Consider this intriguing article about addictive weblogging behavior in today's New York Times: For Some, the Blogging Never Stops. (I've pasted the article's text below my commentary, for future reference.)

I do sense an addictive quality to the act of weblogging. I've felt it strongly; there have been several occasions when I compulsively keyed in a cheesebikini entry and then deleted it, realizing that it's not of much value to anyone but me. So why did I write such things in the first place? I think it's important to be conscious of the tendency to weblog for weblogging's sake. Now I look over everything I write and before selecting "publish" I try to make sure that the entry offers something useful, interesting and entertaining. My most important criterion is that each entry should offer something new: something that hasn't been said on other sites in other words.

Weblogging has some negative qualities and it may have addictive qualities, and some percentage of webloggers get carried away. But we're missing a bit of context here.

It's important to consider what all that weblogging time replaces. For instance: what if, for most webloggers, weblogging time replaces hours that they used to spend watching television? If so, is this really a negative thing? I'm disturbed by the Times' photo of a guy ignoring his wife and typing on a laptop during their anniversary vacation, while others around him chat and read books in the sun. But this troubling image is counterbalanced by the thought of people engaging in new forms of interaction and creativity while their peers passively absorb endless vapid megacorporate marketing messages at the local malls and megaplexes.

I'd love to learn more about how weblogging affects people's offline lives, and where online and offline interactions can intersect. In addressing such issues, can we design for more socially valuable and healthy online and offline activity? I'll explore these issues this summer at Intel Research Seattle. I'll work with Joseph McCarthy there beginning next Tuesday, on the Blogger Bridges project.

May 27, 2004
For Some, the Blogging Never Stops
By Katie Hafner
The New York Times

To celebrate four years of marriage, Richard Wiggins and his wife, Judy Matthews, recently spent a week in Key West, Fla. Early on the morning of their anniversary, Ms. Matthews heard her husband get up and go into the bathroom. He stayed there for a long time.

"I didn't hear any water running, so I wondered what was going on," Ms. Matthews said. When she knocked on the door, she found him seated with his laptop balanced on his knees, typing into his Web log, a collection of observations about the technical world, over a wireless link.

Blogging is a pastime for many, even a livelihood for a few. For some, it becomes an obsession. Such bloggers often feel compelled to write several times daily and feel anxious if they don't keep up. As they spend more time hunkered over their computers, they neglect family, friends and jobs. They blog at home, at work and on the road. They blog openly or sometimes, like Mr. Wiggins, quietly so as not to call attention to their habit.

"It seems as if his laptop is glued to his legs 24/7," Ms. Matthews said of her husband.

The number of bloggers has grown quickly, thanks to sites like blogger.com, which makes it easy to set up a blog. Technorati, a blog-tracking service, has counted some 2.5 million blogs.

Of course, most of those millions are abandoned or, at best, maintained infrequently. For many bloggers, the novelty soon wears off and their persistence fades.

Sometimes, too, the realization that no one is reading sets in. A few blogs have thousands of readers, but never have so many people written so much to be read by so few. By Jupiter Research's estimate, only 4 percent of online users read blogs.

Indeed, if a blog is likened to a conversation between a writer and readers, bloggers like Mr. Wiggins are having conversations largely with themselves.

Mr. Wiggins, 48, a senior information technologist at Michigan State University in East Lansing, does not know how many readers he has; he suspects it's not many. But that does not seem to bother him.

"I'm just getting something off my chest," he said.

Nor is he deterred by the fact that he toils for hours at a time on his blog for no money. He gets satisfaction in other ways. "Sometimes there's an 'I told you so' aspect to it," he said. Recent ruminations on wigblog.blogspot.com have focused on Gmail, Google's new e-mail service. Mr. Wiggins points with pride to Wigblog posts that voiced early privacy concerns about Gmail.

Perhaps a chronically small audience is a blessing. For it seems that the more popular a blog becomes, the more some bloggers feel the need to post.

Tony Pierce started his blog three years ago while in search of a distraction after breaking up with a girlfriend. "In three years, I don't think I've missed a day," he said. Now Mr. Pierce's blog (www.tonypierce.com/blog/bloggy.htm), a chatty diary of Hollywood, writing and women in which truth sometimes mingles with fiction, averages 1,000 visitors a day.

Where some frequent bloggers might label themselves merely ardent, Mr. Pierce is more realistic. "I wouldn't call it dedicated, I would call it a problem," he said. "If this were beer, I'd be an alcoholic."

