Digital Badges

I’ve been fascinated by the idea of wearable digital badges that could be programmed with messages. There are some affordable packages like the MessageTag or Mtag. The question (before I buy one) is … just what would I program it to display?

A related, but more sophisticated, product is nTAG which is essentially a small screen others can read off your chest. It has RFID and infrared so nTAGs can communicate with each other (“Hi, I like vanilla ice cream too!”) or with a central server. The nTAG web site is coy about privacy and costs. I think they rent you the service and don’t sell the technology, which is a pity, as it would be interesting to imagine some playful uses. For a story about nTAG, see Breaking the Ice 2.0.

lavalife: Where Canadian singles go

The Globe and Mail has a story by Dr. Jean Marmoreo, “You can speed up love” (Saturday, Feb. 12, 2005, page F7) about older newly single women who are “slicing time” and using lavalife.com to meet other singles. The article and the web site claims that 8 million Canadians have accounts on lavalife, an extraordinary number. Dr. Marmoreo talks about slicing time – not having the time to mess around when you are a professional with children and therefore using web dating services.

What matters

Christopher Alexander is his 1996 talk to OOPSLA on The Origins of Pattern Theory ends by calling on programmers to reconceive what they are doing with a view to the living good.

It is a view of programming as the natural genetic infrastructure of a living world which you/we are capable of creating, managing, making available, and which could then have the result that a living structure in our towns, houses, work places, cities, becomes an attainable thing. That would be remarkable. It would turn the world around, and make living structure the norm once again, throughout society, and make the world worth living in again.

New media and multimedia likewise have to ask about the ethics of what we do. Are multimedia designers just the rhetors of the digital age – packaging the message of anyone who pays to be as entertaining as possible? Or, are we committeed to coding a living world along with programmers?

Pattern Languages

Unless you’ve been asleep, you will have noticed the spread of Christopher Alexander’s pattern theory through computing. In The Origins of Pattern Theory: The Future of the Theory, And The Generation of a Living World (a talk given in San Jose, California, at the 1996 ACM Conference on Object-Oriented Programs, Systems, Languages and Applications (OOPSLA)) he reflects on the theory and how it has taken root in computing.

The pattern language that we began creating in the 1970s had other essential features. First, it has a moral component. Second, it has the aim of creating coherence, morphological coherence in the things which are made with it. And third, it is generative: it allows people to create coherence, morally sound objects, and encourages and enables this process because of its emphasis on the coherence of the created whole.

Continue reading Pattern Languages

Iain (M) Banks: Feersum Endjinn

Feersum Endjinn by Iain (aka Iain M.) Banks is the best sci-fi novel I’ve read in a while. Ian M. Banks is a Scottish fiction and science fiction writer. His sci-fi goes under “Iain M. Banks” and his straight fiction under “Iain Banks”. Feersum Endjinn is in that Brit dark fantasy/sci fi style of Mervyn Peake and later Pullman. It is tough to read with one narrator whose sections read in something like l33t speak. The world of Feersum Endjinn is an outsized castle where ruined rooms are broad fields or cities and there is a data corpus that anyone not too senior is implanted to be able to access. Citizens have multiple lives, both real and then virtual. Every page slowed me down with twisted insights or insights that twisted. Easily one of the most imaginative writers, though sometimes I worry M-Banks loses his plot in the display of wit and the fantastic. Just think about the title of the book.
Continue reading Iain (M) Banks: Feersum Endjinn

PressThink’s Top Ten Ideas for 2004

Jay Rosen’s blog on the press and media has a nice entry on PressThink’s Top Ten Ideas for 2004. The top ten ideas are:

1. The Legacy Media.
2. He said, she said, we said.
3. What the printing press did to the Catholic Church the blogging press does to the media church.
4. Open Source Journalism, or: "My readers know more than I do."
5. News turns from a lecture to a conversation.
6. "Content will be more important than its container."
7. "What once was good–or good enough–no longer is."
8. "The victory of affinity over geography."
9. The Pajamahadeen.
10. The Reality-Based Community.

There are explanations or links to blog entries that explain these. It is a great way to summarize a year of ideas. More generally Rosen’s blog does a good job of linking to highlights of ideas and short essays. His blog seems a good example of a blog made up of short essays rather than just links.