marcuspecht’s blog

Just watched two episodes of gestalten.tv. great podcaston arts& design, architecture. Hgih quality produced intensively communicating the message.

So everyware is coming. These little rabbits can already do quite a lot of things as being your alarm clock, read RSS feeds, podcasts or receive messages.

NABAZTAG:TAG by Violet in English

This is a very nice analysis of the news reporting about current and daily happening catastrophies which calculates a news death ration for swine flu and tuberculosis.

The Freesound Project is a collaborative database of Creative Commons
licensed sounds. Freesound focusses only on sound, not songs. This is
what sets freesound apart from other splendid libraries like ccMixter. You can find collections, geotagged sounds and remix the sounds. Great stuff if you want to build geotagging environments.

Acces the search here, I found also very interesting the exploration by tags!

where is mobile content going?
http://www.slideshare.net/kaeru/mobile-game-directions/

nice one.

I am in the Program Committee for the CAMA workshop on Contextualized Attention Metadata: personalized access to digital resources see webpage at:

http://ariadne.cs.kuleuven.be/cama2007/

it will be at ACM IEEE Joint Conference on Digital Libraries in Vancouver.

Organized by Erik Duval, Jehad Najjar, and Martin Wolpers

The new MACE project website is online now. We used Joomla for the page and I like the design realized by the MACE partners. Check out www.mace-project.eu if you are interested in learning objects, federated object repositories, architecture and design, and new things you can do with metadata .

MACE Project Website.

Oy is a system of between-stop informal gaming by Andy Huntington (Andy has a list of very interesting projects on his website at http://www.extraversion.co.uk/about.html).

The OY Project!
Participants send in text messages in the bus and have to answer question like in which sequence will we see some places on the bus route. The game also use GPS data of the bus. Nice idea. I like the approach in the sense of combination of different channels. Using SMS senders for information in and public displays for information out.

There is a nice list of mobile social software applications maintained by Timo Arnall at

http://www.elasticspace.com/2004/06/mobile-social-software .

Also Nicolas Nova maintains a nice blog pasta and vinegar http://tecfa.unige.ch/perso/staf/nova/blog/ where he reports some recent works about context aware and location aware applications.

A very nice podcast on the Internet of Things can be found at IT conversations: http://www.itconversations.com/shows/detail717.html

Sterling contrasts waking up in a Internet of Things in 30 years with todays world which is still struggling to find the right labels for “the internet of things”. Very inspiring! Also you should have a look at “Shaping things” by Bruce Sterling.

Some ideas from his talk:

Are words constraining our imagination and search for the best we could make out of machines? AI went wrong because of those writing words about it. Internet of things is not about Intelligence it is about a new relationship towards objects in the real world. This happes in six components:

1. TAGS (Barcode, RFID),
2. POSITIONING SYSTEMS (GEO-LOCATION and tracking systems),
3. SEARCH Engines,
4. Transparent Production, Cradle2Cradle,
5. 3D virtual models for design,
6. rapid prototyping objects

this will lead to different objects and people will interact differently with, SPIMES (physical instantiations of virtual objects).

BUT WHY SHOULD DO THAT?

it will feel good; external inventarization of my things in a ubiquitous machinery offering me a search engine;

“google my shoes in the morning!”