Mr. Pierce, who lives in Hollywood and works as a scheduler in the entertainment industry, said blogging began to feel like an addiction when he noticed that he would rather be with his computer than with his girlfriend - for technical reasons.

"She's got an iMac, and I don't like her computer," Mr. Pierce said. When he is at his girlfriend's house, he feels "antsy." "We have little fights because I want to go home and write my thing," he said.

Mr. Pierce described the rush he gets from what he called "the fix" provided by his blog. "The pleasure response is twofold," he said. "You can have instant gratification; you're going to hear about something really good or bad instantly. And if I feel like I've written something good, it's enjoyable to go back and read it."

And, he said, "like most addictions, those feelings go away quickly. So I have to do it again and again."

Joseph Lorenzo Hall, 26, a graduate student at the School of Information Management and Systems at the University of California at Berkeley who has studied bloggers, said that for some people blogging has supplanted e-mail as a way to procrastinate at work.

People like Mr. Pierce, who devote much of their free time to the care and feeding of their own blogs and posting to other blogs, do so largely because it makes them feel productive even if it is not a paying job.

The procrastination, said Scott Lederer, 31, a fellow graduate student with Mr. Hall, has a collective feel to it. "You feel like you're participating in something important, because we're all doing it together," he said.

Jeff Jarvis, president of Advance.net, a company that builds Web sites for newspapers and magazines, and a blogging enthusiast, defended what he called one's "obligation to the blog."

"The addictive part is not so much extreme narcissism," Mr. Jarvis said. "It's that you're involved in a conversation. You have a connection to people through the blog."

Some compulsive bloggers take their obligation to extremes, blogging at the expense of more financially rewarding tasks.

Mr. Wiggins has missed deadline after deadline at Searcher, an online periodical for which he is a paid contributor.

Barbara Quint, the editor of the magazine, said she did all she could to get him to deliver his columns on time. Then she discovered that Mr. Wiggins was busily posting articles to his blog instead of sending her the ones he had promised, she said. "Here he is working all night on something read by five second cousins and a dog, and I'm willing to pay him," she said.

Ms. Quint has grown more understanding of his reasons, if not entirely sympathetic. "The Web's illusion of immortality is sometimes more attractive than actual cash," she said.

Jocelyn Wang, a 27-year-old marketing manager in Los Angeles, started her blog, a chronicle of whatever happens to pop into her head (www.jozjozjoz.com), 18 months ago as an outlet for boredom.

Now she spends at least four hours a day posting to her blog and reading other blogs. Ms. Wang's online journal is now her life. And the people she has met through the blog are a large part of her core of friends.

"There is no real separation in my life," she said. Like Mr. Wiggins, Ms. Wang blogs while on vacation. She stays on floors at the Hotel Nikko in San Francisco with access to a free Internet connection. ("So I can blog," she explains.)

Blogging for a cause can take on a special urgency. Richard Khoe, a political consultant in Washington who in his spare time helps run a pro-John Kerry group called Run Against Bush, posts constantly to the blog embedded in the group's Web site (www.runagainstbush.org). He blogs late into the night, although he knows that the site still attracts relatively few visitors.

"Sometimes you get really particular with the kind of link you want, so you search a little more, then a little more, then you want to see what other people are saying about that link you chose," he said. "And before you know it, some real time has passed."

Others find they are distracted to the point of neglectfulness. Tom Lewis, 35, a project manager for a software firm in western Massachusetts who has a photo blog (tomdog.buzznet.com/user), has occasionally shown up "considerably late" for events and has put off more than a few work-related calls to tend to his blog.

Mr. Jarvis characterizes the blogging way of life as a routine rather than an obsession. "It's a habit," he said. "What you're really doing is telling people about something that they might find interesting. When that becomes part of your life, when you start thinking in blog, it becomes part of you."

The constant search for bloggable moments is what led Gregor J. Rothfuss, a programmer in Zurich, to blog to the point of near-despair. Bored by his job, Mr. Rothfuss, 27, started a blog that focused on technical topics.

"I was trying to record all thoughts and speculations I deemed interesting," he said. "Sort of creating a digital alter ego. The obsession came from trying to capture as much as possible of the good stuff in my head in as high fidelity as possible."

For months, Mr. Rothfuss said, he blogged at work, at home, late into the night, day in and day out until it all became a blur - all the while knowing, he added, "that no one was necessarily reading it, except for myself."

When traffic to the blog, greg.abstract.ch started to rise, he began devoting half a day every day and much of the weekend to it. Mr. Rothfuss said he has few memories of that period in his life aside from the compulsive blogging.

