JonCamfieldBlog

Well, here it is, post SXSW and I've been nowhere near Austin.

Not that, as a native Austinite, I really get hyped up about SXSW. All these people invade the city and make me wait Really Long Times to go to my favorite restaurants, and all the bars charge exorbitant amounts of cover for live music, which'd be different if they didn't normally have live music year-round.

But the panels are sometimes good, and (the occasional times I'm in Austin for SXSW of recent), I like to at least know what's going on, and use my connections to get into the right parties. The trick to SXSW parties is if you know you're supposed to be there, and can toss out the right names, you don't need to flash your badge. Which is good, because I never buy a badge anyhow.

Bruce's keynote at SXSW this year rehashed his SIGGRAPH speech on informational objects/blogjects/spimes (Wikipedia attempts to define spime) First of, I think spime is a better term for IM spam than an information object, but that's beside the point.

Now, Information-Objects are not a terribly new thing, the ubiquitous computing movement's been (every few years) popping up with fun devices that give you info, like the grandaddy of them all, the XEROX fountain which altered its flow depending on the trading rates of XEROX's stock. More recently is the Ambient Orb line of stuff, which you can set to change colors depending on various variables.

The new thing here is of course that the information is going the other way -- these (items-which-need-a-new-name) send out info, not just report it. Depending on their network requirements (Can they use Sat-phones for a reasonable cost?), they could be very useful in various development causes -- human rights protection/observation, environment reporting, and potentially interesting possiblities to better enable Participatory Video type "new media" projects.

Of course, we do get to ponder the security implications of furbys and spimes...

Posted by Jon at 12:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (2)

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... not my style at all, but that was what I was aiming for: If they think you’re crude, go technical; if they think you’re technical, go crude. I’m a very technical boy. So I decided to get as crude as possible. These days, though, you have to be pretty technical before you can even aspire to crudeness. --William Gibson, Johnny Mnemonic

Sometimes, providing for the lowest common denominator means you have to get super innovative with your technology; witness the One Laptop Per Child project (which I have some doubts on the intended implementation, but the design at least is excellent) -- and sometimes, you just have get creative and get your hands dirty. For this, see the Blue Trunk Libraries for keeping doctors in remote areas up to date with medical advances, using a condensed "library" of books in a rugged, portable blue plastic trunk.

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DC seeks city-wide wifi, and actually focuses on free access for the poor.

DC is looking for proposals to set up wireless internet across large chunks of the city, and it makes free access for 100,000 poor the main focus. DC is being clever, and avoiding "using" tax dollars to fund this. The city expects the company to make money off of the deal by charging in higher-income areas so as to provide free access in the lowest-income areas (Jason and I might be lucky recipients of free wifi!) In return for the risk involved, the company gets an 8 year monopoly on muni-wifi (how does one define that?) and exclusive access to tack antennas to existing telephone/signal poles and gov't-owned buildings.

From a technical standpoint, there's a lot of work and risk involved for kinda unexciting benefits. The company would already have to compete with the cell providers who offer Internet service to computers, who might be encouraged to do some not-nice business practices (being oligopolies with strong (2-year contractual) lock-in (tho less, with number portability, whee).

How this would effect travelling users (say, I get it free at home, would I have to pay $X.xx/month to use it outside of my home area (e.g. downtown?). Also, the article seems to indicate that there'd be some market that would not benefit, probably among the middle class neighborhoods, where the service demand would be so piddly (why bother to pay an additional monthly fee if you're already getting higher speeds through DSL or cable, unless you want to drop your DSL/Cable... also, can this connection be shared, or is it per-person? A house of 5 using DSL for 15+basic phone/month better off than 5x$20/month?)

In my more paranoid moments, I wonder what could happen in the US if the dial-up/DSL/Cable "Internet" became untenably wiretapped, filtered, etc. There are some interesting home-bake mesh network ideas; Champaign-Urbana Community Wireless Network (CUWiN) has a nice downloadable ISO that you can burn to a CD, reboot into, and set up a wireless mesh node that will supposedly self-configure, and CommunityWireless.org has some promising links. Appropriately, WirelessAnarchy seems to have the best combination of local links and general tech links.

In the rush to connect people to the Internet, we forget that any computer network benefits from network effects. Even the links above aim at connecting a massive area to the Net using a few shared gateways, but is the bigger win not in a large, local "intranet"? People on the net could provide various services, (media/pr0n sharing being the most likely), but also blog/forum sites, IM/IRC/chat services, games, etc. -- simple p2p communication for a community could be an important first step in moving them to being able to take full advantage of the Internet; after all, that's kinda how we all started out, with BBSes, local service oriented dial-ins like compuserv/prodigy/etc....

Posted by Jon at 02:09 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

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