MonthJuly 2003

The most important document about social software yet written

Clay Shirkey says The Lessons of Lucasfilm’s Habitat is the most important document on social software. Seems Habitat was a Commodore 64 game that was played on the QuantumLink network (which eventually became AOL).

Culture of Cities Project

Via tobias c. van Veen:

Is there a shared experience of city life, a set of encounters, tensions and issues confronting cities, inducing them, at some level, to be engaged in common problems? Or, on the other hand, are cities distinct by virtue of their geographical, economic, cultural and social forces which have moulded them? This project proposes detailed studies of urban experience in Montreal, Toronto, Berlin and Dublin, to help us to understand how cities struggle to define and sustain their individuality, amidst all those forces which threaten to render them indistinct. This project brings together some of Canada’s leading scholars of cultural life. It will create an ongoing structure for exchange and collaboration between universities, cultural institutions and research centres in Toronto and Montreal. At the same time, the project will allow Canadian scholars to collaborate with colleagues, universities, and research centres in Berlin and Dublin.

Culture of Cities Project

Privacy

Continuing to try to cram Anne’s brain into mine, it seems…

RFID accidentally released confidential documents. This stuff is very interesting. I wonder what the Headmap folks think about this stuff.

Beyond Privacy. Need to finish reading this.

And a related old bit: Privacy and Social Freedom (the article this refers to is gone… I’m hoping to find a copy of it somewhere).

More stuff to read when I get a chance

From Anne a while ago, The Cappuccino Community : cafes and civic life in the contemporary city:

Cafes serving cappuccino have become prominent in many cityscapes over the last five years providing not just frothy coffee and snacks but as importantly new spaces for people to meet, relax, work, write, read and most of all talk. In the history of European civil society cafes played a key role which they only recently seem to have regained in the UK. From July 2002 until December 2004 this project will be investigating the role of cafes in urban communities in the UK, be they neighbourhood, work or virtual communities. It is assessing the cafe’s changing relevance as a site for civic life and public culture. The project?s methodology is a multi-site ethnography of over a dozen different kinds of cafes, their working conditions, customer interactions, and tracing the cafes’ connection into daily routines.

Torispace

From the 1st International Moblogging Conference blog, Torispace:

We have developed a new GPS based photo mapping album

  • focusing on 10-20 year old women market first, but can be used by anyone
  • its very easy to use
  • take your photo
  • send it to our special server
  • GPS, time and the image are sent to the server
  • automatically it is uploaded and mapped
  • the user can see it in their site space whenever they want to
  • Heres a movie of when we went hiking and how we enjoyed it afterwards
  • Radical Software magazine archives online

    The entire run of Radical Software, a pioneering video art magazine, is now available online.

    Radical Software

    (via Stare).

    Humans to scale walls

    Scientists are working to create “gecko tape,” a substance that could be used to create gloves that would enable humans to scale walls:

    Weak molecular forces, called van der Waal forces, attract any two touching objects to one another. These forces are so small they usually go unnoticed. When a human puts his hand against a wall, for example, it doesn’t stick because only a small fraction of the hand touches the wall – perhaps several thousand points of contact.

    The feet of geckos have billions of microscopic hairs per square inch, with anywhere from several to thousands of split-ends touching any surface. The resulting molecular forces are strong enough to defy gravity.

    Full Story: Christian Science Monitor: Spider-Man’s sticky power in human reach

    (via Stare)

    Sam draws pictures from your titles

    This guy draws pictures based on titles that viewers send him, then posts them to his web site. Brilliant stuff.

    (via Brain Blog via Creative Generalist)

    Academic papers I’d like to read

    Guess graduating hasn’t taken academia out of me yet. Here are a couple papers I want to read when I get a moment:

    Anne links to a lot of papers that sound interesting.

    Half way there

    I’ve gone 500 miles, and I’ve got 500 more to go. I’m already tired.
    I’ve been driving too much. I’ll probably need to go to Seattle soon.
    Grrr.

    I got a new car a couple days ago. Gillette, WY got hit by a bad hail
    storm, and the Chevy place was selling 2003 Cavaliers for 4k off, plus
    another 4k off for factory discount. Which made it about 8.5k, minus 15
    hundred for my Taurus. Not a bad deal.

    It’s holding up so far. It’s a lot smaller than the taurus, obviously
    desined for shorter people. But it’s bearable. My main complaint is
    that literally all the controls are in a different place. I really
    liked the control layout on the taurus, very simple and clear. Truely
    remarkable design. The Cavalier, not so much. I may never et used to
    it.

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