He was saved from the rut of his online chronicle when he traveled to Asia. The blog became more of a travelogue. Then Mr. Rothfuss switched jobs, finding one he enjoyed, and his blogging grew more moderate.

He still has the blog, but posts to it just twice a week, he said, "as opposed to twice an hour." He feels healthier now. "It's part of what I do now, it's not what I do," he said.

Suffering from a similar form of "blog fatigue," Bill Barol, a freelance writer in Santa Monica, Calif., simply stopped altogether after four years of nearly constant blogging.

"It was starting to feel like work, and it was never supposed to be a job," Mr. Barol said. "It was supposed to be an anti-job."

Even with some 200 visitors to his blog each day, he has not posted to his blog since returning from a month of travel.

Still, Mr. Barol said, he does not rule out a return to blogging someday.

"There is this seductive thing that happens, this kind of snowball-rolling-down-a-hill thing, where the sheer momentum of several years' posting becomes very keenly felt," he said. "And the absence of posting feels like - I don't know, laziness or something."

Tim Gnatek contributed reporting for this article.

Road Sage

Road Sage, a project at Berkeley for which I led the user interface and interaction design, won second place among 18 contenders in my department's final project competition. (Second-year students in my program must build and present a substantial final project before they graduate. At the end of each year two panels of outside judges select the best projects.)

Essentially, Road Sage is Mapquest on steroids: it takes live and historical traffic data into account in choosing and presenting routes, and in estimating travel times. It uses data logged from highway sensors operated by California's Department of Transportation to forecast traffic between any given starting and ending points, and to suggest the best route at a given time in the future. It also shows live traffic along a given route, among other things.

Mikhail Avrekh, John Han and Lauren Wilkinson (all now graduated) came up with the idea and worked hard for much of the past year to build it out. Bravo team! (Sorry Bay Area drivers, but don't get too excited. We don't have a robust multi-user version of Road Sage so it's not ready for public use. But if Mikhail and friends can track down funding, who knows.)

Imagine weighting the historic traffic data with historic weather records and with the latest weather forecasts -- in this way we could more accurately predict future traffic and provide more accurate route suggestions. For regions that include sports stadiums, imagine weighting the traffic data on game days based on past traffic changes that occured on previous game days. Plenty more can be done here to provide ever-more-accurate traffic forecasts and route recommendations, all of which can be built on top of the Road Sage foundation.

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May 05, 2004

Vizster Rocks

It's intimidating to take an information visualization class with a fellow student who's one of the most talented and creative infoviz wizards on the planet. But it's a great way to see sneak previews of his work.

Jeff Heer is the whiz, and Vizster is his class project. It's the best social network visualization tool yet, by far. I've always wondered what Six Apart and Friendster and the rest were thinking in limiting themselves to flat textual Web pages, because it makes so much more sense to illustrate social networks as images with nodes (circles or squares) for each person linked via connectors (lines) showing relationships. Here and there a few people (academics and hackers yet not the social networking services themselves) have pieced together such creations. Friendster even put a small mockup of such a visualization on their front page, but they never implemented the real thing. Now Heer put all of this together in a tool that effectively and stylishly implements what we were imagining, plus much more.

Unfortunately you can't yet download this awesome Vizster tool or see an animation demoing it, and you lose a lot when you lose the live interaction, so I hope Jeff will put Vizster up for download soon. But on the Vizster site you can explore a collection of screen shots and a written explanation of the project.

For more Heer wizardry, check out his prefuse toolkit, which enables programmers to quickly build visualizations.

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March 22, 2004

Bedouin Devilry

Julian Bleecker's wifi.Bedouin project has my mind churning. Bleecker frames this as a product and a service: essentially it's a laptop in a backpack with wi-fi antennas, a PDA remote control, and software that creates your own little "island Internet."

Forget about the packaging. The big innovation here lies in the paradigm, in viewing your wi-fi-enabled laptop as a server and a filter rather than a client.

What can you do with this? Here's an example: have fun in Starbucks. Walk into a Starbucks cafe, sit back and watch customers come in, fire up their laptops and connect to your wi-fi node. They think they've jacked in to the Internet, but really they're connected to your mobile server. You can serve their Web browsers whatever content you want -- an art piece, brand-damaging fake Starbucks ads, fake coupons, photos of your cat, whatever. Mix your content with real Internet connectivity and content served up via the cafe's wi-fi service. (Combine this with a Guerilla Cafe DJ setup and you've got a toolkit that would make Starbucks interventionist Reverend Billy proud.)

