A really nice remark by Matt Jones during the Urban and Social Media presentations at Futuresonic :
"we get a kind of muscle memory of cities, like where is the best place to cross the road. Can we surface this for each other" using the streams of data we now generate.
And it's still the text message.
Amazon have started doing shopping by SMS:
"Amazon TextBuyIt, which launched late Tuesday, lets people text the name of a product, its description or its UPC or ISBN to 262966 (that’s “Amazon” on the keypad) from anywhere their cell phones work — including from inside physical stores."
I don't think we've seen the half of this kind of stuff yet.
People know how to send text messages, and no one is scared of doing it.
So as soon as you start to think of text messages as peer-to-database, or peer-to-database-to-peer, as well as peer-to-peer, a whole other world opens up.
The only reason things like text shopping won't happen is if people love their mobiles and the intimacy of SMS so much they shy away from using texting as a functional tool.
"Finally, the third looks at artistic endeavours to re-enchant and contest the urban informational landscape of urban sentience." says Professor Stephen Graham.
Enchant - what a great word.*
To cast a spell over; bewitch.
To attract and delight; entrance.
We could use poems, or monsters, or sprites and witches.
Or anything you want.
"Be not afeard.
The isle is full of noises,
Sounds and sweet airs that give delight and hurt not.
Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments
Will hum about mine ears, and sometime voices
That, if I then had waked after long sleep,
Will make me sleep again; and then, in dreaming,
The clouds methought would open, and show riches
Ready to drop upon me, that when I waked,
I cried to dream again."
Caliban, The Tempest, William Shakespeare, Act III Scene 2, Lines 138-146
* and let's even let the Professor off with that "re-" [academics love their "re-" "I will now re-heat this pizza, and we will critically contest the extra slice."]
A nest of Nokia NFC phones to use in Five Trees Forest.
As everyone knows, sprites like to live in mobile phones when they are hiding from the witches because the warm batteries are cosy, and the radio waves make them giggle.
My friends and DRU colleagues Alison Mealey and Tom Betts are going to be artists in residence in World of Warcraft.
To get the job they had to journey many leagues to a pig farm in the game (not sure why a pig farm) and be interviewed by a panel of wizards, dwarves and other mythical characters, possibly riding giant chickens.
I've never played World of Warcraft, and don't really understand what goes on except it's lots of fighting and you get to travel by chicken, but for some reason I really enjoy hearing about it, it seems to have its own language and lore that are fun to follow in a way that I don't feel about Second Life, which seems, from the same viewpoint of total ignorance, to lack silliness.
If you've forgotten to buy a Valentine's card, or want to follow it up with even more luurve, there is a selection of text message sized love poems here (click "thumb love").
SPARKLERS
I write your name:
in traces in the dark;
on flat, wet sand;
in breath on windowpanes.
Given a fair wind and a bit of cash, Lisa is going to be building her own temporary hotel for people coming to this year's We Love Technology and thirty-first Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival.
It'll be housed in some of the empty floors in Bates's Mill, which is where we have our desks as part of the DRU and is the venue for the festival's most fantastic bits (and they were most fantastic last year - until you've seen a Latvian hammering six inch nails into a piano keyboard in the name of art in a gigantic hanger-sized former industrial shed you haven't lived).
For the Bates Mill Motel to be built will need things to fall into place quite soon (building your own temporary hotel is no small undertaking), but fingers crossed, and she already has some architects coming over from Rotterdam to have a look at the available floor space.
Even if it doesn't happen, you can see exactly how good it would have been from reading the WLT blog. Louis Vuitton Victorian-era suitcase travelling beds anyone?
Sheffield decides to join the Republic of M62pia.
(This movement is ready for its first T shirts.)
"Smexting v. Texting while smoking, often outside a bar. The phenomenon is being spurred by smoking bans, most recently in the UK."
Having seen the poor smokers shivering outside all winter, this seems instantly recognisable and lovely (even though they are all busy killing themselves at the time.)
Given any in-between moments, we want to tear off and send one of those leaves (no pun) , as a comfort to ourselves as much as the person we are sending to.
I stole it from a very clever selection of maps on b3ta, where it was posted by this bloke (i think).
One of the ways Blyk are trying to make money is sending text messages to people from Lethal Bizzle and The Streets. I've not seen the messages, but it would be daft not to write them in the first person. (Remember Static?)
Day of the Figurines. A town you walk around in in your head, pretending to be someone else, sending texts to people in the same town who aren't them.
Children on a school trip to Lewes castle, texting people from the past, delighted by their answers. And not caring how people who didn't have mobile phones could send texts. (How can light projected against a wall make us cry?)
