A stream of consciousness from the brain of B.K. DeLong
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May 11, 2004
What follows is a braindump from one of my morning walks around campus. Unfortunately, I did not have a means of recording this braindump so I had to "go over it" again at my desk. I hope to begin taking some sort of recording devlice with a hands-free mic that I can use to start capturing these live.
A brief intro to the below unintelligible jabbering: I have recently started getting involved more in the semantic web community - specifically the development of the FOAF or "Friend Of A Friend" RDF metadata schema. This has lead to alot of thinking and dreaming on my end about the future of the Web, the Internet and human use of technology in general.
Recently on the main list for FOAF discussion, rdfweb-dev, there was some line-drawing between what constitutes a FOAF document and what makes up a "presence" document. Danny Ayers, a frequent muser himself, coined the phrase "MeNow" on-the-fly to describe something that gives contextual presence to what a person is doing at any given moment. Joel De Gan has ran with the idea and begun work on an RDF vocabulary around the idea with Chris Schmidt hacking together a concept of what a MeNow document might look-like.
This idea led me to contact the researchers at MIT's Wearable Computing Lab, (and Joel contacted Steve Mann), to discuss how such a semantic language could be used in those creating a personal, live digital presence of themselves.
In thinking about wearable computing, I also started thinking about Home Networking and the convergence between various devices in the home and the people who reside in it. That, of course, raises incredible privacy issues so I've touched on some ideas to allow for privacy while also allowing for data to get to the right people.
Madness.
See the below braindump for more details.
I have got to come up wityh a way of having some sort of voice recorder during my morning walks. Something that could be converted to text via voice-recognition and then posted into Weblog format.Translation: look at latest voice recog software
So all this work with MeNow comes down to convergence and really fits in with the wearable computing crowd. See crschmidt's MeNow document.
Being able to have book metadata for your reading list and ownership schema for things you own including media of all sorts. being able to pull metadatafrom your tivo live - what are you watching "this second"? What is the metadata for the show? What is the episode information, what channel etc.
How about a real-time status feed from your tivo itself - what is it recording and doing? Seems to me this is where the convergence really happens. Digital sensors everywhere in a house - what is the temp of the fridge - what is the various states of "filled" of objects in the fridge - RFID - what is IN the fridge and RFID -what have you thrown away - disposable RFID tags?
Is the oven on? Is the pilot light lit? Where is the dog in the house? What is currently on your iPod or Nomad Jkebox? What are yu listening to? Which lights are on in the house? Are any of your windows open? doors? Who is in the house? are windows ad doors locked?
What is the baby doing? What are the baby's vital signs? RFID's on legacy stuff like VHS tapes. When in the VCR, it is detected and posted what is playing.
Privacy and Encryption is key. how to prevent neighbors from snooping outside the house? House needs RFID protection -RFID signels are encrypted before "leaving" thehouse against keys only certain people can read based on trust/relationships. Electric company has key to read meter, gas company has key to read gas meter, police and fire or alarm company has key to read security and safety information.
Back to MeNow - digtal media schemas? casettes, cds, dvds, vhs tapes, television or just music and video schemas with media type designations?
Wearable computing Blackboxes - vital signs, gps, aural feed, visual feed, sensory?
User agent representations? How are you "accessing" the net at a given time? Hardware designation, connectivity designation - phone, pda, laptop, desktop, some other method? television? Kiosk? Wireless, cable, dsl? Speed check?
MeNow...
For me that sums it up. Where/What/When/How
Being an old school hacker I would never have things like my address and phone number for instance. I would also not have other really personal things there or it could be a shopping spree for identity theft.
For me it is not a "personal" thing, it is really a snapshot, sort of like someone following you around with a camera, but they don't get to film you going to the bathroom. :)
Also, it cannot be distracting.. Anything that forces me to "update" something I am not really keen on. Thus scripting applications like my music and my browser. And when I do decide to update my dev journal I want to be able to hit a few radio buttons that identify various traits that set in motion some other things.
That is me..
Others have an entirely different view.. I read an ebook by a guy who's goal is writing down every thought that he has. This nearly immobilizes the guy, but whatever floats your boat. A lot of the bloggers on LJ and others are attention seekers and so want people knowing how they feel and what mood they are in and they also want a way to archive it, so that will have to be one of the first apps built on pdns and utilizing the MeNowDocument.
Danny send me this:
http://interconnected.org/home/2004/04/28/on_social_software
Which has an overview of what social software needs.
I am very stream-thinking as well and being bi-polar can tend to go overboard, but this has created some of my greatest work.
Privacy and encryption, that has been defined in WOT, but I think there is much more that can be done with it and think that certain parts should be set private.. Thus the foaf.php app that I have been mulling over for quite a while, it has to be simple enough that anyone can use it, but hold enough that it is useful. In addition it needs to be modular so that it can be built on by myself and others easily.
I have a good mental roadmap of where I am going with this, but not all the pieces are fully fleshed out.. So
Steps at a time. First is the parser I am working on as I can. This has to be perfect.
Then the sub-processor which handles the schema's which also must be amazing. etc.
I need more time.
-joel
A brainDUMP? More like a semi-live brainSTREAM! :)
HAS SOMEONE DEVELOPED A WEARABLE COMPUTING BRAINDUMP METHOD THAT ALLOWS FOR VOICE RECOG WITH ANIMATED GRAPHIC REPRODUCTION?