Roo Reynolds - What’s Next?

• Boris Johnson Facts - “The writers of Lost asked Boris how they should end the series.” (after  chucknorrisfacts.com)
• NYT: Microsoft May Build A Copyright Cop Into Every Zune - “…the consumer wants there to be quality premium-produced content, and in order for that to continue to be a viable business, there needs to be significant protection around it”. Hmm.
• Prime Sense: Giving Machines a Prime Sense - “The Prime Sensor is a System on Chip (SoC) and a complete reference design for a three dimensional sensing and understanding device. … a standard image sensor, a light source, optical components and the Prime Sense IC which is the digital brain…”
• Wired.com: Home Tweet Home - Energy-Savvy House Broadcasts on Twitter - andy_house on Twitter gets a mention in the Wired Science blog. (I mentioned his project recently in a blog post about Tweetjects, but the Wired post is probably more exciting to him <grin>).
• Web 2.0 - Where is Technology Headed? (My recent presentation at MPI EMEC) - The (fairly basic, low-level introduction) presentation I recently gave on Web 2.0, backchannels and virtual worlds. It’s two hours long, including Q&A, and covers much of what I’ve been thinking about this year. Mainly aimed at web non-natives.
• microscopiq: Impossible Music Manipulation - Jason Ellis discovers an excellent video of Direct Note Access in an upcoming version of Melodyne “Imagine the kinds of new music games that could be built, making use of music the original developers never heard or even imagined” (I re-blogged this on Eightbar)
• Melodyne - “recognizes the music in an audio file and represents it directly as notes” When version 3 of the plugin comes out this autumn it will recognise notes within chords too. Nice.
• Hacking game controllers and 3D Wii | Technology | Guardian Unlimited - Bobbie’s writeup of this weekend’s Game Camp. (mattb is a hero)
• Cans festival - a set on Flickr - Was hoping to see this festival of street art on Saturday, but didn’t get a chance. Glad someone documented it.

I was at Game Camp 08 on Saturday. It was held in Sony’s 3Rooms building near Shoreditch which is amazing. Imagine your dream flat, but full of rather more PS3s and PSPs than you could ever need. That said, the Sony branding wasn’t actually overpowering, and the venue was a very good choice.

The day was held in the style of a barcamp, with sessions run by participants. There were sessions on ‘How to play Doerak, a semi-russian card game’, ‘ARGs, are they f****d’?', ‘Playing SLorpedo (mixed reality naval warfare in Second Life)’, and many many more.

Bobbie Johnson of the Guardian organised the event and has since written up a conclusion as well as a quick review of one of the busiest sessions, Matt Biddulph on ‘hacking game controllers with Arduino’.

Lots of photos of the day on Flickr, including this great one taken by Justin Hall (lead PMOG genius) and shared my Matt Jones.

London’s first Game Camp was great. I’m already looking forward to the next one.

I joined the IBM Hursley ETS (Emerging Technology Services) team just a few weeks after their first Rocket Day in 2005. Today was version 2.0, and it was the most fun team-building day out you can imagine; a field full of geeks and their (water, air and coke-and-mentos powered) rockets, cameras, access to good food and great beer. Good times.

I took some photos and videos, and there’s also a Flickr group containing photos from the day.

Best of all, Rob made a video which includes some footage captured using a tiny camera fixed to the nose of one of the rockets. There’s a long version on YouTube. Here’s the short ‘trailer’ version (music by yours truly).

• A few years ago, I was playing more online poker than was probably healthy (though only ever invested about £10 in online poker at my peak had built it up to well over £100, which I inevitably lost. Frighteningly quickly. (Though not before I extracted the original £10.) I don’t particularly want to start again at the moment).
• Reading (this is an addiction anyone would be proud of. I regularly get through 5 or 6 books in a month).
• I bite my nails (and I hate it. If you see me doing this, tut at me or something).
• EVE Online (I recently suspended my account, since I wasn’t playing it nearly enough to make the monthly payments worthwhile, so my character is currently in the equivalent of hibernation. The past two Christmas holidays have been marked by obsessively shooting space-based pirates though, and I’m sure I’ll get back into it one day).
• The addition of an Xbox 360 has meant I’ve  been recently hooked on some excellent games. (Call of Duty 4 is amazing, and having played through the single-player game I got sucked into levelling up in the multi-player game until I reached ‘Presetige’ mode. Grand Theft Auto 4 came out this week, and I think it’s already my latest addiction. For a few weeks anyway).

I seem to have a slightly addictive personality. But doesn’t everyone?

