If, in the augmented reality of the day-after-tommorrow shown in telco commercials, you’re getting directions and suggestions from every wireless-which-way; wouldn’t you rather get them from your friends, than a megacorporation? Jo Walsh would, and luckily for us she’s working on it, as she tells the relaunched WriteTheWeb:

“If location-based, mobile services are going to become essential to my lifestyle, like my mobile phone has, I’d like to have an alternative to near-monopolistic commercial offerings. When I’m walking down a London backstreet and my mobile-of-the-future points out that I might enjoy that beer in that pub over there, I’d rather that was a friend of a friend , and not News International telling me so.”

Maps are power, and power to the people.

Nice.

Jo is going to be presenting this project at ETCON ’03.

» WriteTheWeb: Jo Walsh’s Spacenamelondon

Danger (who designed/produced the Hiptop) have launched Hiplog, their moblog environment. It’s a near-clone of amateur effort HiptopNation, which preceded it’s commercial equivalent (as is now common in the New Cambrian Era of the web) by a number of months.

Joi Ito thinks that they share some DNA [update comments on Joi’s site indicate that they do not], but where corporate nuture is taking over from open-source nature is clear already from this, one of the inaugural posts to Hiplog:

“Unless my posts can be under a Creative Commons license, this is the only post I’ll be sending here… This is what I think of your terms of agreement [pictured]. I prefer to retain copyright on everything I produce, and give it away as I see fit”

I know that the owner-demographic of the Danger at the moment is in all likelihood techno-savvy, early-adopters who are ultra-aware and ultra-paranoid about their personal information and content, but wouldn’t it be great if this kind of “personal copyright awareness” went mainstream… Sounds like a job for a public-service media organisation…

John Webword Rhodes on how commercial WIFI provision through payphones could complement or compete with Clay’s vision of DIYfi or DIYfratstructure.

” So I think we are seeing the end of Warchalking, but we are seeing the beginnings of a very strong wireless network. The internet will be everywhere, all the time, available to all devices. And you won’t need to look for quaint Warchalking markings. Instead, you’ll walk into Starbucks or Wallmart or Barnes and Noble, or you’ll be walking through your neighborhood, or perhaps some place near a payphone. You’ll have the web around you, all of the time. At home, at the office. Everywhere. It’ll be like air or water. Wi-Fi will just be there. At some point, you won’t have to worry about where you are. Wi-Fi or some other related wireless network will provide you with an internet blanket, and you’ll always feel warm and cozy. No Warchalking required.

Please don’t mourn the loss of Warchalking. It made plenty of people drool and it helped people start really thinking about Wi-Fi in all places. It helped people think about how to expand and extend the internet. To make it more like a utility, always on and available. With all this said, I’m actually excited about the death of Warchalking.”
[My emboldening]

If indeed warchalking‘s dead… then that’s the best epitaph I could hope for.

» Webword: How Warchalking Died
[Via Anil Dash]

For something I’m doing at work, I mailed a few folk about the benefits of installing wireless networks in the workplace. Phil Windley was the first to reply, and he’s blogged it here. Superuseful.

» Windley.com: Wireless Workplace Wisdom

Wow. Someone is blogging live with their hiptop as they are running the Honolulu Marathon.

Kevin Werbach writes on the worth-watching Supernova blog about “the next communications network”:

“WiFi is taking off as a grassroots phenomenon. More users leads to more access points, which leads to WiFi being built into more devices, which pushes down costs, etc. With enough density, WiFi could be the basis for the phone and broadband network of the future.”

This reinforces what Nicholas Negroponte was saying in his WiReD piece “Lilypads and Frogs” that got me thinking back in September. I clumsily married some of these things together, along with some carfreeLondon in a talk I gave on the “hypermobility” track of the “beyond the Backlash” thinktankathon, entitled “DIYfrastructure” [1.8mb powerpoint in need of annotation]

Also – Danny’s writing about the idea that was at the core of our carfreeLondon proposal:

“I think [the] largest hurdle public transport has to overcome, I think, is the feeling of powerlessness and unpredictability it induces in most people. I think you can go a long way to reducing that – without requiring any heavy initial investments in public transport itself, by harnassing this new tech.”

I made a very brief talk about at this the social software summit in NYC: DevelopingBlurryspace/Blurrytime: giving people control over their time and space through technology. More on this later. There was a somewhat similar presentation which was a little higher on style than substance by someone from Ivrea entitled “Fluidtime” at Doors7.