Klintron’s Brain

I remain skeptical of whether we’re truely entering some sort of post-capitalist “attention economy.” But I’m a techie, not an economist, so I’ll leave that discussion to people better suited for it for the time being.

Regardless, attention is the new technological frontier. Reading through notes from ETech 2006, as well as other recent blogosphere activity re: glocalization, everyware, myware, etc. I was left with a feeling I’d heard rather a lot of it before. It’s pretty impressive how far ahead of their time Headmap were in when they published their manifesto in 1999. I’ve only read the second iteration of their text fragment collection, available here [pdf]. It had some early ideas about the stuff that’s shaping our current reality. Here’s one particularly relevant bit:

As far as I can tell I’m a pattern following animal. There are whole years of my life that I cannot clearly remember. Sometimes in an effort to recover those years, and in the absence of a journal or diary to remind me, I grab a pile of bank statement from that year and study them to see roughly where I was and what I was doing. Usually mind numbing patterns emerge. Same Safeway, same day, every two weeks, roughly the same amount spent. Same ATM every friday night roughly the same amount. Every two weeks a meal at one of a small number of revisited restaurants. Every month rent cheque, haircut, some aberrant item like clothing or travel. If I continue long enough the pattern breaks up temporarily as I move to another city and then quickly settles down again. If I had my grocery receipts I’d find roughly the same food items recurring for months at a time. If I could trace my movements I’d find
myself taking similar routes over and over again to get to the same set of destinations.

Show people their patterns in a way that might be directly useful and interesting to them, even suggest changes in behaviour and be able to measure and show direct changes in mood resulting.

Sounds a lot like what Attention Trust is up to.

They also warned us, in this blog post, of a potential dark side I’ve not yet seen discussed elsewhere:

on the darker side quantifying attention leads to being paid in attention units rather than hours, and more pay for longer periods of continuous attention ..and variable rates depending on where your attention is focused at any given moment

[call centres pretty much there already]

Another plea for help from my readership:

I’m trying to use this WordPress hack to import my del.icio.us bookmarks in WP: YADD.

I’m having trouble figuring out how to setup the chronjob right. If anyone could help me out, or at least point me to a relevant guide to setting up chronjobs, that’d be great (my googlefoo is failing… I haven’t found a relevant chronjob guide yet).

Anyone know if it’s possible (and if so, what routers support this): I’d like to leave my wifi open to the public, but I’d also like to use a secure WEP connection for myself (for secure transactions, etc.). I’d also like to limit the bandwidth of the open wifi connection, but keep my private WEP connection unlimited. Any advice?

isolatr.

JusFlam Network.

Josh has some ideas for Witness, in response to Joi Ito’s joining their board:

Here’s my observation and suggestion, Joi: Witness is a really, really great program with a really brilliant idea behind it. So why haven’t most web surfers seen these materials, especially in an era when video of civil rights violations circulates almost as quickly as live-action recreations of the Simpsons credits?

(I’m going off of the assumption that the public is just as much the target audience of Witness as, say, war crimes tribunals or other governmental/NGO programs. After all, the court of public opinion can be far more effective than any UN investigative body…as events in Iraq have unfortunately shown over the past couple of years.)

It might be useful to ease Witness’s media into the wider flow of data. For example, mirror incoming photographs to a Flickr account. Mirror video to YouTube and/or Google Video. Set up a bittorrent server.

I’d never heard of Witness before, which is sort of embarrassing. I’ll have to look more deeply into this organization… sounds like they’re really using technology in a beneficial way. And if they take Josh’s advice, they could take it even furthur.

Full Story: Zenarchery.

Update: Adam tells me the book’s been delayed. Should be out soon though.

I think I’ve mentioned it before, but my friend Adam Greenfield has a book on ubicomp coming out: Everyware : The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing. Actually, it was supposed to be out on the 18th, but Adam hasn’t mentioned the release on either of his blogs, and I haven’t been down to Powell’s to check yet.

