Category: Tech

Flash Mobs and Dance Halls

Paul Resnick writes enthousiastically about Flash Mobs as a new form of social organization that may displace longer-term associations and friendships. Instant communication makes things faster, but the gathering of strangers has been part of urban civilizations since the days of dance halls and public hangings.
Flash mobbing makes it easier for people to flock. Those groups will complement longer-term associations, rather than displacing them. Here in Austin, webloggers and online journalers have become friends in physical space. The Texas Dean Meetups are being used as a base for strengthening the Democratic party precinct system.
This cartoon is pretty funny, but my guess is that new ways to meet people are competing with time spent home in front of the television, rather than with “real friends.”
In short, I think augmenting flocking is cool, but it’s not so new, and it adds rather than takes away from the repertoire of human social behavior.

Your life as a soundtrack

Ed Vielmetti suggests a music player that plays music based on your location.

…a mobile music device like an iPod that has GPS location on it, so that it knows where you are and selects or offers up things to listen to based on where you are or what’s coming up. Some of it is totally ideosyncratic, like playing tunes from bands you saw at concert venues when you go past or near the venue. Some of it is obvious, like playing Mystery Spot Polka when you’re on US-2 heading west out of St Ignace, or Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald on M-123 north of M-28 near Whitefish Bay.

Prentiss Riddle builds on the idea and suggests a collaborative soundrack…

If you combined it with GeoURLs (and some method of doing wireless downloads of music to an iPod, a bit of a stretch given 2003 infrastructure and copyright law) you could construct a collaborative musical geography….
A “songlines” system would require a GeoURL engine with hooks to CDDB or an equivalent music database, preferably with a bit more annotation capability than GeoURLs offer; a way to plan a route and query the GeoURL engine to produce a playlist; preferably some capability in the playlist generator to filter CDDB info for genre (no death metal, thanks) and song density (the songs associated with Graceland or Times Square or Austin’s Sixth Street would run into the thousands, while some highways would be lucky to have one song per 50 miles). The hard part would be a discovery agent to trawl various file-sharing systems for the MP3s.

Wow. All kinds of opportunities for collaborative performance art.
This would be cool for reunions… “they’re playing our song.” Or creating a mix tape for a friend programmed for a favorite walk. All you need are lighting effects cued to emotional dynamics and life becomes a movie.

iTunes and Diversity

from a Slate article comparing the iTunes Top 100 with the Billboard Top 100:

“Billboard says that Apple, the most aggressive player in this market so far, is selling an average of 500,000 tracks a week. If that’s true, and it takes just 1,500 sales to be No. 1, then the variety of tracks that people are downloading must be extremely broad

You are not your identity

Joi Ito writes: There is a lot of talk about identity these days. You MUST remember that identities are like names. You are NOT your identity. Your identity points to you. Everyone has multiple identities. Roger Clark describes this as the difference between entities and identities. You are an entity. Your name, your role in the company, your relationship with your child, they are different identities. Multiples identities isn’t just about having more than one email address or chat room nym. A multitude of identities is an essential component in protecting privacy and interacting in an exceedingly digital world.

Wifi Wiki Hifi

Gordon Mohr wants a Wifi Wiki Hifi “Imagine that a cafe has both wireless net access and a net-linked stereo. Just like a Wiki website lets visitors edit its pages, such a sound system would let walk-in visitors mix its audio playlist.”
Gordon brings up a small concern: “The only real impediment here is that if you want to get technical, such dynamic unlicensed music sharing and performance is illegal.”
Yes, but commercial venues already have license terms for recorded music they play for the crowd. It shouldn’t be impossible to work out a deal to extend the terms to digital mix and play.

Is Google God?

..is the headline of Tom Friedman’s column today in the New York times. “Says Alan Cohen, a V.P. of Airespace, a new Wi-Fi provider: “If I can operate Google, I can find anything. And with wireless, it means I will be able to find anything, anywhere, anytime. Which is why I say that Google, combined with Wi-Fi, is a little bit like God. God is wireless, God is everywhere and God sees and knows everything. Throughout history, people connected to God without wires. Now, for many questions in the world, you ask Google, and increasingly, you can do it without wires, too.”
Well, almost. The canonical description of a monotheistic deity is “omnicient, omnipresent, and omnipotent.” (Pagan myths, by contrast, would have pretty boring plots if the gods knew everything and were all-powerful)
Google comes pretty close to “all-knowing” and “omnipresent” with wireless internet access. But omnipotent, nope. Google doesn’t cause anything to happen, so it’s clearly not all-powerful.
Google’s omniscience is missing a few attributes, if you look a bit more closely. Google knows everything about the present, and a lot about the past. But it doesn’t report query results for in dates the future.
Another canonical attribute of divine omnicience is wisdom. Is Google wise? The top search result for enterprise application architecture is Martin Fowler’s book on the subject, which seems like a pretty good call to me.
Google will also tell you all about Jennifer Aniston, too.
The wisdom of the answer depends on the wisdom of the question.