Reading the blogs - May 25, 2006

In a recent post I provided a list of sites that I visit - pretty much on a daily basis - through the magic of RSS (really simple syndication) and a "feed reader," in my case NetNewsWire. In this post I take a dose of my own medicine and reflect on what I learned from my blog reading today. At least two items jumped out as related to mobilemuse.

While it looks like a chokingly large list (76 blogs/news sites), the news reader software makes it easy to rip through them pretty quickly, just glancing at the headlines as you go. Only the unread stories are presentated, and when you find something you're interested in you can dig deeper by first looking at the selection (sometimes the whole story, other times just the first few lines) that has been retrieved for you, and then if you really want to know more you can visit the web site or some of the embedded links.

In this way I manage to skim through that material in half an hour. But what do I find? Sometimes nothing, or very little, but when I do find something interesting I mark it for later follow-up. This way I can keep up the rhythm of reading new things and not get too distracted with following up on things. It seems like these deserve to be separated out.

Anyway, enough about the process. Today I found a couple of interesting items, from a mobilemuse perspective. The first is a game, called Pixie Hunt. Pixie Hunt is reminiscent of the digital dragonboat game developed as part of the MUSE I, but it benefits from technological advances made in the last year. It also has taken a page out of the "mashup" craze and builds on two very popular tools - Flickr and Virtual Earth. The players send pictures of their play (a scavenger hunt type event) to Flickr from wireless mobile devices (PocketPC) and watch the other teams via Virtual Earth. Pixie Hunt is being featured at Where 2.0, a conference down in California all about locative media. You can find out more about the conference here, at their web site: http://conferences.oreillynet.com/where2006/

The second interesting story came from a post in a blog called "Software Everywhere" and emerged because of "old media" attention (Wall Street Journal) to a new media story of almost 18 months ago. A blogger called Scott Schaffer wrote, in "The Pondering Primate," about the connections between the real world and hyperlinks back in November of 2004. (See his reaction to the attention yesterday.)

As he sees it, the mobile phone is like the computer mouse for navigating the physical world. A nice metaphor, I thought, and certainly part of the idea behind one of the current mobilemuse projects, "metrocode." Metrocode's idea is to put codes on physical objects (art objects and events, in the first instance) and have those become the prompts to an interactive voice response system accessible through your phone. Later iterations, of course, could make use of the growing ability of mobile phones that can be used to "read" barcodes (see examples from Japan) or RFID tags (as a new Nokia phone can do) - cutting out the tedium and errors of typing in strings of numbers.

Interestingly, it turns out that a Canadian, Simon Woodside, is leading the charge on this front with his open standards technology, called "Semacode." Using software you can download from his site, you can turn a java enabled camera phone into a barcode reader - at least of the new two dimensional barcodes that his software creates. Given the propensity of our cities to barcode everything (apparently the City of New York has started to put barcodes on all the light posts, as part of an accounting requirement for physical assets - details here), perhaps the barcode and the mobile phone will become companions in our locative development exercises (e.g., Semapedia).

Here is my barcode:

And that's reading the blogs for today!