It's important that we engage in this sort of play and think through these things, because not all the possibilities brought to light here are funny. McDonald's or Starbuck's or anyone else can intercept passwords and can easily monitor, record, forge and censor unprotected wi-fi communications. We can prevent such misdeeds through technical means, but before the solutions can be perfected and adopted we need to raise public awareness that the problems exist. Pranksters can spread this sort of consciousness.

This is just one example of what we can do with systems like Bedouin. Check out Bleecker's scenarios page (and click through the three scenarios) for more.

3/24/04 UPDATE: Arthur Law brings up two other fun possibilities. (1) For business people and software developers: why not put the project work on a bedouin server and huddle the workgroup around a campfire? (2) For video game afficionados: won't weddings and funerals be more fun when you and your laptop-toting friends engage in action-packed shoot-em-up tournaments during the ceremonies? Why wait for high-speed Internet coverage to reach your destination when you can bring the connectivity with you?

5/04/04 UPDATE: I recently came across another intriguing application that converts local machines (in this case, handheld computers) into miniature wi-fi Web servers. It's called Hocman and it's designed to allow motorcyclists to exchange social information via HTTP when they encounter one another on the road. Details here.)

5/16/04 UPDATE: It turns out that Intel Research has been doing its own work using the mobile server paradigm, using tiny Personal Servers.

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January 04, 2004

I Want My Wi-Fi Telephony

Last February I requested a small, cheap mobile device that:

notifies me when I'm within range of an open wi-fi (wireless Internet) access point, and:

allows me to call any telephone number on the planet, nearly free of charge, whenever I'm within range of a Wi-Fi signal, via a simple numeric-keypad interface.

Back then, the hardware necessary to make this a practical reality wasn't cheap and it wasn't widely in use. Now it is. Many of the most popular PDAs (personal digital assistants), like my new Palm Tungsten C, provide Web browsers and high-bandwidth wi-fi Internet connectivity.

We have the hardware. We have the infrastructure -- the cities are becoming saturated with wi-fi hotspots, many of them free for public use, and robust Internet telephony networks have been in use for years.

And we have the client software -- but it hasn't been designed for the right devices. A handful of firms like Dialpad and Net2Phone already provide cheap PC-to-phone voice service. But none of them seem to have ported their client applications for use on PDAs.

What are these firms waiting for? For a very modest investment in resources, Dialpad and its competitors can make a very compelling offer: global telephone service on the go for prices less than one-tenth what you pay for mobile or even land-line phone service.

Dialpad: I have my portable wi-fi telephone and I'm ready to pay you to use it. What are you waiting for?

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September 02, 2003

Leaving the Nursery

Burning Man was phenomenal as usual, and as usual I won't try to put it down in words.

But I will point you to the most inspiring newswire article that I've read in years.

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July 03, 2003

Live Love Hotel Conference

Remember, the First International Moblogging Love Hotel Conference is going down today. Lovers all over the world (or just all around Tokyo?) are collaborating in one of the strangest weblogs around.

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June 21, 2003

Guerilla Cafe DJ

I want to be a guerilla cafe DJ.

Here's what I need: a small, portable FM transmitter powerful enough to override the signal in any cafe that's playing megacorporate radio. This would be especially useful in cafes tuned in to that unbearable Clear Channel snooze-jazz station that has infected so many San Francisco Wi-Fi cafes.

When I enter a cafe and power up my laptop, I'd like to plug this magic transmitter box into my laptop and use it to overpower the cafe radio's reception of that cheesy station, replacing it with whatever music is emerging at the moment from my laptop's sound card.

If you know where I can obtain such a device, please clue me in.

(If you know who created the power-tower graphic above, please let me know so I can give them credit. I pulled this image from the Web a long time ago and I can't remember where it came from.)

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June 18, 2003

Twenty-First Century Transcontinental Love

The First International Moblogging Love Hotel Conference:
Just remember, it's not about the sex.

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June 01, 2003

Stick It to Safeway

Stop using your Safeway Club Card. Use mine instead.

Safeway is one of those monstrous inescapable inhuman supermarket chains that saturates a regional market, peddling overpriced Frankenfood and driving smaller local merchants out of business.

One of Safeway's more deceptive tactics is to raise overall prices while providing slightly lower prices to those consumers who agree to use a "Safeway Club Card."

Safeway expects you to divulge a home address, a birth date and a bunch of other information in return for a card. If you want to avoid paying the highest prices you're supposed to present that card every time you shop at Safeway, so the company can monitor and store your whereabouts and your purchase patterns.

