Nonetheless: interview me. 5 questions. Amusing answers guaranteed.*
* Amusement to be measured on the Krankies scale. For reference: “Why did the chicken cross the road?” rates approximately 200 mega-Jimmies. All answers will have a value of at least ten Jimmies. (The sensation of treading in dogshit in one’s bare feet.)
I’d forgotten how much I enjoy Moby’s album “Play”. I bought it at the same time everyone else in the known universe did, and got sick of it being played to death by a) everyone else in the known universe, and b) every advert ever made, and so, like everyone else, I stopped listening to it. And then, for a long time, it reminded me of a slightly bleak period of living in hotel rooms and being generally a bit fucking down, so I never really listened to it again.
But for the first time in a few years, I’m listening to it now, as part of an attempt to listen to everything in my CD collection at least once this year, and y’know, I think I remember why everyone in the known universe bought it. It really is quite bloody good.
Spime is a pretty stupid sounding word (like most neologisms), but it describes an increasingly important concept – they are objects that can be digitally tracked through their entire life-cycle. There’s a little more to them than that, because the man that coined the term, Bruce Sterling, is a big techno-hippy, and felt the need to include ideas about their manufacturing process and some notions about recycling in there too. I’m reasonably sure that given time and usage, that part will fall away (and to be honest, since I am also a big techno-hippy, I’ll be sad about that) and we’ll be left with the specifically useful definition, of an object that generates a data cloud than can then be accessed by other objects.
To make the example more concrete, I’ll quote from the Wikipedia entry for spime – in a near future spimeworld, where your house has a Star Trek style voice activated computer, and all your possession are spimes, instead of spending a fruitless twenty minutes searching for your shoes in the morning, you will simply be able to say “Where are my shoes?” out loud and Majel Barrett will respond “Your shoes are under the bed”, because your household computer will be able to track the datacloud generated by your shoes and your bed, and combine it with in house mapping systems to work out their proximity. (Or, if you’re me, you’ll have ripped the Majel Barrett bit of the code out with claw hammers, and replaced it with something with a decent and attractive accent. Possibly something Scottish. But I digress…)
Which brings us to blogjects. Another word that practically clunks whenever it’s used, a blogject is exactly what you’d think: an object that blogs. An object that publishes data about itself to the web at intervals, without the intervention of a human. One might make the case, for instance, that I have turned my hi-fi into a blogject, because I have a set-up that produces a weekly top-ten type chart of music I’m listening to. It’s not strictly accurate, because it’s not the hi-fi itself that’s doing the playing, recording and publishing – I play all my music via iTunes on a PC, going out through the hi-fi, and it’s the PC doing the publishing, which is then interpreted by several intvening services and scripts. But it’s an example of what the future of things might look like.
And where it all gets really exciting/frightening is that almost everything you do will be generating data like this. Me, as much as it creeps me out a little, I think overall it has the potential to be interesting at least.
It’s part of the reason I run ala.sda.ir. Yes, it’s convenient for others (I hope), but it’s also a chance for me to slowly adjust to where I see the web going, the idea that people will continuously generate personal data, that will be available from central “personal portals”. At the moment, I’m choosing to provide it of my own free will, but there’ll come a point where it’s generated my my spimes automatically. For example, if my camera had a built in GPS device (and believe me, I’d love it if it did), all the photos on my photoblog could be geotagged, and (were I to publish enough photos) someone might be able to build up a reasonable picture of where I’ve been on a given day. That is, of course, if my weekly calendar were not enough – although what I’d quite like is something that would compare before-and-after the fact, so I could track how many of the things I book, I wind up doing, and then provide data about which of my friends I wind up cancelling plans with most often, or who I haven’t seen in a while, and so on…
My point is, that the systems I’ve build to do all this proto-spime stuff are slowly coming together, and becoming more accessible to everyone, and we need to start thinking about how we want to manage our privacy in this strange Doctrow-esque future. At the moment, my calendar will allow me to block stuff from public view, and several of my datafeeds allow me to toggle what turns up on the portal. We need to be sure we give users control over what data they expose to the general public.
