Landmarks, wayfinding and the 3-ring binder

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Abstract Dynamics:

“What happens to landmarks when every store is a chain? When we live life at 70 miles an hour we hand our navigation skills over to the government and place our trust in freeway signage. But what about when slow down to 35, stop and go, through the infinite “strip” feeds Americans and their cars?

The preferred navigation is landmark. Follow the river, keep the mountain on your left, turn right at the large oak, veer left at the rabbit rock. Walk towards the walls, through the iron gates, left at inn, right at the bank. Towards the capital, left at the Starbucks, right at the Jamba Juice, you’ll see it right before the B of A… All of a sudden our landmarks are multiplying. And make no mistake plenty of effort goes into making sure those marks are memorable. But anyone who turns at a Starbucks is going nowhere but in circles…”

Puts me in mind of the franchised-landscape spread by the DNA of the 3-ring binders as described in Snowcrash.

Hypercard RIP

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Ben Hyde on the magic of hypercard:

“It never competed with the installed base of developers. Instead it generated this amazing bloom of new tiny little applications. Instead it illustrated what happens when you manage to hand a useful tool over to a large unserved population of amateurs. The tail of the power-law curve.

I wonder, if flash is the closest modern equivalent; maybe so.”

I really regret never playing with Hypercard that much. Back in around 1987 I suppose, I nagged for a copy back at the print shop I used to work at after school, but I never really had the time or the persistence to get into it. And now it’s gone… sniff

My old school

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My old school Porthcawl Comprehensive, in South Wales has introduced a SMS-surveillance system to stop truancy, with the delightfully honest name of “Informer”, that enables the school to text parents if kids are not present at class:

“Porthcawl Comprehensive School has had an Informer system for over a year.

Head teacher Kenneth Dykes found that while not all parents were enthusiastic, the system has helped improve communication between school and home. He said, “Being able to communicate with parents to let them know that their child has not attended registration has helped us increase attendance and keep in touch with parents more often.”

I look forward to reading how the kids in Porthcawl Comp inevitably hack their way around this…

» icWales: Text messaging helps schools beat truancy

Blowing Melvin’s mind

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Deep joy to be had from subscribing to Melvin Bragg’s “In our time” newsletter, that supports the Radio4 show of the same name.

This week our hero, Melvin, describes having his mind blown early one morning by a bunch of physicists explaining string theory to him:

“Hello

This morning’s programme was a tough one for me. I gave up physics at
the age of 14 because the school to which I went was very small and at
that time, in the mid-Fifties, you had to make what proved to be
crucial decisions ridiculously early. I was also not much good at
physics.

About 15 years ago when, as I discovered like many people in my
generation, I saw that some of the most intense, vivid and beguiling
ideas around were to be found in general books about science, I tried
to get some sort of grip on what I had left behind quite happily at
the age of 14.

It’s proved to be extremely difficult and this morning was clearest
proof. Sometimes you hold on by your fingertips. Sometimes you hold
on by your fingernails. I was holding on by what could be called a
planck length which is so infinitesimal as to make the head of a pin
look like Wales.”

Read the full newsletter below:
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City of storage II

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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…

Place and chips

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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

City of storage

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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