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Wednesday, April 19, 2006 |
Everyware discussion on Well: new book about ubicomp.
The Well's Inkwell Conference, which is open to the public, features a discussion with Adam Greenfield, author of Everyware, an excellent new book about the implications of ubicomp:
Computing devices shrink ever smaller and become invisible, while at the same time we interact with them and they communicate with one another. Rather than carrying phones and PDAs, our desks, rooms, and clothing, our food and our sex toys converge, interconnect, and interact. Their connectedness is hidden from us, we don't control the information they record, and there's no "Undo" key.
"Great, another loopy novelist in the Inkwell, extrapolating from a random headline in a trade journal," you say.
It's not loopy fiction, according to Adam Greenfield. Instead, it's the form computing will take in the next few years, and it behooves us to think it through in advance, in order both to understand it and humanize it. That's the subject of "Everyware: The dawning age of ubiquitous computing."
Join Adam Greenfield from the beginning of the conversation or catch up on the latest posts
[Smart Mobs]
6:33:02 PM 
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The internet and big decisions.
The Pew Internet & American Life Project has released a report that says "the internet has become increasingly important to users in their everyday lives.It is also the case that for many of online Americans, the internet has become a crucial source of information at major moments and milestones in their lives.Our surveys show that 45% of internet users,or about 60 million Americans,say that the internet helped them make big decisions or negotiate their way through major episodes in their lives in the previous two years".
The Internet’s Growing Role in Life’s Major Moments [Smart Mobs]
6:32:15 PM
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- 90 Years of Webster. It began in 1898, when the Sisters of Loretto, a catholic women's organization, bought the Benjamin Webster estate with the intent to open a college for women.
- Sisters of Loretto formed Webster's foundation. While a religious congregation no longer runs the university, Webster still has ties to its founding mothers, the Sisters of Loretto. Several sisters continue to work at Webster, while others are scattered across the globe.
- KICKBALL. Webster 2005 alumnus Drew Johnson prepares to gun down a petrified opponent during the second of many kickball games April 18 on the Quad. The game is a weekly fixture Tuesday afternoons.
[The Journal]
6:32:06 PM
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The Ferrari that split in half.
"How do we know it was going 162 mph when it crashed?" Daniel Engber at Slate tell us how investigators calculated the speed of the rare Ferrari Enzo sports car that crashed and split in two on the Pacific Coast Highway. [Pajamas Media]
6:38:15 AM
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GreenScanner.
Ever stand in a grocery aisle contemplating the unknown (and potentially unappealing) story about where a product comes from and what it contains? Given the deceptive nature of advertising and packaging, the best way to get a straight answer about a product is to aggregate the opinions of its users. Enter GreenScanner, a public database of consumer opinions about the environmental accountability of over 600,000 products.
GreenScanner was developed by Bill Tomlinson, a researcher at UC Irvine's California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology. He's created a simple page, with a text box where you can enter a UPC code to find other people's ratings of a product. It's designed for use with network-enabled mobile devices, meaning that when you're standing in the grocery aisle fretting over whether to buy something, you can whip out your blackberry and find out on the spot. You can also add your own ratings and commentary after you've tried something.
Now that Tomlinson has set this system up, though, it's up to us to build up the arsenal of consumer reports. The service will become more effective the more we contribute our own opinions to it. Collaborative networked technology for choosing better groceries! We'll give that a Worldchanging stamp of approval.
[WorldChanging: Another World Is Here]
6:37:02 AM
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Free Expression in Asian Cyberspace.
I’m currently at the Free Expression in Asian Cyberspace conference in Manila, Philippines, with other prominent folks from the blogsphere, like Rebecca MacKinnon, Ethan Zuckerman, Jeff Ooi and Isaac Mao. You can check out the conference blog for a rundown of presentations on “Southeast Asia, South Asia and East Asia in Manila to share experiences and discuss needs, threats, trends, and issues of ethics and the emerging roles and responsibilities of bloggers, podcasters and the alternative online media.”
Myself - I’ll be talking about blogging and podcasting in China, and also wikis and online collaboration. [Center for Citizen Media: Blog]
6:36:59 AM
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