In short: Safeway uses deception to extract an ongoing stream of private and personal information from shoppers, while providing nothing but smoke in return. Safeway marketing drones disguise this swindle as a selling point, as a humanitarian service that Safeway provides to the public out of kindness.

Don't accept this abuse. Jam Safeway's customer surveillance system.

One way to do this: throw out your card and use mine instead. Safeway doesn't demand that you slide your card through the scanner; instead you can just enter your Club Card number (which is the same as your telephone number) at checkout. So write down my card number, and the next time you go to Safeway, type it in at checkout: 408-354-0579.

Tell your friends to do the same. That will hopelessly jumble together our purchase data and restore a bit of our privacy. Choke on that, fascist Safeway wonks.

What if you don't live in Safeway's shadow? Then join forces with your friends; use this strategy to protect your privacy from whatever giant card-wielding supermarket chain dominates your neighborhood.

For more about megacorporate "loyalty card" scams, visit nocards.org.

DISCLAIMER: Safeway occasionally sends piddling discount coupons and the like to cardholders. I'm not doing this as a scheme to get coupons. If I receive more than $5 worth of benefits (coupons that I actually use, or free bottle openers or anything) within six months, I'll donate that amount of money to the Electronic Frontier Foundation. If you don't want to use my card number at all, just use your own card with your friends and neighbors.

UPDATE: Not surprisingly, someone else is way ahead of me. Rob at cockeyed.com not only offers to let you use his Safeway card, he scanned the UPC code from his card and he printed it on stickers. He'll send a UPC sticker to you so that you can stick it on your own card, effectively making your card a clone of his. NOTE: This isn't necessary because Safeway will let you just type in your phone number instead of swiping a card. But more power to Rob.

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March 06, 2003

Video Fabric?

From the Department of Utterly Impractical Ideas:

I don't usually get jazzed up about clothing. But consider this amazing new glowing fabric from Italy.

Actually, it's not a fabric in itself -- it's a new type of luminescent fiber that can be sewn throughout all sorts of fabrics. You attach the fibers to a microchip with a battery power source, turn it on and the whole thing glows brilliantly.

The fibers are colorless by default, but they emit whatever color the microchip instructs them to emit. Imagine adding optical sensors and a little intelligence, so that your glowing clothes constantly change colors to match your surroundings. Walk from room to room in a dark club and you'll change colors like a chameleon. Or imagine using audio sensors to make the colors pulsate with the surrounding music, or in time with the wearer's heartbeat.

Better yet, could you use Luminex to turn your clothes into a video display? Perhaps you could cover thousands of fibers with an opaque coating except for the tips, then distribute the tips regularly throughout the clothing to form pixels. Then a microprocessor could control it all to display any imagery you can imagine.

How about having tiny video cameras in the clothing that capture the imagery in front of you and behind you, then display that imagery on either side of the video-display clothing? People facing you at just the right angle would see a freakish mirror-image of themselves -- or they'd see a freakish live image of what's behind you, so that you'd seem nearly transparent to them...

A big question: how expensive is this stuff? The Luminex site doesn't even hint at the answer, which probably means it's very pricey. Let's hope Moore's Law drives down the cost soon because I'm dying to play with this stuff.

(Credit where it's due: I snagged the simulated-invisibility idea from The University of Tokyo's Optical Camouflage project.)

UPDATE, 3-10-03: Thessy reports that a Swiss distributor sells Luminex at prices much lower than the U.S. distributor's: 40-60 Euros per meter, which equals about US$41-US$61 per yard. Details below in the comments.

UPDATE, 3-7-03: The U.S. Luminex distributor sent prices and details. In brief, it's very expensive (fabric costs US$280-US$450 per yard, depending on the type of fabric used) and so far you can't light up a fiber with any color on the fly. But the fibers are lit by LED's at the base, and you can have two LED's merging light of two colors into the same fibers to create the range of colors between the two chosen LED colors. Theoretically, I think it could be possible to create a triple-LED system to create any color, but apparently nobody has done this yet. Details below in the "comments" section, where the full sales message was posted. (By the way, I don't know any Luminex people and I'm not getting any sort of commission or kickback.)

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February 23, 2003

Wi-Fi Internet Telephone

I want a small, cheap mobile device that:

notifies me when I'm within range of an open Wi-Fi (wireless Internet) signal, and:

allows me to call any telephone number on the planet free of charge, or nearly free of charge, whenever I'm within range of a Wi-Fi signal, via a simple numeric-keypad interface.

(Services like PhoneFree and Net2Phone already let you make very cheap calls to worldwide telephone numbers, over the Internet using a personal computer. Now that Wi-Fi signals are becoming so widespread, a small, cheap device dedicated to this application would be extremely handy.)

