chrisblunt.com

Over the Christmas season, while indulging far too much in seasonal foodstuffs, I have found some time to work on the two key components of my final year: my dissertation and final project. The component parts of my final project are now working, and all that remains is to combine them into a working prototype which I hope to complete by the end of January.

Due to the nature of the project, it’s important that it has been running for a number of months (and has been used!) by the time I have my final presentation around Easter.

For my dissertation, I have spent the majority of the holiday researching my subject matter in-depth and writing a 1st draft which I shall submit on returning to Plymouth. The subject has drilled down to Virilio’s observation of the (information) generalised event, something that it appears has renewed relevance in the context of Web (2.0). Researching this area has certainly highlighted some key concepts that I hope to explore further in both my research and development for the final project, and the related Assignment for Production of Space.

Outside University work, I’m finding some spare moments to make updates to HostManager, the webhost’s toolkit for OS X. On Saturday I’m taking a trip to Milan. Hopefully, I’ll get some nice photography, as I’m informed Milan is running temperatures comparable with those I’ve been experiencing at home (below). More than anything though, it will be a great place to greet 2006.

I noticed today that the BBC has opened some of its news video archives to public (open-source) use. The content - limited at this beta stage - is available for use providing that no commercial gain is made from it, and original authors are attributed. It is also currently restricted to UK-only IP addresses.

The licencing is declared under the Creative Archive Licence, something that bears a striking resemblance to the well known Creative Commons licence that governs the use of many websites and much online content. One might ask why the BBC didn’t simply employ a Creative Commons licence to govern their media?

The media is protected from exploitation by a limited Digital Rights Management system, that provides a ‘patented Video Watermarking technology where a virtual barcode will be embedded into the video clips’. This, says the BBC, will help to trace the source of material used in exploiting the open licence. This open admission to, and limitation of, DRM usage probably helps to ensure the BBC will not enrage its consumers as in the case of Sony BMG.

Either way, the opening of commercial content for public use (so called produserism) is a massive change in the BBC’s traditional position as a content producer and distributor. With the growing authority of (P2P) social networks, the BBC’s move is one that should be welcomed.

Ironically, I found this announcement on the day my dissertation discussion turned to the increasing influence of social networks on established institutions.

Tracking Web 2.0 technologies is becoming an increasingly difficult task. Every week seems to bring with it several new key social technologies. One of those I came across today was meetro, a location-based messenger service that bears some resemblance to Jambo. I haven’t tried it yet, but the concept seems pretty interesting and certainly relates to my latest work.

Through: TechCrunch

Friday saw my terms of reference for the final dissertation submitted:

Drawing on concepts from Production of Space and current trends towards digital saturation and asset management, my dissertation will explore the effect of digital history in the context of destroying the time-space connection, where we are currently at, and where with ever-increasingly pervasive technologies our desire for instantaneity will end up.

I am interested in the idea of semantic data, the concept of location-less information, freely available allowing one to transcend time and space to arrive at the destination without having to re-context - re-map to a pre-determined, normalised model - what it is we are looking for.

Works of Reference

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• Baudrillard, J: Simulacra and Simulation

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• Virilio, P: Cyberspace Alarm

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• Satre, J: Being and Nothingness

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• Levy, S: Digital Mcluhan (consequently Mchluan, M: Understanding Media)

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• Reihngold, H: Smart Mobs

Concepts

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• Hyper-compression of time

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• Open/free culture and the re-empowerment of bottom-up civilisation

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• Remapping information; role of semantic data in freeing us from the constrains of (information) normalisation.

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• Infinite space; borderless personal and cultural spaces in the age of pervasive technology.

Today I presented my first Production of Space assignment, and the critical foundation for my social software plaform.

The platform, entitled touch engages with the many transient social spaces we encounter every day, whether knowingly or not.

The project for this assignment was a small touch application entitled transience. Running on a MIDP2.0 device, transience gives tactile response to social spaces as you go about your day. By giving a physical feeling of these spaces, transience acts as a prompt to more actively engage with them.

touch is the foundation platform for both my Production of Space assignments, and shall also be extensively used in my major project. The platform requires a Bluetooth supporting MIDP2.0 device that implements the JSR-82 specification.

More information shall shortly be published on a touch project page.
Transience MIDlet (.jar)
Transience MIDLet Descriptor (.jad)