Which leads in to another topic, identity management, that I’ll come back to another time.
This entry was originally published at my workblog.
The much-beloved last.fm expose a “top albums” feed (here) that provides amazon URLs to images. It doesn’t change enough to be worth tying directly in to my weekly “top ten” list on ala.sda.ir but it might be a useful data source, to then build a personal weekly top ten albums.
I’m thinking about this because I’ve conculded that tracks doesn’t work well enough to be interesting, since I tend to listen to new albums two or three times in a row per day for several days on the trot, so for example, last weeks top 10 was entirely made up of Dresen Dolls, despite the fact the an album chart would have been a more comprehensive sampler of my listening habits.
(Edit: Damn. Their “top tracks” feed doesn’t carry album data, so matching the two isn’t currently feasibly. Although I note they’ve got a weekly top albums feed on their web services pages, although it doesn’t currently hold data…)
This entry was originally published at my workblog.
It’s been a while since I had a night that useful. I got the bulk of Ninth Art’s re-build done – just some testing to do and a few trivial back-end functions to move across now, although it’ll probably be a few weeks before I get it all done. Then I went home and for some reason I don’t quite understand, decided to slot in an extra session at the gym this week. Having done that, I did the page breakdowns for SIX STRINGS, got a few pages of script written, and nailed down the storytelling approach I want to use for the project. With any luck, I’ll break the back of it tonight…
I’m not given to deity-worship. I don’t believe in encouraging the little bastards. But still, I have a certain amount of sympathy for Odin. Sure, everyone knows him as chief of the norse pantheon, but most people tend to look at him as Jupiter/Zeus figure, when he’s an awful lot more than that. He’s a christ-figure, a shaman deity, and a god of wisdom and knowledge. He has the more martial aspect present in Jupiter and Zeus, but with a grimmer, darker edge that I find more fitting to that role. He’s the Norse god of magic and knowledge, but everyone is so busy with Thoth or Mercury/Hermes that this gets forgotten, but unlike the book-magic that the others seem to favour, that hermetic tradition has imprinted on them, Odin’s magic is from that primal root, shrouded in visionquest, plucked from darkness and wind.
But today, listening to Julian Cope’s CD programme, I come across a single line “Myself a sacrifice to I”, and something kicks hard in my brain. This I like. The notion of a god whose power and knowledge comes not from outside, not from story or fable, not from simply being woven into his very being by his divinity (or from worshippers, or from the other means that you might think gods draw their power) from from their own effort to find it inside themselves.
A god whose basic example says “You don’t need gods. Anyone could do what I did, and get what I got.”
Well, no, not really. But it’s getting closer. A totally fictional country has a real world GNP per-capita only slightly behind that of Russia. New Scientist has a report on the real-world economic impact of Norrath, the fictional landscape that frames Sony’s EverQuest on-line game.
I find this interesting on several levels. My magical worldview is based in large part around ideaspace, the notion that our hopes, dreams, desires and gods exist on a “plane of concept and idea, where thought is form” (Alan Moore). The fictional worlds of MMRPGs (Massively Multiplayer RolePlaying Games) like EQ strike me as interesting, as a shared “unreal” space that has real and concrete impact in the “real” world. They don’t spring from the more abstract reaches of ideaspace that give birth to religion – they’re closer, more tied to reality, but they’re occupying some of the same bits of psychic real estate.
And y’know, more concretely, I’m just pleased to see that a country that doesn’t exist is worth so much.
Via Anna, I present the translateotronned version of this page.
Always, more candies for me.
Well, I wasn’t happy with “Going Pro” as a title. Yes, I’ve paid for Blogger Pro. Now I’ve got shiny new things, like titles on my posts and other clever stuff.
Between the weightlifting I’ve started doing and the yoga class (Dru Yoga, for those that were asking), it’s getting so that every other day has me suffering from mild aches in various muscles. I have never been as aware of specific muscle groups as I have been in the last week or two. It’s kinda weird.