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February 20, 2003

Location-Aware Thumb Ratings

People have predicted very complex "augmented-reality" systems that might arise in the near future, when many folks will carry around location-aware devices. But how about a simple thumbs-up/thumbs-down rating system?

Here's how it might work: your device includes a green thumbs-up button and a red thumbs-down button, TiVo-remote style. As you move through the city, when you enter a favorite restaurant or club or cafe you click the "thumbs up" button. When you pass that restaurant where you got food poisoning or that stuffy overpriced bar, you click "thumbs down." And if you enter an especially wonderful place, you click "thumbs up" twice to give it two thumbs up.

The key: you don't have to interrupt your daily activities; just reach into your pocket and click one of two buttons whenever you think of it.

Each time you press the button, the device records your geographical location and the thumb rating. Soon you have a little database, a map that shows the spots around town that you love and the spots that you hate.

So what? So nothing, until people share their preference maps. Now you have a powerful concept.

Thanks to this network, you can share your preference map with anyone who wants to use it, and you can freely use other peoples' preference maps. You decide which of your friends have tastes closest to your own, and you subscribe to those friends' preference maps.

Software on your device notifies you when you're near a spot that friends have rated positively; if a dozen of your friends rated a place highly, the device specifies via sounds or spoken words that the spot got a lot of thumbs up from the people you trust. And another thing -- software maps this for you, visually overlaying the green and red thumb-clicks over a map of a city or a region or a building.

You can also form preference groups, just as you form e-mail discussion lists. Everyone who shares an interest adds their account to a particular list, and that list compiles all members' preference maps into a master map for that group. Then anyone in the group can subscribe to the group map and use it or turn it off as desired. (Of course, if you no longer trust a person or a group's tastes, you can filter out their thumb-clicks on your map by removing that person or group from your list).

For certain events you use time-sensitive preference maps with thumb-clicks that fade over time. This could be great at an art fair or an outdoor festival -- you form a preference group with a bunch of friends who will attend the same event, and as you all explore the place, you each tag the coolest things and the most worthless things that you see. You might glance at a map and notice a dozen bright green blips at bandstand 3, which suggests that something amazing is going down there right now. Those green blips by the coat-check, on the other hand, have faded, so you probably missed whatever happened there. So you head straight to the action at bandstand 3.

(I'm reading the book "The Orchid Thief," and I just finished a scene that takes place at an orchid convention. Word spreads through the convention center that "you've got to check out the orchid that smells just like grape Kool-Aid." Frustrated flower freaks are milling around, blindly trying to find that particular orchid among hundreds of flowers on display. The orchid freaks would immediately know just where to find the most talked-about flowers in the show if they used such a preference system. That's what sparked this idea.)

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January 31, 2003

Location-Based Lowlives

I've been envisioning freakish scenarios that are bound to arise soon, when location-aware devices embrace payment and auction systems.

Imagine driving in circles, seeking a parking spot on a busy block in a crowded city. Your device immediately finds four people who are preparing to evacuate parking spaces within a few blocks of you:

Ted demands a digital $5 payment before he'll let his spot go.

Jeanine's parking space is up for auction. She'll give it up to whoever posts the highest bid by the time she's ready to leave, three minutes from now.

Marcus wants to give his space to a friend. He specified that anyone within two degrees of separation from him in his community of friends and colleagues can claim the spot.

Bill will give up his spot too -- but in return he demands $40 or twenty-four bottles of Zima.

Bill the fruit loop has plenty of time to spare and he lives for this crap; he's prepared to stubbornly hog that parking spot for hours, until someone meets his demands. What happens when Bill and his money-grubbing cronies take over all the public toilets at an outdoor concert? Not even our jiffy-johns are safe from speculating sleazebags.

I'm exaggerating, but the point stands: we'll face scenarios where a minority of selfish jerks can use location-aware networked technologies to manufacture new hassles in public spaces. Left unchecked, these are just the sorts of hassles that can draw more lawyers and politicians into the mix, just the sorts of hassles that can eventually prompt lumbering government bureaucracies to enact broad, boneheaded legislation that can hamstring innovation.

We should think through such scenarios now, and devise strategies for discouraging such abuse long before legislation and litigation rear their ugly heads.

(Thanks to headmap.com for inspiring this line of thinking. I love headmap because its authors spend a lot of time just imagining how location-aware technologies will fit into everyday life, then they write up their most intriguing thoughts and scenarios.)

