The End of Cyberspace

links for 2006-08-01

• Hypertext and the scholarly archive
  "This paper argues that the scholarly archive is going though a process of hypertextualization that is not adequately accounted for in theories on hypertext. A methodological approach based on Gerard Genette’s theory of transtextuality is proposed."
  (tags: hypertext)
• The Faith-Based Encyclopedia
  Former Britannica editor-inchief Robert McHenry's critique of Wikipedia.
  (tags: collective_intelligence community Internet wiki wikipedia encyclopedia)
• Open Source = Closed Minds?
  Critique of Wikipedia.
  (tags: collaboration wikipedia encyclopedia)
• The FUD-based Encyclopedia
  Response to Robert McHenry's "The Faith-Based Encyclopedia," a critique of Wikipedia.
  (tags: encyclopedia wikipedia collaboration open_source)
• Encyclopaedia Britannica Online?
  1995 Wired Magazine article asking, "Given that the Web itself is becoming the sum of the world's knowledge, isn't putting the Encyclopaedia Britannica online a spectacularly useless thing to do?"
  (tags: encyclopedia Internet)
• Constructing the Digital Universe » Blog Archive » The New Politics of Knowledge
  Wikipedia, "the amazingly huge, wide-open encyclopedia project has become the locus of a new debate over the politics of knowledge."
  (tags: encyclopedia open_source collaboration collective_intelligence)

Search 2.0

Building on Tim O'Reilly's idea of bionic software is Ebrahim Ezzy's two-part review of "third-generation" search services. These

are designed to combine the scalability of existing internet search engines with new and improved relevancy models; they bring into the equation user preferences, collaboration, collective intelligence, a rich user experience, and many other specialized capabilities that make information more productive.

Arguably, the collective intelligence and collaboration aspects have always been present in Google, but have been implicit, rather than explicit. Still, making something explicit can be very important, and the posts talk about a number of services that are new to me.

[via twopointouch]

Technorati Tags: end of cyberspace, search, social software, Web 2.0

The Age of User Experience

Andreas Pfeiffer argues in ACM Ubiquity that features don't matter any more; user experience is all.

Why Features Don't Matter Any More: The New Laws of Digital Technology

In the seemingly never-ending debate about Apple's successes, announcements, new products and predicted-but-unannounced über-gadgets, features and technical specifications often seem to dominate the debate. Yet if there's one lesson to be learned from the company's recent successes, it is a very simple one: features don't matter any more.

Welcome to the Age of User Experience.

One key aspect of modern digital devices is that technical specifications are easily copied and replicated: mega-pixel count in cameras, storage capacity in music players or processor speed in personal computers are the same everywhere. As a result, they provide only poor distinguishing factors for consumers when it comes to choosing between different brands.

That's where the overall user experience comes in. As computing and digital devices move more and more into the consumer space, features and functionalities will increasingly take the back-seat as motivators for technology adoption: as the iPod abundantly shows, user experience (along with a strong brand, and clever marketing) is much more important for the success of a device then technical specifications. Web designers have grasped the importance of good user experience a long time ago; now it is time the big technology providers to understand where the industry is headed.

All true. But how true-- or new-- is it? In the 1980s, Regis McKenna was saying that people don't really know enough about technical specs to evaluate high-tech products on the basis of processor speed, etc., and that other factors-- particularly influencers-- were more important. Still, perhaps what matters today is that an argument like this seems to self-evident.

Technorati Tags: design, end of cyberspace

Bionic software

Tim O'Reilly has a fascinating concept: bionic software.

[Bionic] systems that combine human and computer activity to produce better results than either can alone are becoming both more widespread and more explicit. Take for example flickr, which introduced the tag cloud to the web design palette. The tag cloud is a powerful user-interface element that is created dynamically by user activity. Or consider how digg.com explicitly harnesses its users to drive which stories go to the front page. (And yes, I'm aware that slashdot did this long before digg, but with digg, this feature is the heart of the site.)

It seems to me that what we're seeing now is just the beginning of a really significant trend, as bionic systems become more widespread and variations on the technique more sophisticated....

I was talking about the idea of bionic software with Tom Shields of the Woodside Fund a few weeks ago, and explaining how I thought that the old dreams of artificial intelligence were being replaced by this new model, in which we are creating more intelligent systems by using humans as components of the application. Tom neatly summed up the paradigm shift: "AI becomes IA." ("Artificial Intelligence becomes Intelligence Augmentation.")

