locative_media - Yule Heibel on Diigo

02 Jun 08

"The Future of Mobile Social Networking" by Kate Green (p.2) (MIT Technology Review)

P.2 of Kate Green's "the Future of Mobile Social Networking" - fascinating stuff.

www.technologyreview.com/...page2 - Preview

mit_techreview local_news location_based_reminders locative_media mobile_city mobile_muse

Whrrl is most useful when members of the user's social network actively contribute reviews. This requires that the user's friends have smart phones--and the motivation to critique the places they go.
the biggest obstacle faced by services like Whrrl is privacy concerns.
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- Choudhury says that these first-generation services will likely be used by small groups of early adopters who are more aware than most of potential privacy risks and will push companies to confront them.
- In the future, she suspects, location-based services will include more predictive features. For instance, instead of explicitly requiring you to write a review, the software might recognize how often you visit a restaurant and infer that it is a favorite.
- "Eventually, I think that a whole lot of exciting technology will emerge that figures out how to reduce the burden on the user," Choudhury says. "There will always be the case where user input will be important, but when we find the sweet spot, that's when I think it will take off."

"The Future of Mobile Social Networking" by Kate Green (MIT Technology Review)

"IPhone users will soon be able to enjoy Whrrl, software that combines activity recommendations with real-time location data."

This sounds very intriguing...

www.technologyreview.com/...20844 - Preview

location_based_reminders locative_media mobile_technology mobile_city mit_techreview local_news

The software enables something Pelago's chief technology officer, Darren Erik Vengroff, calls social discovery: using the iPhone's map and self-location features, as well as information about the prior activities of the user's friends, Whrrl proposes new places to explore or activities to try.

"If you think about your day-to-day life and how you discover things around you and places to go, to a great extent the source of that information is your friends," Vengroff says. With Whrrl, a user can "look through the eyes of friends and see the places they find compelling." The software begins with the user's position on the iPhone's map and indicates a smattering of nearby establishments. If the user's friends have visited and rated these places, the software indicates that as well. The map also shows the positions of nearby friends who have enabled a feature that lets them be seen by others.
Whrrl may turn out to be the leading edge of a wave of new location-based applications. "I think we're going to see a lot of new players showing up in this space," says Kurt Partridge, a research scientist at the Palo Alto Research Center who works on a similar project called Magitti. "Part of the reason," he says, "is the universal availability of GPS or access to location, which hasn't been available to application writers before." The iPhone and Nokia's N95 phone are two examples of phones that provide location data to computer programmers. Google's forthcoming Android mobile operating system may also help push location-based applications onto the market.
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- Whrrl, which can also be downloaded onto BlackBerry Pearl, Curve, and Nokia N95 smart phones, is commonly compared to both types of service. But it differs from either in that it combines aspects of both. In addition, Vengroff explains, Whrrl has collected details on establishments in 17 cities, which allows the service to provide fine-tuned local search, letting the user narrow down the hunt for, say, a café to one that has outdoor seating and vegetarian options and is recommended by at least one friend.

13 May 08

MIT students show power of open cell phone systems (MIT Technology Review)

Fascinating report on MIT class project to design software programs for Android (Google) mobile operating system. Upshot? Location, location, location. All but one of the projects involved location-based applications.

www.technologyreview.com/...20765 - Preview

mit_techreview mit android cell_phones mobile_technology locative_media

What do you want your cell phone to be able to do?

Massachusetts Industry of Technology professor Hal Abelson put that question to about 20 computer science students this semester when he gave them one assignment: Design a software program for cell phones that use Google Inc.'s upcoming Android mobile operating system.
If the brainstorms of these MIT students are an indication, phones will soon challenge the Internet as a source of innovation.

13 Apr 08

Twitter and the Friends Crisis

Darren Barefoot blogs about Twitter's "signal to noise ratio" (which easily descends into uselessness) to explain some of the problems around "friending" on the web. I left a long-ish comment in response (on the usefulness of filters).

www.darrenbarefoot.com/...er-and-the-friends-crisis.html - Preview

twitter darren_barefoot socialmedia locative_media

06 Apr 08

Videos (and slides) of keynotes available - The Mobile City » Blog Archive »

Michiel de Lange posted keynotes and slides online from the recent Mobile City conference.

www.themobilecity.nl/...d-slides-of-keynotes-available - Preview

mobile_city reference locative_media video cities architecture

28 Dec 07

Portable Objects in Three Global Cities: The Personalization of Urban Places (PDF)

The abstract: "The mobile phone has become the central node of the ensemble of portable objects that urbanites carry with them as they negotiate their way through information-rich global cities. This paper reports on a study conducted in Tokyo, Los Angeles, and London where we tracked young professionals’ use of the portable objects. By examining devices such as music players, credit cards, transit cards, keys, and ID cards in addition to mobile phones, this study seeks to understand how portable devices construct and support an individual’s identity and activities, mediating relationships with people, places, and institutions. Portable informational objects reshape and personalize the affordances of urban space. Laptops transform cafés into personal offices. Reward and membership cards keep track of individuals’ use of urban services. Music players and mobile devices colonize the in-between times of waiting and transit with the logic of personal communications and media consumption. Our focus in this paper is not on the relational communication that has been the focus of most mobile communication studies, but rather on how portable devices mediate relationships to urban space and infrastructures. We identify three genres of presence in urban space that involve the combination of portable media devices, people, infrastructures, and locations: cocooning, camping, and footprinting. These place-making processes provide hints to how portable devices have reshaped the experience of space and time in global cities."

