Machinewhuffie

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0xDefcafbad on the relationship between the semantic web and whuffie* :

“Were the Semantic Web to take off in a big and easy to use way, people could spend more time creating answers and less time answering questions, since the machines do the job of fielding the questions themselves.

Of course… without the Whuffie, where’s the motivation to provide the data? “

Wild, uninformed speculation follows: so, to motivate the machine, is there a need for machine whuffie? Of course, machines don’t feel shame or pride in their work (as yet) and so reputation must lie in things like uptime, bandwidth etc – the things that get echo’d in p2p node ratings etc. Also, in a network, if you got a got reputation as a node that was great at handling semantic web queries, then would a ‘rich-get-richer’** effect come into play, eventually overloading the node with queries? Here’s the homepage of Beulah Alunkal who is researching reputation systems in grid-computing. Need to read more about this sort of thing – not for pratical purposes, but for good SF ideas…

“Les arts de la rue”

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John Thackara:

“The French – who, with their grands projets, have so long been focused on trophy buildings – have noted that ‘sociability’ and ‘liveability’ are now the key criteria for urban design and have gone off in a new direction: towards the development of live, participatory events as ways of adding value to a place. Formal cultural festivals have been booming in France for years, but the new craze is for ‘les arts de la rue’.”

» Icon magazine: November

The Pantone colour of destruction

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Michael Beirut at DesignObserver:

“…at another presentation, I glimpsed what perhaps will be a starting point for a new certainty, perhaps the ultimate one. Michael Braungart, author with William McDonough of Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things, talked about how graphic designers are contributing to the destruction of the environment. Braungart is not a designer. He’s a chemist. At one point in his presentation, he displayed a chart that described the precise amount of toxic elements in a single ink color. You felt the audience, 2000-plus strong, draw a collective breath. Here, at last, was true certainty: the promise that every piece of graphic design, each an amalgam of dozens of arbitrary, intuitive, ‘gee, this looks right to me’ decisions, could be put into a centrifuge, broken down into its constituent parts, and analyzed for the harm it could do to our environment.”

Best not get started on the ecological impact of the stuff that makes up a typical designer’s computer then…

Design in public services

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is the focus of an excellent, signal-rich blog by Brian Parkinson [found via Dan], who is a designer working for the NHS. My first job was as an architectural assistant working for the NHS in Wales about 10-11 years ago, in between my first degree and my post-graduate architetcure degree. Working in design in public service is sometimes frustrating but satisfying – I’ll be following Brian’s blog carefully.

Monday links, found with free wifi…

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Enjoying free wifi and good coffee at the moment in Tinderbox, Upper St, N1 [free until 1st November] and Foyles cafe on Charing Cross Road. Discovered Foyle’s hotspot while struggling to get connected in the souless surrounds of the Starbucks concession in Borders on Charing Cross Road.

Stood next to a window where the connection seemed to be there, if very poor – holding my laptop in one hand and trying to IM with one finger. Then, while cursing, opened a browser- and saw the splash-sponsorship screen for the hotspot bore the logos of Foyles and O’Reilly…

The cloud of connectivity was drifting across the road – not where I’d imagined it had orginated from at all! I shut down and moved across the road, where there was organic food, fine coffee, beer and nice tunes from Ray’s Jazz store that share the space with the cafe on the first floor of Foyles.

A lovely discovery to make, if it wasn’t my final week in London…