Anyway, I’m really looking forward to this book, because a. I don’t know much more about ubicomp than what I read in Smart Mobs. b. I’ve enjoyed Adam’s perspective on design/urban/tech issues at V-2 for the past few years, and his writing is always clear and enjoyable.

Here are a couple of interviews with him:

1. Interview from a French magazine.

2. Interview with Rebacca Blood:

I’ve been saying for about three years now that the first real business opportunity of the full-fledged everyware age is gonna be zones of amnesty — cafes where you can explicitly go to be offline and inaccessible. Maybe I’ll start a chain called Faraday’s Cage, or something. (It seems that a few coffeehouses and the like are actually starting to institute similar measures, at least during peak hours.)

Late update: I forgot this Podcast interview.

Adam Greenfield’s first book is available for pre-order on Amazon. I don’t know nearly enough about this ubicomp stuff, so I expect this will be the perfect opportunity to catch-up.

I’m not sure if these notes are from the book or from a talk with the same name, but they should give you an idea of the subject matter.

I’m turning comments off since everytime I post sort of Microsoft vs. Apple type post, I get a thousand ridiculous comments from both sides of the fence.

Why I might switch back.

Business 2.0 speculates that Google may be readying a free wifi program. Sounds cool, but: “Google’s interest in Feeva likely stems from the startup’s proprietary technology, which can determine the location of every Wi-Fi user and would allow Google to serve up advertising and maps based on real-time data.”

A number of people, notably Abe, have been concerned with Google’s emerging “big brother” status for quite some time. I’ll be the first to admit that geolocative advertising would be useful to both businesses and consumers… but I also have to admit that yes, things are getting scary.

Could this work like Dodgeball as well? Search for your friends, pull up their location on Google Maps? Now’s the time to check out Headmap if you haven’t… this stuff’s finally happening.

I love reading about this sort of stuff:

It’s especially effective for intensifying the thrills of a horror story, said Satoko Kajita, who oversees content development at Bandai Networks.

The Tokyo-based wireless service provider offers 150 books on its site, called Bunko Yomihodai, or All You Can Read Paperbacks. It began the service in 2003 and saw interest grow last year. There are now about 50,000 subscribers.

“It’s hard to understand unless you try it out,” Kajita said, adding that the handset’s backlight allows people to read with the lights off — a convenience that delights parents who like to read near sleeping infants.

Users can search by author, title and genre, and readers can write reviews, send fan mail to authors and request what they want to read, all from their phones.

So I don’t lose these links again:

TRS-80 Model 100 / 102

Epson HC / HX-20

I happen to have a few thoughts about the new Apple products, but for now check this out.

And also have a look at Gawker’s Open Letter to the People Who Want Team Zissou Adidas.

I saw the movie and loved it, but agree that movie tie-in shoes are pretty silly. But I don’t think it’s that big of a deal either. And what’s wrong with being the art-house version of Armeggedon?

We’ve been hearing about this one for a while, but it looks like it’s getting close. Bruce Sterling’s got the dirt. What’s the economy gonna look like when we start pirating objects?

Adam thinks the future of the ‘net may be in web services after all (I’m not sure I agree):

I also find it verrrrry interesting, and not at all coincidental, that at least two of the above-named applications (Konfabulator and Quicksilver) [Flickr is the other above named application] and possibly all three point towards an emergent theme of my Design Engaged, which is the disappearance of Web sites and standard applications in favor of little distributed chunks of functionality.

(Yeah, I know you’ve heard the “Web services” spiel before. You have reason to be skeptical. But this time it’s actually started to happen, and maybe you’ll find that makes the argument a little more convincing. Certainly when I look at an image from Flickr in an RSS feed, and immediately send it on to someone in an IM window, without ever engaging my Web browser, I get the sense that something epochal is yet again happening. And that, my friends, is fodder for the next discussion.)

awesome project… but up to over $100 already? wow!

Plenty Magazine is a new glossy dedicated to sustainable living. Nice and smooth.

See also Treehugger, World Changing, Sustainable Style, Meta Efficient, etc.