Life & Research Notes

Unless I’m mistaken, John is the only faculty member at the lab who consistently keeps a blog. Why aren’t other faculty members self-publishing their thoughts and work on blogs? In the emerging media landscape, blogging is no longer simply about promotion of one’s identity, ideas and reputation. It is about preservation. If the lab and its faculty continue to ignore this medium they will simply and quietly drop off the collective radar. And if they can pick it up like John, Henry Jenkins, and others, they will find an audience.

I really want to clear my brain and go to sleep, but instead I keep looping through the events of the past few days, and periodically checking the clock to see just how little sleep I’m actually getting. This does happen to me from time to time, especially when I slip off my wagon of caffeine-freeness and indulge in the mid-afternoon coffee. Like I did today. Well I figure the less I sleep tonight, the more tired (and hence less stressed) I’ll be tomorrow. Yup, tomorrow night I’m going to sleep just fine. But in the meantime tomorrow is my busiest day of the week, with two demos, a meeting, and an early morning (8:30!) Sloan class I’m trying to audit. Let me just stick pins in some of these thoughts…

Being a dilettante. With the web, there is so much to know, but we don’t actually have to know very much of it. We just have to know how to find it. This has been said before, but I don’t remember exactly who said it…

Mentoring. Relevant to the last point on dilettantes, I’m only now beginning to understand that I will never find that single mentor to teach me design, programming, electronics, woodworking, surfing, gardening, and cooking. Oh, and wheel building, finance and investing, and welding. I’m going to have to find lots of mentors. So I have to be my own meta-mentor.

Luis’s definition of the three eras of our group - VLW, ACG, then PLW - as direct consequences of a single element of the almost messianic McLuhan vision. The VLW were the explorers of the digital medium, remapping tools and techniques to work in new ways within the digital space. ACG played with the medium to create messages that were previously not possible. And now the PLW is shedding the VLW and ACG boosters, pulling out of the gravitational field of the medium/message dichotomy, into a future in which people’s lives are so tightly woven into the media as to be indistinguishable from it.

promiserver.org. That’s the old placeholder still, but note that I actually bought the domain. Oh, and the .com too. It just seems like a good name. The actual code is really coming along too. My goal is to have something up and usable online by the end of the month. It’s very important that I beat all the other procedural judicial systems to the market. Competition in this space is fierce.

Speaking of domains and tlds, somewhat related is Niue. They have a most excellent tld, free community internet, paradisical, and sovereign. Seem like it would be a place worth visiting, especially with Jenn.

iTunes plugin. Anita and I have decided this would be a nice side project. I see the SDK for the visualizer plugins, but how did iLike make theirs? I’m thinking they’re using an unpublished API. Some more investigation is in order.

Perhaps I’ll reread this post tomorrow, quickly realize I was sick with sleep deprivation, and promptly take it down. But it is, I think, perfectly blog-like, perhaps more so than anything I’ve previously written, so I may have no choice but to leave it up.

For my Hacking Second Life project I was interested in the trails of data each Second Life resident inadvertently generates without any awareness or control of its usage. While content creators in Second Life have some control over the licensing of their work, how do we navigate and manage the digital content created simply as a result of ‘living’ in a purely digital world in which our speech, gestures and actions are made of the same stuff as our code, clothes and cars? How do we decide whether others use this content? Can we set up personal license policies for our personal data?

To begin thinking about these issues, I wrote a small script that may be attached to any object, and that sends all locally overheard chat to a “Permanent Record” web application via an HTTP post. On the web, visitors may then view a list of the names and unique keys of all people recorded and all listening devices, and can view a live updating audit of all chat.

The site acts as a real time observation post of all conversations taking place within range of any of the listeners, revealing speaker identity, content, location and time. Check out the screenshot and screencast (24MB) of the permanent record and recorder in action.