Technorati Tags: end of cyberspace, social software, Web 2.0

links for 2006-07-22

• Professor Stephen D.N. Graham
  (tags: culture Geography uk cyberspace cybergeography)

Quote of the day: Stephen Graham

Sam Kinsley turned me on to Stephen Graham's 1998 essay "The end of geography or the explosion of place? Conceptualizing space, place and information technology," Progress in Human Geography 22:2 (1998) pp. 165-185:

Too often, then, the pervasive reliance on spatial and technological metaphors actually serves to obfuscate the complex relations between new communications and information technologies and space, place and society. In the simple, binary allegations that new technologies help us to access a new `electronic space' or `place', which somehow parallels the lived material spaces of human territoriality, little conscious thought is put to thinking conceptually about how new information technologies actually relate to the spaces and places bound up with human territorial life. Without a thorough and critical consideration of space and place, and how new information technologies relate to, and are embedded in them, reflections on cyberspace, and the economic, social and cultural dynamics of the shift to growing `telemediation', seem likely to be reductionist, deterministic, oversimplistic and stale.

In this article I aim to explore some of the emerging conceptual treatments of the relationships between information technology systems and space and place. Building on my recent work with Simon Marvin on the relationships between telecommunications and contemporary cities (Graham and Marvin, 1996), and on conceptualizing telecommunications-based urban change (Graham, 1996; 1997a), I identify three broad, dominating perspectives and explore them in turn. First, there is the perspective of substitution and transcendence ± the idea that human territoriality, and the space and place-based dynamics of human life, can somehow be replaced using new technologies. Secondly, there is the co-evolution perspective which argues that both the electronic `spaces' and territorial spaces are necessarily produced together, as part of the ongoing restructuring of the capitalist political-economic system. Finally, there is the recombination perspective, which draws on recent work in actor-network theory. Here the argument is that a fully relational view of the links between technology, time, space and social life is necessary. Such a perspective reveals how new technologies become enrolled into complex, contingent and subtle blendings of human actors and technical artifacts, to form actor-networks (which are sociotechnical `hybrids'). Through these, social and spatial life become subtly and continuously recombined in complex combinations of new sets of spaces and times, which are always contingent and impossible to generalize.

Technorati Tags: city, cyberspace, end of cyberspace, place/space

The annotated man (or suit)

One of my favorite work blogs is English Cut, which is written by a Saville Row tailor named Thomas Mahon. As I wrote a while ago, it shows that many professionals can talk about their work in public in a way that makes them sound very good at what they do, without giving away anything essential: even after reading him, I'm not going to be able to make my own suit.

In a recent post, he explains some of the simpler tailors' marks, which are made on a suit in chalk during a fitting. It turns out that tailors essentially annotate suits, writing instructions to themselves about things like where a sleeve should hang, where a piece of fabric needs to be expanded, or whether a leg should be shortened or lengthened. The annotations are made in chalk, then are transcribed; as he explains, "chalk is not permanent, and by the time it's been in a suitcase for a week and hauled round America, it can all look very confusing. Especially when I open my suitcase with jet-lagged eyes."

It makes me wonder at the number of places or occupational contexts in which skilled workers make annotations on things, and how widely technologies like smart fabrics, reactive surfaces, and heads-up displays could affect work. One of the first applications of wearable computers has been in aircraft fault detection and repair: Xybernaut's wearables, for example, let technicians consult schematics and other documents without having to leave their craft. (This sounds trivial until you consider how complex a jet engine is, and how big the manuals are: as Geoffrey Nunberg famously reported a decade ago, "printed documentation that accompanies the delivery of a single Boeing 747 weighs about 350 tons, only slightly less than the airplane itself.")

But while retrieving and displaying information for the "task-at-hand" (as Xybernaut puts it) is good, being able to precisely annotate an object for repairs or improvements is a more complicated matter. But this kind of technology could be more significant than Xybernaut's aircraft documentation system for a couple reasons. I suspect that a lot more skilled work involves annotation rather than rule-following: not many things come with 350 tons of documentation, and a gigantic regulatory and liability framework that mandates how you make repairs. And there are still plenty of skilled craftsmen who can't read: for them, writing on the thing isn't just useful, it's critical.

