The End of Cyberspace

links for 2006-06-01

• Materialization and Dematerialization: Measures and Trends - Wernick, Herman, Govind, and Ausubel
  Study of dematerialization-- "the absolute or relative reduction in the quantity of materials required to serve economic functions"-- in the United States.
  (tags: environment energy consumption)

VERB Yellowball

On the heels of reading David Weinberger's piece on unique IDs, a friend sent me a link about VERB Yellowball.

VERB YELLOWBALL is a big, bouncy, world-changing idea that was created to spread play to every kid in America.

Here’s the deal. We’re scattering thousands of yellow balls all across the country. It’s up to you to find one, play with it, and most importantly, pass it on.

FIND ONE. Someone is bound to pass one to you. Can’t wait? Check out our “Pass It On” section.

PLAY WITH IT. However you want. Whenever you want. Just play.

WHEN YOU'RE DONE, ENTER THE CODE ON THE BALL AND BLOG YOUR STORY TO THE WORLD.

PASS IT ON. To a friend, or a kid you don’t even know. Pass it as far as you want. If you’re going on a trip, bring it with you. Remember, this is a revolution. And you are the messenger.

It's a bit like Where's George, in that part of the point of the game-- or meta-game?-- is to contribute to a record of the object's travels, and the system relies on each object having a unique ID that is linked to information about it. Though in this case, the purpose of the records (or the blogs for each ball) seems to be to encourage more use-- to get other users to play with the ball.

Not quite things that blog, but things that are blogged.

Not hard to imagine such objects connected to online games-- for example, putting objects that have magical properties in a game environment out in the real world.

Technorati Tags: digital-physical, end of cyberspace, games, blogject, sports, unique ID

Unique IDs

Stupid that I haven't seen David Weinberger's December 2005 piece on unique IDs until now:

Last year, it was Web 2.0 and tagging. This year, it's going to be unique IDs (UIDs), and for the same reason that Web 2.0 and tagging matter: The Web is going miscellaneous.

Technorati Tags: business, Web 2.0

From library to learning commons

Librarian Steve Thomas has a short piece placing the recent rise of the "library as place" meme as a defensive move against arguments that "if everything is online, we don't need libraries." The whole post is worth reading, but here are a couple paragraphs:

So now, the mantra in libraries is collaborative learning. We have to provide space for the students to study, and we have to let them study in groups, and talk and make noise. We have to provide facilities for them – not just computers, but coffee and exhibitions. The Information Commons is now the “Learning Commons” – again the emphasis is on the user rather than the provider. It’s not the information that’s important, it’s what the user can do with that information.

If I sound cynical, I don’t mean to be. (I just can’t help myself!) I think the early adopters of the WWW were thinking in the right direction, if perhaps over-enthusiastically. The web has had an extraordinary effect, and made access to information much easier, but the death of the book was a mis-fire. We may see the end of printed textbooks, but there are no indications of books generally being replaced by online access. And the Library as Place concepts are likely to lead to some kind of renaissance for libraries, making them more attractive and interesting spaces, while retaining something of the mystique of being the repository of all knowledge.

And -- ironically -- it is the web and electronic access which makes this possible. As more and more journals and their back-sets become available online, we can shift many thousands of bulky volumes to off-site stores, freeing up space for study areas. Wireless networking and notebook computers can allow students to access information from all parts of the library, whether online or in print – finally making the Hybrid Library into a reality. In effect, the whole library becomes a “Learning Commons” – a place to learn which is available to all, equally.

Technorati Tags: collaboration, design, digital-physical, end of cyberspace, library, place/space

Is scanning as good as reality?

In the latest New Yorker, there's an article about L'affaire Meinertzhagen, the discovery of fabricated and sometimes stolen works in the collections of famed ornithologist and collector Richard Meinertzhagen. This bit caught my eye: one worry that scientists working to uncover the extent of Meinertzhagen's fraud in the British Museum was that their findings

might damage the collection at a time when some scientists were beginning to debate the value of keeping large collections. In the same way that card catalogues in libraries were disposed of once their contents were digitally rendered, so, perhaps, could specimens be removed from museums, once they had been digitally sampled and photographed-- freeing up valuable space for revenue-generating attractions like planetariums. "Serious people have seriously suggested that once you digitize the specimens you don't really need them," [Smithsonian ornithologist Pamela] Rasmussen told me, indignantly. "People are asking what collections are good for, why do we need to keep them?"

