April 01, 2005
 There's evidence that kids are using Bluetooth to share content - Happy Slapping videos have spread throughout the UK via this method, supplemented via the web, admittedly. And I think this is a trend that is going to grow like crazy.
Mobile Weblog reader, Floris, left a comment on a post recently asking about passing data from phone to phone to bypass the networks. I think this is an interesting idea, worth exploring further.
Floris suggests adapting Cabir, the Bluetooth transmitted virus for this purpose. So, if I want to send a message from me in Munich to Floris in Belgium, I load it into the Cabir Messaging App (CMA) and forget all about it.
Meanwhile, my phone looks for others with the Bluetooth in "discoverable" mode and asks them if they're willing to act as a carrier for the message. If they say YES, they install the CMA, with the message. The new host then looks for more phones to pass the message on to, together with my original phone, which is still transmitting.
Of course, the CMA would need to be accepted by enough people to make this possible - maybe it could come with some kind of certificate? Any ideas anyone?
But assuming enough people agreed to accept it, I wonder if it would ever get to Floris and if so, how long it would take to get there. It's the digital equivalent to a message in a bottle. There's no guarantee that it'll ever get delivered. There's no guarantee when it'll be delivered. And everyone en route could read it (unless there was some form of encryption).
Therefore, I'm not quite sure what kind of message this would be applicable for. But it would be a really interesting thing to do, with exactly the same motivation as putting a message in a bottle and flinging it out to sea.
The big hurdle obviously is the willingness of the intermediaries to download potentially dodgy apps onto their phones. But if we were to reconsider this idea in a micro community, like a school, it may actually work. If everyone knew about the project and that the CMA was safe, it gets round the major stumbling block.
In a closed community environment, I wonder how long a message sent between 2 people would take to arrive? I reckon it would be quicker than we might think intuitively.
I think this would be a really interesting project for someone to try in the wild - though probably solely for academic purposes. Although, there may be commercial applications too, I guess....
What do you think? Please leave a comment - or since we're continuing to have problems with comments, drop me an email russell AT mobhappy DOT com and I'll put it up for you.
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unmediated.av:
The Weekly Show
drawing from extrastruggle.
We've been having a back channel conversation amongst the trackers at unmediated about how/whether to update the way in which we aggregate, present, and make useable the content on the site, in light of all the various aggregators, digg and its clones, and role model group blog sites that we all consume/use/hate/love. Since we all primarily support open media movements and the freedom of bits and so forth, and with all of us being busy with our primary projects, we are looking for ways to make getting content on the site easier and more streamlined, while making it obvious that we are presenting other sources content. With the availability of open API's for just about any type of media aggegration literally getting past the saturation point, and mashups taking every possible form, we are wondering, is it time to take a step back, or a step forward with how/what we do at umediated? In the course of my surfing today, i found this new site, Boxxet Which just might be the straw that breaks the camel's back in how we all perceive the current mix and match nature of the web as it now stands. What's different about Boxxet from other aggregators and mashups like the newest entry popurls, (which aggregates digg, slashdot, reddit, newsvine, tailrank, and flickr) is that Boxxet is a Website generator. Thats right, just pop in all the urls u want to aggregate (and WHAT from them) choose how u want to format it, plug in the url that u want it to be accessed at... and whammo: Your own site with everyone elses content, and all thats left to do is decide whether googleplex or yahooza is going to be the source of your linklove revenue. And if u have on older domain that u plug this into...well, we all know how the pageranking with search engines work by now. It used to be that u had to have a bit of code knowledge to make all this stuff work. Eyebeam's Re-blog engine which powers this site was not a simple undertaking at the time that Michael Frumin and Michael Migurski put it all together... a half a year before Marc Broadband-mechanicked the term Reblog as his latest buzzword before casting his attention on the ourmedia-meme. (kudo's, kudo's) But now, with the cut and paste mentality of webculture that we at unmediated have helped create, the pace at which people are remixing and repurposing code is accelerating at a rate similar to the curve that we saw with pro-sumer desktop video... almost anyone can do it. I have this sinking feeling in my gut that we will arrive sooner than later at the same existential threshold that the film studios and record labels are squirming under to our joyful cries of "die, dinosaurs, die!". What i am wondering, is how long until my hero of the open-information movement, Cory Doctorow, and the rest of our pals at BB will tolerate re-aggregation and repurposing of his content, (now that he is investing so much more time at the site) before he (or any of one us) screams, "FOUL!" Stewart Butterfield over at Flickr is dealing with this beast at the moment...and i have to admire the dryness with which he states, "I loaded the FlickrCentral pool and firefox got up to using 240mb of ram before dying. So that's not a great user experience, but it's really terrible for Flickr. If it catches on and you don't limit it, we'll have to cut you off :\" Sure, Stewart, blame it on the user experience and firefox. ;) I admire your candor, and personal attention/approach to what has become one of the hottest new BRANDS in Web 2.0 ...that u still have time to be personal and all flickr-fuzzy even after being acquired, but I am sure that your jeans feel like they're fitting a bit tighter all of a sudden. Pretty soon, I expect, a lot of us bell-bottomed infornistas are going to wake up in a similar pair of Jordaches. I'm curious which of us will cut the inseams and sew in another totally different material to keep our style,and which of us will claim that now that we're wearing skintight jeans ("they're really really comfortable...REALLY! You think i should get a pair of Reeboks to go with 'em?"), that the manufacture of bell-bottoms should be forbidden. I point this all out in good humour only to illustrate a point: The times, they are('nt) a changin'>, and Cory just might wake up one day soon in his magic kingdom, and say "Hey, man, where'd all my whuffie go? And he's going to have no choice but to join Walt's pinstripesuits in pushing for copyright extension. It's a pill i hope he (and we) never have to swallow. So i pose the question to our community readers: How do you see unmediated-Are we crossing the boundaries in how we repurpose content? Would you like to see more editorializing? Narrower/Broader scope? Are we a repository of information that you come back to use, or just part of your daily information addiction? Let us know... I, for one, would like to have an idea about what pair of jeans to wear this year ;) michael
Featured Project
Berkeley Conference: Online Video and the Future of Television - Friday, September 30, 2005
This one-day conference brings together archivists, educators, technologists, entrepreneurs, producers, legal experts, and investors to explore the enormous promise offered by the availability of online video and television content. Demonstrations and interactive panel discussions will highlight new video technologies, services, legal issues, and economic models. Participants from diverse – and until now, largely disconnected – specialties will be especially encouraged to interact.
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unmediated is a group blog that tracks the tools, processes,
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