If you couldn't make it to the Bay Area Maker Faire, you can track the event on Twitter. [Link]
Serious worldsaving playMy latest article for the Austin Chronicle, in the just-released "green crush" issue, is about sustainability and gaming. The article mostly focused on an interview with Pliny Fisk, who's thinking hard about serious, robust sustainaqbility games and how they might work. [Link]
Fisk has been thinking hard about how to build a green game that's engaging and fun but with serious real-world implications, such as location-specific modeling of the balance that sustainability requires. One kind of game would focus on and simulate real city environments. It would explore models that maximize efficiency and minimize the environmental impact of the built environment. Fisk sees four flows that would be relevant: materiality flow, energy flow, information flow, and monetary flow.Doc on the Glass Roots Revolution
"Any one of those things can work related to the others," he says, "but they can also work independently. One measure of a city, from an information standpoint, is how much of the information network is actually reinforcing that place. How many newsletters and how many organizations and how many information sources are actually supporting and talking about the city, its people, its business?" There are also social information flows. "You could link people based on similar attributes and needs and so on. It's very much a peer-to-peer and can be a place-oriented way of operating." So an eco-game might include a city-centric social network.
Doc Searls has nuts and bolts info that lines up pretty well with my posts at Worldchanging about the DIY home of the future (here and here). Doc asks us to imagine what happens when it's really easy for home-hacking everyday people to run fiber optic cabling throughout the house bridge fibre to ethernet.
Where it goes is the independent hacking together of everything: a convergence of cheap, mobile and hackable. Add to that the half-zillion open source code bases now populate the world of useful tools and building materials, and you have the ingredients -- if not yet the recipe -- for remaking infrastructure from the edges inward.Chris Messina on OpenID
That edging inward is a movement that the phone company does not own, and can not own. And it won't just happen with wiring and wireless. It will happen with devices as well. The consumer electronics business will turn gradually in to the producer electronics business: a new category in which ordinary hackers far outnumber big manufacturers. In time, the few will follow the many, even as the many continue to follow the few.
Meaning that consumer electronics won't go away. It will just become the reciprocal of producer electronics. The two will work together. Because they'll have to. Those things that only large companies can do will continue to be done by those. And those things that can only be done by small companies and individuals will continue to be done by those. The difference is that the latter group will grow. A lot.
Chris Messina's updated his OpenID Hitlist/Shitlist. [Link]
...via Blogger, Google has become both an OpenID provider (with delegation) and consumer. Separately, Brad Fitzpatrick released the Social Graph API and declared that URLs are People Too.
DIY Home at Maker Faire
Photo above is a shot of the DIY Home of the Future installation at Maker Faire, concocted by Derek Woodgate, David Demaris, and I, with a lot of help from other folks. It wasn't practical to build our complete vision of the DIY Home, but we did manage to show some sense of the immersive media environment and suggest embedded "ambient intelligence" by including the very interesting biofeedback system "Healing Rhythms" from Wild Divine. This was a pretty good first instance of the kind of "Futurama" exhibition we want to do more of ... a kind of floating museum of the future. We ran into all sorts of interesting problems of production, but Dave Demaris is a real genius at solving those problems. Biggest hit: Brian Park's Flogiston Chair with a nice bendy screen for fully immersive game play. Kids were all over it. (BTW, we were using the same chair that was used in the film "Lawnmower Man.") We're at Maker Faire again today, if you're in or around Austin...
Public appearancesAn excessively busy couple of weeks here. Last week I coordinated a couple of sessions at Innotech Austin, where we talked about Sustainability and Social Media in one session, and Ambient Intelligence and Digital Convergence in another. (Some photos here. For Maker Faire this weekend, I've been working with Derek Woodgate, David Demaris, Joey Lopez, Maggie Duval et al to create a "futurama" installation on the DIY home of the future. We hope to give a good sense of three aspects of the home of the future: 1) it's reconfigurable by the "user," 2) it's responsive (via sensors picking up health and energy information, etc., and 3) it's an environment for immersive media and ambient intelligence. These are potential, anyway - I can imagine barriers. I talked to someone yesterday who's working on a project to create smart energy meters for homes that will send readings over the network (an idea that's been around for many years, but it's finally going somewhere). He said that the energy companies don't want residents to be able to see their energy usage. Not sure why; if I was a conspiracy theorist, I would imagine they want to jack with the numbers before they send a bill. But surely not...
Photo: The Sustainability and Social Media panel at Innotech... l to r: me, Bill Anderson, David Armistead, Josh Parker
Google and privacy (or Google vs. privacy) has come up in my conversations quite a bit lately... the more Google sinks its teeth into the global social information sandwich, the more I hear concerns that the company will somehow sometime misuse its massive databases and algorithmic expertise. The Wall Street Journal discussed the Google vs. Privacy domain with Cory Doctorow, who ficitionalized the growing paranoia in his recent story "Scroogled." Cory talks about the "real tension about, on the one hand, being good to people, but on the other hand, acquiring as much information about them as they can, under the rubric that it allows them to be better to people."
And it does, a lot of the time. There are lots of ways in which Google knowing more about you makes Google better for you. But without much regard to what's happening in the world around us, in an era in which the national security apparatus has turned into a kind of lumbering, savage, giant toddler, it behooves us to not leave things within arm's reach that it might stick in its mouth. And that includes things like my search history. And I'd prefer that Google not be storing a lot of that stuff, especially today, especially after Patriot [Act] and so on. They're inviting abuse, I think, by doing that. The steps you don't save can't be subpoenaed. And by saving them, Google is inviting a subpoena.
So Google's always had this kind of "We will collect all your information, and it will belong to us, and you won't be able to take it away, but it's OK because we'll only do good things for you" attitude, and that's a bit of a problem.
Photo: Cory Doctorow, 2004, by Jon L.
Being a Public CharacterIt's like we all bit a circus lion, like the dog in the Don Marquis story... we're all public characters now, dealing with whatever slices of attention come our way through our presence online. Our data stacks up in the nooks and crannies of the 'net, and it never goes away. It was inevitable that systems like Rapleaf would appear, aggregating our data and looking for ways to monetize it. I once wrote a piece called, "Who are you, who owns you?" - in which I said, bravely, that "there should be no legal framework within which my data can be considered someone else's asset." The genie, actually a large drooling cooter, is out of the bottle... Link to ZDNet TechNews on Rapleaf
PhotosynthThis photosynth demo is very cool... "We can do things with the social environment, taking data from everybody, from the entire collective memory visually of what the Earth looks like, and link all those photos together, and they become something emergent that's greater than the sum of the parts... this is something that grows in complexity as people use it... their own photos... become enriched with all that [everybody else's] metadata..." Thanks to David Weinberger for the "miscellaneous" pointer!
If WiFi is outlawed, only outlaws will use WiFiOkay, the title's a little off, but it felt clevered. Sam Peterson, an evidently upstanding citizen of Sparta, Michigan, was charged with a felony for using a coffee shop's open WiFi connection without going into the shop. It wasn't a problem for the owner of the shop, but police and local prosecutors figured there had to be something wrong with it, and sure enough, they found a law that seemed to make it illegal. [Link]