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December 07, 2002

Snapshots to the People

Lovely and talented Mie lives in Tokyo. Dashing, fleet-footed Dav lives in San Francisco -- downstairs in my house.

Dav and Mie have a thing goin' on...

Mie has one of those new cel phones with a digital camera built in. Dav arranged things so that Mie can take a snapshot anywhere, at any time, and that image will immediately appear on Tokyo Tidbits, a special blog site that he created.

Now Dav bought a similar device for himself. When it arrives, distant Mie will tune in to the latest images from Dav's San Francisco life. Choke on that, Hallmark...

These networked, wireless camera devices are just the thing for long-distance puppy lovin'. But here's what I love most about them: they comprise a powerful new weapon against censorship and brutality. They allow people to immediately distribute evidence of wrongdoing without fearing that local authorities might examine or confiscate their film. Take a snapshot and the photo disappears from your device; but within minutes that image appears in the e-mail boxes of friends and colleagues around the world, or if you prefer, it's stored safely on a server on the other side of the planet.

Networked wireless camera devices are becoming cheaper and more popular by the month. (How cheap? Consider Dav's hiptop phone/camera/Internet device: it costs $99 with a special December Amazon rebate, and the service costs $40 per month, which includes always-on Internet access and a basic cel phone plan). And these prices should fall substantially in the years to come.

Already folks are sharing their photos from the field on sites like Hiptop Nation.

With fascism on the rise and civil liberties under siege all over the planet, innovations like these keep me from losing hope. Injustices will continue. But as more people can afford to arm themselves with wireless networked cameras, fewer injustices will go undocumented and unpunished.

[ More inspiring thoughts about mobile blogging: "From Weblog to Moblog" by Justin Hall. ]

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October 26, 2002

The iPod Killer?

Imagine listening to the mp3 music files stored on your PC or server, from anywhere, via your mobile phone/device. Just browse through your music via your device's display, choose mp3's to stream to the device, plug in your headphones and groove.

Why lug around gigs of expensive portable storage space when the music lives at your house, or on rented Web server space? Why hassle with multiple copies of your music, one on each device and computer that you use, when that music can live in one place?

Brad Lauster's recent blog entry got me fired up about this. Someday people will store their music and other files centrally and use them via multiple devices in multiple places; that's almost a given. But don't we have what it takes to make that someday today? Don't plenty of people who regularly listen to mp3s have devices that can support such a system?

Someone just needs to build device-based client software that allows folks to choose and stream down their songs, and the corresponding server software that talks to the device and serves up the chosen songs from the PC back home.

So what do you think -- is the bandwidth cheap enough to make this sort of streaming practical yet? Certainly during weekends, when minutes are free, no? Shoutcast streams mp3s effectively from PC to PC, even over modem connections, so I think we already have sufficient bandwidth. The device-side UI would be quite a challenge, but what a great capability this would provide...

More power to you:

What if you could submit music search queries, right from your mobile phone device, to peer-to-peer networks like Gnutella? These queries would run through your Gnutella client on your home PC, and the files you choose would be downloaded to your home PC. Then you could stream those mp3s over your mobile phone too.

Combine this with song-ID-and-download software; now you've really got something. Imagine this: one afternoon you wander into your favorite cafe and you immediately love the song playing in the background. You tell special software on your mobile phone to identify and grab the song. The software records a few seconds of the song and sends this digital sample to your server or home PC, where software identifies the song, fires up Morpheus (or whatever peer-to-peer software you prefer), runs a search on that song and downloads an mp3 of it. Later, in line at the grocery store, you'd love to hear that song that you caught just a bit of in the cafe. So you plug the headphones into your mobile phone and you stream that new mp3 from your server. Sweet.

Here's how the software would identify the song based on just a sample: it would query the online CDDB database, which contains titles of thousands of songs along with unique checksum signatures for each song. A special algorithm allows software to quickly scan any mp3 and come up with a unique "checksum" or signature, which applies to that song and that song only. So if you have an untitled mp3 on your PC, you can scan it and submit the resulting signature to the CDDB database. The database will spit back the name of the song, if it recognizes it. (I know: the ambient noise would probably screw up the whole scheme, and the checksums in that database probably require -entire- tracks, but can't a guy dream?)

How about a voice interface that lets you quickly request a given song by speaking it into your mobile phone device? Back home, the server software serves the track right away if it's on your hard drive; if not, it tries to find it on Morpheus and streams it down to you as soon as it can.

How about direct streaming from Gnutella users?

I can hardly wait.

