Ourmedia, in collaboration with the Internet Archive, offers free storage and hosting for video, audio, image and text files. Currently in alpha, the site is home to 23,000 grassroots members, and is growing steadily each day. From their site:
“Ourmedia is a global community and learning center where you can gain visibility for your works of personal media. We’ll host your media forever — for free.”
» The Participatory Culture Foundation’s Broadcast Machine is a software package aimed at the curation and delivery of online video content, kind of like video feeds via RSS. Using their DTV client, a user can subscribe to video channels, have the latest videos automagically downloaded in the background, and then watch the playback via the DTV software. From their site:
“Broadcast Machine is software for your website that can publish fullscreen video files to thousands, using torrent technology to reduce or eliminate bandwidth costs. It is free, open source, and designed for easy installation. Broadcast Machine features an intuitive interface, integrated torrent creation, and flexible channel management.”
» Independent World Television is a new organization looking to utilize the power of the web and an international audience to report on what is *really* going on in the world. Not limited to the web, IWT is also looking for satelitte and digital tv delivery. The process, planning, and mission of IWT are very transparent, something I think FSTV could benefit from (doing the same, that is). I’m really looking forward to seeing how they grow and progress in the future.
What would be even better would be to add Free Speech TV to this list, and we are exploring ways of delivering video content to our audience. Not just the content we show on channel 9415, but content from around the web, content submitted to us from viewers and community members. I know the Real Media/Real Player format doesn’t please many, but we will probably always retain this set-up for streaming purposes (I do hear good things about Darwin Streaming Server though). As we look to expand video content and explore new broadcast mechanisms, we will begin to offer other formats, namely mpeg4. We are currently experimenting with the preview release of the Broadcast Machine, and I’d like to point anyone interested to a recent blog post on the PCF blog: Political Activism with Broadcast Machine.
From wikipedia: Folksonomy is a neologism for a practice of collaborative categorization using freely chosen keywords. More colloquially, this refers to a group of people cooperating spontaneously to organize information into categories, noted because it is almost completely unlike traditional formal methods of faceted classification. This phenomenon typically only arises in non-heirarchical communities, such as public websites, as opposed to multi-level teams. Since the oragnizers of the information are usually its primary users, folksonomy produces results that reflect more accurately the population’s conceptual model of the information.
Folksonomies and tagging have been buzzing around the www for a while, and can be seen in use at sites such as Flickr and del.icio.us. Taking a cue from this emerging taxonomic method, I thought I might borrow the animal classifications elaborated in “The Analytical Language of John Wilkins” by Borges and apply them to web pages, using del.icio.us (http://del.icio.us/cyborges) as the means to start categorizing the www. If you have a del.icio.us account, please feel free to contribute by tagging web pages with one of the following categories:
a) those that belong to the emperor
b) embalmed ones
c) those that are trained
d) suckling pigs
e) mermaids
f) fabulous ones
g) stray dogs
h) those that are included in this classification
i) those that tremble as if they were mad
j) innumerable ones
k) those drawn with a very fine camel hair brush
l) others
m) those that have just broken a flower vase
n) those that resemble flies from a distance
Due to the nature of tagging on del.icio.us, please denote spaces with a period, such that the category “those that have just broken a flower vase” becomes “those.that.have.just.broken.a.flower.vase”. A bit of a pain in the arse, but not so much for anyone who has ever had a broken space bar.
Soft toothbrushes in Japan are *really* soft. I like them.
I just started reading The Robot in the Garden: Telerobotics and Telepistemology in the Age of the Internet, and started with Telepistemology: Descartes’s Last Stand by Hubert L. Dreyfus. The first paragraph details a disembodied future mediated by the internet/communication technologies and tells us we are getting closer and closer to such a future (natch). To pull a quote:
“When we are engaged in such activities [reading news, shopping, talking to friends, doing reseach], our bodies seem irrelevant and, thanks to telepresence, our minds seem to expand to all corners of the universe.”
Uhm, irrelevant bodies my ass. Mr. Dreyfus has obviously not had the pleasure of sitting on a plastic crate covered with a yoga mat for 5+ hours of computing time. My body has never been more relevant, or I so painfully aware of it (this is also due to the bruises from a grappling match post-viewing of the Ultimate Fighting Championships… grar!).
My italk and isight arrived today; the former for podcasting and the latter for keeping up with friends and family while in Japan without the expensive phonebills (VOIP too). I’ve convinced kzi to do some podcasting about our travels with me, and I’m looking forward to experimenting with audio broadcasting.
But then I started to get worried. As the web evolves and broadband becomes ubiquitous (at least in Korea and Japan) the need for text-only disappears. People will move on to bigger and better… there are already thousands of podcasts and hundreds of video blogs available online right now. Throw in P2P and MMORPGS and suddenly the web becomes a cornucopia of moving images and blaring sound. I started to panic thinking about the possibility of losing, or having shoved to a small corner, the quiet library of text I’ve always enjoyed. That’s where the “realworld” is at now… libraries losing funding, Blockbuster on every other block, and 5000 channels available on television. Where is this paragraph going? I don’t know, but I don’t want to lose my textnet! Can I use aalib with links to render video in ascii? That might make me feel a little better.
Several weeks ago a woman from an alternative newspaper Columbus Alive contacted me about the RNC Mobnet and moblogging in general. Here is the article as it ran (yesterday, I think).