• eco gadget shop: Current Cost monitor - “a device which receives information on electricity consumption from a transmitter attached to the domestic meter. The device then calculates the amount and cost of the electricity consumed” (in case you were wondering how to get hold of one)
• O’ReillyGMT: Speechification - “I can say categorically that Speechification is my favourite website of the moment!” (hurrah)
• ComputerWeekly.com IT Blog Awards 08 - ‘Help us to identify the best IT blogs in the UK … Web 2.0 and Business category. …for wide-ranging commentary across the Web 2.0 sphere, try Roo Reynolds … self-styled “UK-based Metaverse Evangelist, blogger and geek”‘ (also, hurrah)
• TrackThis: Track FedEx/UPS/USPS/DHL Packages using Twitter - “send a quick direct message to @trackthis and we’ll send you a direct message any time your package location changes.” Supports FedEx, UPS, USPS and DHL tracking codes.
• ROFLCon - “A group dissection of internet culture.” April 25th and 26th in Cambridge, MA. (looked simply amazing)
• pachube :: connecting environments, patching the planet - “Pachube, a service that enables people to tag and share real time environmental data from objects, devices and spaces around the world. The key aim is to facilitate interaction between remote environments, both physical and virtual.”
• Color Wars 2008 - “The world is our tether ball court. You can join anytime!”
• Married To The Sea: “The Champagne of Comics” - Married to the Sea is a simply brilliant web comic.
• ReLIVE08: Researching Learning in Virtual Environments conference - 20th and 21st November 2008 (am keynote speaking at this)
• the stribe - “The Stribe is an 8-channel multi-touch controller for music or video software.”
• RAD - Ruby Arduino Development - “RAD is a framework for programming the Arduino physcial computing platform using Ruby. RAD converts Ruby scripts written using a set of Rails-like conventions and helpers into C source code which can be compiled and run on the Arduino microcontroller.”
• russell davies: interesting2008 - Oh yes. Interesting 2007 was a blast. 21st of June, here we come. (Tickets are now sold out. Am hoping to get to speak at this. Something about Lego.)

Before there were blogjects, there were blobjects. In the closing speech at SIGGRAPH 2004, Bruce Sterling started by talking about blobjects, or blob-shaped consumer items.

Blobjects are the period objects of our time. They are the physical products that the digital revolution brought to the consumer shelf.

Sterling goes on (via ‘gizmos’, the current state of the art) to introduce spime.

At the moment, you are end-using Gizmos. My thesis here, my prophesy to you, is that, pretty soon, you will be wrangling Spimes.

This subject is covered more completely in his Shaping Things book, which is reviewed here by Cory Doctorow. Cory handily sums up Spime thus:

A Spime is a location-aware, environment-aware, self-logging, self-documenting, uniquely identified object that flings off data about itself and its environment in great quantities

Meanwhile, to fill the gap between blobjects and spime, we have blogjects. Julian Bleecker’s ‘Manifesto for Networked Objects — Cohabiting with Pigeons, Arphids and Aibos in the Internet of Things‘ introduces Blogjects, describing them as an “early ancestor” to spime. While spime is still speculative, Bleecker says

I can make Blogjects now because the semantics are immediately legible — objects, that blog. Tonight, I can go into my laboratory and begin to experiment with what a world might be like in which I co-occupy space with objects that blog.

Bleecker says there are three key characteristics of a blogject:

• Blogjects track and trace where they are and where they’ve been;
• Blogjects have self-contained (embedded) histories of their encounters and experiences
• Blogjects always have some form of agency — they can foment action and participate; they have an assertive voice within the social web.

The last point is important, and while he’s not expecting them to pass the Turing test, they need to interact. Good bloggers don’t ignore their comments; thats where most of the fun happens. In the same way, blogjects participate and converse both between themselves and with us.

The significance of the Internet of Things is not at all about instrumented machine-to-machine communication, or sensors that spew reams of data credit card transactions, or quantities of water flows, or records of how many vehicles passed a particular checkpoint along a highway. Those sensor-based things are lifeless, asocial recording instruments when placed alongside of the Blogject. … The social and political import of the Internet of Things is that things can now participate in the conversations that were previously off-limits to Things. … Things, once plugged into the Internet, will become agents that circulate food for thought, that “speak on” matters from an altogether different point of view, that lend a Thing-y perspective on micro and macro social, cultural, political and personal
matters.

If a blogject is an object that blogs, a tweetject is clearly an object that tweets (an intransitive verb: the act of using Twitter).

There are already lots of examples of objects using Twitter to interact with people, usually to report about the state of things in a convenient form. Botanicalls is an interesting project, aimed at “enhancing person-plant communication” using tools that can be used by people as well as plants. As a result, Pothos is a plant that knows when it needs watering (learn how to make your own).

Gareth Jones wrote about getting his laptop to tweet when Bluetooth devices come in and out of range. For a while that script was updating as gareth_laptop on Twitter. As long as some relevant mobile phones and laptops have Bluetooth enabled, there are some useful and interesting elements of personal presence detection here. Who is nearby? With some additional second-order agents running to work out what these devices are and what they mean (is Gareth at home? If he’s at work, who is nearby?).