I plan to put up a more permanent version of the site as soon as possible, and I’ll install a few listeners around some MIT or Media Lab sanctioned land. I’ve been tempted to attach the script to a variety of different types of objects, especially projectiles so I could launch them towards interesting things happening. It would be interesting to have these things distributed all over the place, though at some point I’d probably be violating the Linden Lab ToS.

Luis and I tested out the recorder a little…

Unfortunately he felt compelled to sit on it.

Check out the LSL source code. If nothing else, it at least has some generalized little functions for sending RESTful HTTP posts. Since Second Life only allows 20 HTTP requests per 100 seconds, my code queues up overheard statements and sends them in batches.

On Thursday I joined forces with Brandon Roy and Jeevan Kalanithi for the Simplicity consortium 24 hour build-a-thon contest. We created foodstckr, a little social web application that tells the stories of food via simple user designed food stckrs that can be printed out on labels and placed on food items.

Exhausted after working all night, we presented on Friday morning. Despite being obviously juvenile and irreverent, foodstckr is in a way quite lovable, and we were lucky to win first place in the build-a-thon’s popular vote. I think it helped that we played a little King Tubby as the soundtrack to our demo pitch. Jeevan registered the domain, so look to see foodstckr.org up and online eventually.

1. Signup, then login and create your food stckr…

2. Go to “print assorted” and generate a sheet. Print it on labels or sticky backed paper.

3. Now cut it all out. Each stckr has a permalink url on it, so a curious stckr discoverer can find it online, see who made it, and possibly press charges.

3. Apply to food items, optionally with picture taking. Avoid eye contact with store employees.

Recent PLW graduate Burak’s latest project is up online. He is pushing ahead with some work in experimental art market models, all leading up to a live event featuring sensors, live video feeds, and the city of Oklahoma (as well as Boston, Istanbul, and Munich). See Burak’s description on the OS Blog, and the live site, A Stock Market in Life.

Another recent grad, Kelly has been busy settling into Google’s team in Atlanta, and recently releasing Google Web Toolkit (GWT) for the Mac. GWT is a package for developing rich AJAX applications in Java. Your Java code compiles into compact and efficient Javascript. He has a more accurate and helpful description on Google Mac blog. Nice work Kelly.

It was a whirlwind five day trip, including 24 hours of travel each way. I had excellent colleagues and travel companions in Dave, Amanda, Jaewoo, and John. We managed to cover a lot of ground in a short time, both with the engineers and researchers at Samsung, and in our explorations of the city and the DMZ.

Yet I seem to be having trouble putting together any interesting commentary or reflection on Seoul. I can say that in some places, like among the students, shoppers and partiers in Insadon and Dongdaemun, the electricity and newness felt very much like Tokyo. And at other times, wandering the backalleys and outdoor markets, or watching the motorbikers carry impossibly bulky loads through crowded streets, I recalled the chaos of Bangkok and Saigon. Then there were those experiences absolutely unique to Korea, like the outdoor performance that Dave and I stumbled on, some blend of Taiko and the circus, with young women jumping and singing and drumming, and older men leaving the circle of spectators to dance drunkenly around in the center. Throughout the first two days we were also working, giving talks and a workshop at Samsung and meeting with engineers. It was a busy few days. The jetlag didn’t help.

One of many markets.

Some sort of food, hard to know what, probably spicy.

We happened to be in the right part of town at the right time…

A labor rights rally demonstration was happening…

Riot police were out in force. Hundreds of police sat in buses or on the street on their riot shields, smoking cigarettes, listening to music on their headphones, waiting for the rally to move outside its designated area. We heard later that it did. We’re told Korean police like to use tear gas.

Sometimes it is fun to be a tourist.

Amanda found out about this show at the modern art museum.

Jaewoo overordered. It looks nice here, but got messy really fast.

Approaching the DMZ.

That’s all we could see of the DMZ.

Dave and Amanda in Dongdaemun.

Samsung has tight security.

Advertisements of a comedy show

Insadon was hip.

More please.

Reminds me of a book I read as a kid.

The aftermath of the Samsung dinner.