is doing some good ol’ fashioned brainstorming with
Zauri,
BlogWalking, Smart Mobs and other oddities
:
“A strange little idea I had on the way home today:
Movable Type on a Sharp Zaurus equipped with wireless ethernet? Or
maybe Bloxsom if/when it has static publishing? Just use rsync to
publish whenever the thing finds itself on a network, wireless or
otherwise. Maybe that happens while you’re out Warwalking – better
yet, maybe that wireless network detector you cobbled together
autoblogs what it finds while in your pocket.But, beyond that, I wonder what else having your blog in your
pocket might give you? Toss in a GPS unit somehow, maybe some other
things like a thermometer device? A compass? Thinking about ways to
automatically capture metadata about your present
environment.”
it would certainly be interesting to see a stew
of parts/pieces like wifi, blogging, rss, presence [ in the instant
messaging sense ] and maybe something like
rdfmap
could begin to lay the foundation for the oft theorized, seldom
implemented vision of
context aware
computing
:
“Context-aware computing is a mobile computing paradigm
in which applications can discover and take advantage of contextual
information (such as user location, time of day, nearby people and
devices, and user activity). Since it was proposed about a decade
ago, many researchers have studied this topic and built several
context-aware applications to demonstrate the usefulness of this
new technology. Context-aware applications (or the system
infrastructure to support them), however, have never been widely
available to everyday users. In this survey of research on
context-aware systems and applications, we looked in depth at the
types of context used and models of context information, at systems
that support collecting and disseminating context, and at
applications that adapt to the changing context. Through this
survey, it is clear that context-aware research is an old but rich
area for research.”
it’s not like there that far away from this type
of vision on
wifi enabled college campuses
these days:
“Take Ben Kasdon, a Dartmouth exchange student with
spiky, bleached-blond hair. Kasdon recently applied for a patent on
a personal-security device that uses the network’s base stations to
pinpoint the location of campus emergencies. About the size of a
cigarette lighter, the gadget attaches to a key chain and, when its
panic button is squeezed, links up with nearby wireless access
points to triangulate and transmit its position.When I meet up with Kasdon, who’s working on a double degree at
Dartmouth and Skidmore, he’s relaxing in the Collis student center,
just in from traversing the campus with an open laptop to look for
holes in the network’s coverage. Asked to name the biggest
difference between the two schools, he gives an answer that should
stop phone company executives — and anyone else who’s betting on
the cellular carriers’ version of the future — in their tracks:
“Nobody here knows anyone’s phone number.””