www.itofisher.com/...portableobjects.pdf - Preview

camping cities cocooning footprinting locative_media mimi_ito mobility socialcomputing socialtheory urbanism

Locative_Commons.pdf (application/pdf Object)

- 5-page PDF by Marc Tuters; relates to / mentioned in Mobile City blog entry on locative media/ Starbucks vs. Boulevard culture, urbanism. "At stake is not only setting the terms for public access to the vast databases of open source information but constructing the sustaining architecture to do so. If in the construction of the public nation state, the 19th Century was defined by railroads and early tele-communications networks and 20th Century the development of the social safety nets, then the 21st Century will be recognised for making available the digital domains to the public at large in the tradition of furthering our concept and implementation of democracy."

www.futuresonic.com/...Locative_Commons.pdf - Preview

cities digital_city locative_media marc_tuters mobility psychogeography socialtheory urbanism

Mimi Ito - Statics: Portable Objects in Three Global Cities: The Personalization of Urban Places

- portal page to PDF on locative media, chapter for "The Reconstruction of Space & Time through Mobile Communication Practices"

www.itofisher.com/...portable_object.html - Preview

locative_media mimi_ito mobility socialtheory urbanism

The Mobile City » Blog Archive » Towards a Starbucks-urbanism?

- discussion of Starbucks coffee house culture as locative networked culture where people "camp" with their media (laptop etc) to work, network, inform themselves -- but they're not by a long shot isolating themselves from other people. In fact, they choose these locations b/c of what they offer in terms of ambience, connection with others, feel, and culture. Calls into question Habermas's bleak assessment of the death of coffee house culture...

www.themobilecity.nl/...towards-a-starbucks-urbanism - Preview

culture locative_media media mobility sociability socialtheory society starbucks urbanism

Over Christmas I reviewed some literature on locative media, and came across a handful of texts that addressed the changing role of the coffee house in our urban culture. Perhaps we are seeing a paradigm shift here: away from a BLVD-urbanism of public culture and towards a Starbucks Urbanism of a networked culture?
This is not your great-grandfather’s coffeehouse, found on a tree-lined European Boulevard with an outside terrace. It is no longer the coffeehouses that functioned as the proverbial meeting place or ‘public sphere’ where citizens irrespective of their background (as long as they wern’t women or other excluded groups that Habermas in his theory on the emerging public sphere overlooked) could engage in discussion with one another.
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- the public sphere was not primarily a physical place, rather it was a discursive site where a literate public could conduct rational and critical debate. The assembly and dialogue that constituted this emerging public sphere occurred as much within the pages of newly circulated printed materials as it did within the walls of the coffeehouse.
  - - "then" - on 2007-12-28
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- In Starbucks people congregate not so much to communicate with one another. Rather they use it as a comfortable semi-public base from which they keep in touch with their personal friends or collegues through the 3 and 4-letter acronyms that make up our network society: GSM, SMS, UMTS, WIFI. As Marc Tuters writes in another key essay on locative media, this emerging Starbucks culture has often been described as antithetical to the public culture of the coffeehouses.
  - - "now" - on 2007-12-28
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- Particularly in the post-911 world, the function of these places to provide random encounter is practically eliminated in these insulted pay-access locations under the operative logic of ‘risk aversion’. Based on these observations, sociologists and urban theorists have developed a narrative of loss and decline in the contemporary literature on public space
- Yet other more empirical research studies, such as Portable objects in three global cities: the personalization of urban places by Ito, Anderson and Okabe show that this binary opposition is too simplistic. In the article they describe a number of tactics through which people appropriate urban space. One of them is camping:
  
  One brings a personal media device and works with it in a public space. Yet the goal is not to completely shut off public space, the public space is especially chosen because one finds it an agreeable location to work from. Like reading a paper in a café rather than at home. … They put down roots that have temporal limits, but are more extended than commuters who are simply passing through.
  
  Camping is not so much about shutting out the environment: ‘people saw value in residing for a period of time in a desirable location. Just as people seek out beautiful campsites to set out there gear and reside for short periods of time, urbanites find attractive public places to temporarily set up camp with the help of their information technologies.’ For campers Starbucks is not a proverbial non-place, but a local place they engage with, where they perform their identity, yet at the same time keep in touch with absent others, still being part of their ‘full-time intimate communities’
  - - think about the difference btw "camping" and old coffee house culture... - on 2007-12-28
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- We argue that culture is no longer localized in time and space, but neither is it non-place. Instead, individuals inhabit a physical world of simultaneous environments, of localized time and space as well as of multiple telematic worlds in which they can be co-present with others at a distance.
  
  Yet, this still leaves some questions. To what extent are the sites of Starbucks-urbanism parochial rather than public spaces? And if they are mainly parochial, to what extend is that a threat to urban culture? Are critics clinging on to old, nostalgic ideas about a public culture? Or could new locative media ‘discovery’ services introduce new forms of contingency into Starbucks-urbanism?

Yule Heibel's Library tagged locative_media → View Popular

"The Future of Mobile Social Networking" by Kate Green (p.2) (MIT Technology Review)

"The Future of Mobile Social Networking" by Kate Green (MIT Technology Review)

MIT students show power of open cell phone systems (MIT Technology Review)

Twitter and the Friends Crisis

Videos (and slides) of keynotes available - The Mobile City » Blog Archive »

Portable Objects in Three Global Cities: The Personalization of Urban Places (PDF)

Locative_Commons.pdf (application/pdf Object)

Mimi Ito - Statics: Portable Objects in Three Global Cities: The Personalization of Urban Places

The Mobile City » Blog Archive » Towards a Starbucks-urbanism?

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