Andy Stanford-Clark has an impressively complex home automation setup in his house on the Isle of Wight. It’s been online for a few years already, but has more recently been exposed via Twitter as andy_house. (Although Kelly raises bots as one of her Twitter pet peeves, she makes an exception for Andy’s house.) Andy also Twitter-enabled the Red Jet ferries which go to and from the Isle of Wight, where he lives.

There are many more tweetjects out there too.

There have been lots of weather bots on Twitter for a long time. Here’s one for Brighton and here are links to many more. Radio 1 is tweeting the playlist and summary information about listeners’ text messages. Mario Menti set up a lot more BBC bots too. Tom Morris hooked the various London tube lines up to Twitter. The Lovell telescope at Jodrell Bank tweets what it’s pointing at (and it’s not alone). Tower Bridge lets us know when it’s opening and closing (and for what). The Heavens Above user updates Londoners with the times and directions of Iridium flares and International Space Station flybys over their city.

There are many more, and lots more will no doubt be added this year. Currently, most Twitter bots are one-directional. Things will get really interesting when more of them converse as well as simply report.

Further reading:

• In this post I’ve already linked to both Shaping Things by Bruce Sterling (and the 2004 SIGGRAPH speech), as well as Julian Bleecker’s ‘Manifesto for Networked Objects — Cohabiting with Pigeons, Arphids and Aibos in the Internet of Things‘ essay.
• Everyware by Adam Greenfield is relevant, though it deals mainly with the near-term. Andy Piper has a review which you might find helpful.
• OpenSpime is a project to enable “individuals and corporations to better understand their environment, through the use of a series of GPS-enabled sensors”. Read Tish Shute’s introduction on UgoTrade too.

• David Maine, The Flood - re-telling of the Noah’s ark story, from multiple points of view. Charming.
• Michael Collins, The Meat Eaters - collection of short stories. Mixed, but generally enjoyable.
• Lorraine Adams, Harbor - as you can tell by the spelling of the title, an American book. A tale of immigration and (hints of) terrorism. Misable, but apparently well received in the US.
• Ian McEwan, Amsterdam - I read this in one sitting (during the flight from O’Hare to Austin) and loved every word. I wanted it to be longer, and it was no ‘Saturday’, but it’s good.
• Simon Ings, The Weight of Numbers - Meh. I wanted to enjoy it more than I did. Involved and full of character development, but let down by dull sections and some badly written sex (which was not even central to the book). Meh.
• Ian McEwan, On Chesil Beach - I love McEwan, and enjoyed his latest, but it was no ‘Saturday’ or even ‘Amsterdam’. His weakest yet, or was I just in a bad mood?
• Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion - stuck in an Austin airport, surrounded by Best Sellers, I was desperate to buy anything that wasn’t by Crichton, Binchy, Grisham etc. Eventually settled on Dawkins, who turns out to be a good read. Thought provoking (obviously) but also surprisingly readable.

I’ve always wanted a pair of Converse. I picked these up in a skate/juggling shop in Brighton today. They were the last pair left (bargain: £20) and just happened to be the right size.

Hipster heaven.

• Polaroid Digital Mobile Photo Printer (Zink) - Oooh. Zink (zero ink) technology. The colour lives in the paper. [See also here.]
• Song Chart Meme - a set on Flickr - Wonderful series of charts which represent song lyrics.
• Virtual Worlds News: Disney’s Virtual Magic Kingdom to Close Doors - Read the comments for a glimpse of some passionate and dissapointed users. [via:waxy]
• FT.com: BBC chief quits to launch online service - Ashley Highfield has left the BBC to become chief exec of Kangaroo.
• Infochimps.org: Free Redistributable Rich Data Sets - “The infochimps.org community is assembling and interconnecting the world’s best repository for raw data — a sort of giant free almanac, with tables on everything you can put in a table.”
• The DEFINITIVE guide to Airline WiFi and Internet Access - In-flight wifi. It’s getting there.
• Aviary - Creation on the Fly - I like this a lot. Phoenix is an image editing tool (think: Photoshop on the web) while Peacock is a visual algorthmic patten generator (think: pipes for images). Lots lots more tools yet to be launched. Aviary is also a community. I have 5 invites.
• Musical Arduino - Aduino acting as a MIDI controller (sending serial data at 31,250bps, no computer required). I love the piezo elements as velocity-sensitive electricronic drums. Way cool.
• Whomwah.com » Blog Archive » More fun with QR Codes and the BBC logo - bbc.co.uk/programmes as a QRCode containing the BBC logo. Nice

I flew back from New York today, to discover England where I left it, but covered with a light blanket of snow.

I will blog some more notes from the conference soon (I have already shared my flimsy summary on the panel I moderated on Eightbar. More to come) and I’m still uploading photos to Flickr.

For now, here’s a short video of an amazing busker we saw yesterday. (Update to use fancy new Flickr video feature)