Technorati Tags: clothing, displays, end of cyberspace, work, ubicomp

links for 2006-07-20

• Futuribles - Prospective Studies and Foresight
  (tags: future)
• TechCast - A Virtual Think Tank Tracking the Technology Revolution
  (tags: technology future forecasting)

More on RFID

Last year the Institute published a series of memos on the present and future of RFID. (I was the principal author on them, but like everything at the Institute, lots of people were involved in the thinking and production.)

I just noticed that they're now publicly available as PDFs on the Institute Web site. Titles and links:

• Thinking About RFID
• Public Concerns and the Near Future of RFID
• Flashpoint and Controversies
• Smart Homes and Sociable Devices
• Implications and Recommendations

Technorati Tags: RFID, future, end of cyberspace, IFTF

Memory Spots

HP announced a new kind of tag for putting digital information on things. Called Memory Spots, they're somewhat like RFID tags in basic structure-- they're passively powered, have an antenna and memory-- but add a small processor and a lot more storage space. The New York Times highlights some differences between Memory Spots and RFID, both in technology and potential use:

In contrast to RFID tags, which store only a few hundred or few thousand bits of information, and which are readable from distances of tens of feet, the H.P. Memory Spots can be read only from extremely close range and store up to hundreds of thousands of bytes of information.

Like RFID tags, Memory Spots are powered from radio fields emitted by reading devices, but the H.P. researchers said they would have new applications beyond the typical supply chain and identification functions of RFID chips. Ultimately, executives said, the reading and writing technology could be added to smart phones or other inexpensive handheld devices.

The Memory Spot chips could be priced as low as 10 cents each if they were manufactured in volume, Mr. Taub said....

One of the advantages of the Memory Spot is that the 1.4-millimeter-square chips contain a small processor and as a result have the ability to offer data protection features.

Interestingly, that "putting bits out in the world" line is getting lots of play: this morning's HP press release is titled "HP Unveils Revolutionary Wireless Chip that Links the Digital and Physical Worlds," and features this bit:

“The Memory Spot chip frees digital content from the electronic world of the PC and the Internet and arranges it all around us in our physical world,” said Ed McDonnell, Memory Spot project manager, HP Labs.

However, many of the applications they suggest are pretty RFID-like:

Some of the potential applications include storing medical records on a hospital patient’s wristband; providing audio-visual supplements to postcards and photos; helping fight counterfeiting in the pharmaceutical industry; adding security to identity cards and passports; and supplying additional information for printed documents.

Currently there are RFID-enabled hospital wristbands, but they don't have patient records on them: they're just an ID device. Likewise, there's been plenty of talk about RFID being used in counterfeiting, document identification, and passports. It'll be interesting to see how and where RFID and Memory Spots actually compete. There are four obvious questions:

• Will Spots (a nice alternative to "tag") will operate on the same frequencies as RFID tags, or require entirely different infrastructure? If they're interoperable, and if RFID deployment is fast enough, that could affect some choices regarding spot use.
• When does it make sense to have large amounts of data embedded in an object, instead of associated with it? HP suggests users could "[s]end a traditional holiday postcard to family and friends with a chip containing digital pictures of a vacation, plus sounds and even video clips." In a world of YouTube, have we passed the point where sending
• Will Spots be more secure? On-board processing and the short read-range suggests the possibility greater immunity to hacks, if they're well-designed.
• When will it be worth the extra cost? HP estimates that the cost of Spots could fall to a dime per, with volume production-- still far above the dreamworld of the penny RFID tag.

I think there's also a bigger trend that one can extrapolate from this data-Spot.

We think of RFID tags as new and unique, but that's wrong on both cases. RFID tags have been around for quite a while; what's new is the emergence of a couple standards that promise to make them cheaper, more ubiquitous, and easier to use (or abuse). They're also not unique; it's better to think of them as the first-to-market examples of a new family or class of devices, with varying levels of intelligence, memory, and range.

Together, they're aimed at a functional merger of bits and atoms-- that embed data in things, facilitates the real-time/real-space retrieval of information, and chips away at the familiar distinction between the "real world" and the "online world." Cypak AB's disposable computer, which is more like an RFID tag on steroids than a competitor to PCs; Ted Selker's work on RFID signatures; and dozens of other prototypes and early adopter products are building on Wifi, GPS, IPv6, and other infrastructure to enable a digital-physical convergence.

Technorati Tags: digital-physical, end of cyberspace, pervasive computing, RFID, ubicomp