One hundred posts to Cluster. No champagne to celebrate, but a glass of decent Australian white. Time for a bit of reflection. Strangely, the most popular posting is one in which I mentioned, in passing, the iDetect wifi sniffer. In fact, most people cruising past Cluster seem to be more interested in iPaqs, wifi and streaming mp3s than in any of the other things I’ve been talking about. Oh well. We’ve covered quite a lot of more interesting stuff. The topics that seem most important to me in retrospect are:
Spaces Are not (Necessarily) Places. This thread came out of discussions with Katherine about MOO worlds at the start of the year, and has kept coming back in various guises [1] [2] [3] [4]
Nude Media. Thoughts on the experiential qualities of purely digital media (especially music). [1] [2]
The Radio-Of-Me Concept: a thought experiment on the phenomenology of radio, and how such considerations, with some collaborative filtering technology, might finally find an unobtrusive application for Digital Rights Management while still giving consumers a simple listening experience and access to new music. [1] [2]
The Smart Spaces/Discreet Computing Whitepaper. I’ve been involved for years in the design of working environment technology. The whitepaper is something of a manifesto regarding where I think creative businesses are getting technology adoption right and wrong. It’s based on some rough notes that appeared here first. [1] [2] [3] [4]
There’s more, but those cover what’s been most on my mind for the past six months. I’m not sure what comes next, but I’m going to at least be working more on the Smart Spaces ideas (and hopefully selling some Smart Space projects to my clients). I’m also going to be implementing a proof-of-concept radio-of-me to see what it actually feels like. Having had Cluster as external memory for the past few months, I’ve become very aware that phenomenology and experiential concerns form the basis of most of my thinking, so expect more of that. Anyway. Thanks for being here.
appropriately, this just poped up in an rss reader i was playing with (doing some compares of OSX-based rss readers)
somewhat of a dictim: oh bloatware, why for art thou?
those skinny threads of sound that squeeze through the “radio” and those little tickers that (filtered nicely) keep things lively … we think you’re sexy.
so, happy blogday.