Submitted by David Vogt on September 24, 2006 - 3:33pm.
I’m old enough to remember television sets with knob channel-changers; when there was only a knob-full of channels to be found. Who can even count the channels now? A similar explosion of opportunity is about to revolutionize your mobile existence. Are you ready for a thousand-channel lifestyle?
A simple demonstration of this phenomenon leaps forward from the recent Winter Olympics in Turin. Turin is laid out on a classic European city grid with a number of open public squares sprinkled across the urban landscape. In terms of ‘programming’ an analog city, this is a perfect design: a set of discrete ‘channels’ where the 2006 Turin organizers were able to ‘broadcast’ distinct crowd-pleasing offerings in a variety of locations. It works well but there’s a profound scaling problem (like the knob channel-changer): what happens when you’ve got enormously more events than town squares, and the events are transforming faster than a printed program can keep up-to-date?
