Here’s the thought of Matt Locke’s I was trying to find, prompted by the announcement of cheapo wifi-enabled hard drives a few days ago: Public Caches:

“[I] thought of the idea of installing ‘Public Caches’ – stand alone devices embedded into street furniture or trains that people could use to upload or download content. You could send an e-book or avantgo article that you had finished with, or browse the cache to see what people have left behind…

…In such a network, information would have to travel physically between people’s devices in order to jump from cache to cache. The cache on your train or street corner would be full of stuff that only people who physically travelled through or visited your neghbourhood could access. This would mean it would take a long time for ‘memes’ to migrate through a network, but it would also increase local specificity, and so enhance a sense of place and community.”

The Ouroborosian nature of my outboard brain becomes apparent here, as Locke’s post links from some previous thought here about deliberately engineering slowness in networks. Need to revisit this… again…

Sorry about the pun.

Via Smartmobs, Techdirt picks up on Uncle Jack’s piece on “Smart places” in today’s Guardian Online and runs with the RFID / NFC* aspect of the piece.

“The writer [of the Guardian article] suggests that RFID may be the missing ingredient to make such services even more valuable, by allowing more pinpoint use of location info. This certainly beats some of the applications that people were originally predicting for location-based services – where the restaurant you were walking by would spam you with a coupon. When the content is both interactive and user requested, things begin to get a lot more interesting.”

Indeed.

I would also add that when the content is both user-requested, and authored by other end-users/peers/individuals/whatever it gets a HELLUVALOT more interesting.

See also Chris Antimega’s RDFGeowarchalking, and Jo’s Spacenamespace for less commercial and more interesting applications of annotating space.

» Techdirt: Location Based Services Leading To Smart Places
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* Disclosure: my employer, Nokia is a founder member of NFC forum

Found from one of my Google newsalerts:

“Taiwanese hardware and motherboard supplier Asustek Computer is to launch a wireless Ethernet-accessed hard-drive in May.

Its WL-HDD will offer fast WiFi access by using 802.11g, which provides up to 54Mbit/s. The actual drive will be a 2.5-inch unit and its capacity is as yet unspecified. The device will cost $150 – about £90. It will have a Web-based management interface through which the drive can be accessed. Files will be freely shareable, have read-access only or be restricted to password-owning users.”

Imaging building these into buildings, spaces, walls: geocaching dead-drops for digital media. I remember Matt Locke talking about something like this a couple of years ago – a city-wide network of storage where the city’s inhabitants would exchange news, media, anything digital. Mass-storage ‘hotspots’. I left my Pixies in Maida Vale…

» Macworld Daily News: March 23, 2004: Wi-fi hard-drive unveiled

Locative media workshop
29 March-3 April 2004, Helsinki
http://www.pixelache.ac/locative/

“The workshop is a community of interest, where members of different communites of practice come together. In this case, an international group of artists, writers, and researchers will gather in Helsinki with disciplines of expression ranging from textual, aural, digital film, performance, architecture, and contemporary archaeological theory. The workshop process will – through practical engagement – elaborate the relationships between documentation, content, and context.

To this aim, a large portion of the scheduled workshop time will be dedicated to exploring the specific site, subterranean and surrounding area of the Rautatieasema.”

Thanks to Marc Tuters for letting me know about this…

From Space and Culture:

“What makes the urban available to the gaze? Cities are an example of phenomena too extensive in scale to be empirically visible to the human eye in one glance, yet are taken on a sort of visual faith which makes the overall unseeable city part of what Taussig calls a ‘public secret’.”

From “The Invisibles: Say you want a revolution”:

“Cities have their own way of talking to you; catch sight of the reflection of a neon sign and it’ll spell out a magic word that summons strange dreams.

Have you ever sean the word ‘IXAT’ glowing in the night? That’s one of the holy names.

Or make tape recordings of traffic noise and listen to them at night. You’ll hear the voices of the city coming through, telling you things, showing you pictures.

Sometimes they’ll show you where they came from.”

Right then. Been a while since the lunch with Loosemore, Hurley and O’Brien, but nethertheless, here’s an idea that wiggled it’s way into existence through talking with those guys.

The idea behind Warchalking is that it breaks the cycle of having to be online to get to the pages that give you the free-wireless node info for the city you are in. Fellow free-wireless travellers or those who maintain the nodes themselves have scrawled chalk symbols on the pavements to indicate the presence of wireless access.

A few people I’ve talked to about this have said “why chalk?” and suggested something more permanent. Well, part of me is a fuddy-duddy who doesn’t want to inflict permanent marks on the pavement (but hey, the utitlities providers do) and the other, more important part, is that I like the idea of the marks having an impermanence, so they have to be renewed and validated on a regular basis by an active community of warchalkers.

The root of this stuff is Hobo language – Nadav pointed to some great resources on this a while ago. Like hobo language, hopefully we can evolve a little common symbology and chalk up our cities…

» Blackbeltjones.com: Let’s Warchalk!!!