[ASCAP and RIAA attorneys: I'm not encouraging anyone to download any music that they haven't purchased. I'm not seeking financial profit from any of this. And I don't have any money. So stay off my back.]

- Sean

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September 16, 2002

How to Fix an Election

Spoken-word audio version:
how2fix.mp3 - 4 minutes, 1.2 Mb.
Synthesized speech for your MP3 player.

Text version:
About once a month I join my fellow native Floridians in a massive group cringe as the latest piece of staggeringly shameful Sunshine State news rockets its way around the planet.

The latest election embarrassment hit me harder than most Florida fiascoes because Human Computer Interaction professionals and journalists were to blame, and I'm an HCI geek and an ex-reporter.

We didn't learn a thing when Florida made itself the butt of barroom jokes from Stockholm to Singapore by ruining the 2000 presidential election. We made the same mistakes last week.

Let's reflect on this for a moment, before we botch another election.

The media overlooked the core problem behind the gubernatorial election screwup, just as they did in the stories about the presidential-campaign butterfly-ballot screwup. This oversight will not recur if Human Computer Interaction professionals do their job, if they explain to the media and the public the importance of involving users in technology design.

Here's the core problem: the vote-handling system in question doesn't work; it fails because it was not designed for the people who use it.

Rather than dealing with this, most news stories focus on whether voters and poll workers were trained long enough, whether laws were broken in the handling of votes, how results were analyzed, whether there's a conspiracy afoot to steal the election, and so on. These latter questions are important but they're secondary to the core problem; whether or not you have a conspiracy on your hands, you still have a broken ballot system.

The New York Times editorial page echoed most news outlets Sunday in its analysis: "...it appears that most of the problems were caused by improperly trained workers and by voter confusion."

This is like saying the World Trade Center fell because the weather got really hot for a few hours in those middle floors.

Dade County may have dropped the ball in training poll workers. But when people are expected to undergo 12 hours of training before they can operate a simple ballot machine, something is horribly wrong.

Reporters, like the rest of us, expect new technologies to be complicated and difficult to use. After decades of wrestling with the blinking "12:00" on the VCR, who can blame them for forgetting the whole point in designing computerized ballot systems: to make them easier to use and less error-prone than their predecessors?

More about HCI Professional organizations involved in HCI: ACM SIGCHI Human Factors and Ergonomics Society Usability Professionals' Association Clearinghouses of HCI news, Web sites and knowledge: HCI Bibliography UIWEB.com

Why were the ballot devices so confusing? Because the designers failed to bring the voters and poll workers into the design process.

Most people don't understand that the years of intense training and hard work that turn a person into a talented, capable engineer simultaneously convert that person into a special sort of creature. Such creatures can build fantastic devices that give us wonderful powers, but in mastering these technical intricacies they lose the ability to see the world through the eyes of a regular person.

So if these creatures develop a tool completely on their own, if they presume to understand the regular people who will use the tool, those regular people will invariably end up with a tool that confuses the hell out of them.

At best, regular folks will let that annoying "12:00" keep blinking because setting that clock is such a hassle. At worst they'll press the wrong button and crash an airplane or bungle an election.

Human Computer Interaction workers understand all this because they've watched this typical cycle of failure unfold countless times to produce countless unusable products. HCI workers study a tool's intended users, and they involve those users with engineers during the design process to ensure that the tools will work for their intended audience. They tailor tools to users, so that nobody has to take a 12 hour class before using a simple voting booth.

Most reporters have never heard of a Human Computer Interaction professional, so who will a reporter call regarding the design and implementation of new voting technologies? At best, she'll call the engineers who built the ballot machines and who, in the case of a fiasco like this, are out of touch with their audience and honestly view the problem as a lack of training, a lack of tailoring the users to the tool.

So the media never understand this: tools that work are tailored to their users. From the ground up.

So the public, and the civil servants who purchase voting machines, never recognize the real problem.

So more votes go uncounted.

Journalists need to learn what Human Computer Interaction professionals do; they need to consider the HCI perspective when covering stories about failing systems and confusing tools, so the public and the government can solve these problems. Before this can happen, Human Computer Interaction people need to educate media people about their profession.

Let's fix this problem. Spread the word.

- Sean Savage

(A footnote: for the best coverage of this election see Carl Hiaasen's take).

(Update: A version of this essay was published in the the Association for Computing Machinery's SIGCHI Bulletin. Details here.)

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August 14, 2002

Douglas Adams on Innovation

"Some of the most revolutionary new ideas come from spotting something old to leave out,
rather than thinking of something new to put in."

- Douglas Adams

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