This is one of the more spectacular examples of the assumption that digital versions of physical objects-- particularly scientific specimens or printed works-- are just as good as the objects themselves, which is in turn an expression of the cyberspace-era notion that the digital world (or digital records) was superior to the physical world (or physical things).

Technorati Tags: digital culture, digital-physical, library

links for 2006-05-30

• ZMA - Bird type specimens online in 3D
  "This section provides direct access to 3D images of 151 type specimens in the bird collection of the Zoological Museum Amsterdam (ZMA)."
  (tags: science digital-physical documentation)
• UC TLtC: Art, Artifacts & Slides: Digitization Opens Collections to New Audiences and Uses
  2003 article on digitizing artifacts and slides from various U. of California collections.
  (tags: science preservation digital-physical digitization)
• The Chronicle: 1/24/2003: Art History Without Slides
  On the ups and downs of digitizing art history slide collections.
  (tags: digital-physical digitization preservation art education)

links for 2006-05-27

• Invisibility cloaks 'are in sight'
  "The development of new materials could see items such as invisibility cloaks, a key weapon in the trickery of Harry Potter and countless science fiction plots, become a reality within five years."
  (tags: science)

links for 2006-05-26

• Leverage Software
  "Leverage online communities to understand your customers."
  (tags: collaboration pro-am)

Semapedia

Semapedia.org describes itself as "the physical wiki." The basic idea

is to connect the virtual and physical world by bringing the best information from the internet to the relevant place in physical space.

We do this by combining the physical annotation technology of Semacode with high quality information from Wikipedia.

Most simply, the Semapedia system generates 2D barcodes that can be linked to Wikipedia articles (and maybe any other Web page? not sure). When you point a camera cell phone at the code, you can call up the article. Here's more:

The significance of Semacode is that one can now link a real world, physical object to arbitrary data. Before there has been no link, except for things like ordinary barcodes such as those used in stores to label products, or on books to indicate publication details. Unlike Semacodes, traditional barcodes have limited storage for information, are fixed function and good for only one narrow application, and also require the use of special, custom hardware and software to read or access such barcodes.

With the Semacode approach, all it now takes is for an ordinary camera phone, equipped with a Semacode reader software package (available free of charge by pointing your mobile phone web browser to the ‘over the air’ distribution). There is no need to purchase any hardware or software to read these two dimensional barcodes.

Semacodes, by embedding a URL into a barcode, enable any portion of the Internet to be ‘attached’ to any object, and can replace barcodes by going further to give arbitrary information on the Internet, not just the simple product number.

Naturally, are pictures of semapedia in action on flickr, and a flickr semapedia cluster.

There are a growing number of little systems that consist of stickers/tags/barcodes + back end with some content + delivery of said content to mobile device. All pushing to make it easier to access digital information in physical places-- easier both in technical terms, and in terms of lowering the amount of work or distraction required. What's a general name for these things? Is there one yet?

Technorati Tags: digital culture, digital-physical, end of cyberspace

Fabrication and architecture

Yet another data-point on the relationship between fabrication technologies, design, and education. It's weird how you sometimes see clusters of things.

Fabrication: The Fifth Ecology of Los Angeles

For [architect] Jason Payne of gnuform, Los Angeles provided an opportunity, as he says, “to strain through materiality” the more abstract formal experimentation his office had been pursuing in New York....

Los Angeles’s unique culture of fabrication that make it one of the most exciting places to practice in the world today. Drawing on the expertise of fabricators working with Los Angeles-based aerospace, automotive, and entertainment industries, these and other area architects are beginning to materialize designs that until recently were trapped inside their computers. What seems especially appealing is the willingness of Los Angeles fabricators to take on jobs that require extraordinary flexibility in schedule, budget and specifications of final product.

This looseness and embrace of collaboration has fostered a design culture in which fabrication has become an increasingly important engine of design innovation. Architects design by making, by fabricating, which enables them to quickly learn from successes and failures, building the design intelligence required of more refined and robust designs.

I suspect that many of the substantive objections to having computers in the classroom can be boiled down to issues involving bringing a then-disruptive cyberspace into the classroom-- and that we can begin to see how, for some disciplines at least, we could design our way past those problems.

Technorati Tags: architecture, California, city, end of cyberspace, prototyping