The USC's Julian Bleecker has just published an astonishingly awesome paper called "A Manifesto for Networked Objects – Cohabiting with Pigeons, Arphids and Aibos in the Internet of Things," subtitled, "Why Things Matter." It's a paper about the coming wave of "blogjects" — objects that blog — which is to say, manufactured goods that emit a steady stream of information about their world and what they make of it, and take action to change it. The idea is high-falutin' big-brain academic stuff, but the approach is simply, folksy, plain-language and exciting as hell. I just devoured it and man am I jazzed.
Blogjects don't just publish, they circulate conversations. Not with some sort of artificial intelligence engine or other
speculative high-tech wizardry. Blogjects become first-class a-list producers of
conversations in the same way that human bloggers do – by starting, maintaining
and being critical attractors in conversations around topics that have relevance and
meaning to others who have a stake in that discussion. If the contribution to that
discussion happens through some seemingly mundane bit of networked dissemi-
nated insight matters little in terms of their consequence. A Blogject can start a
conversation with something as simple as an aggregation of levels of pollutants in
groundwater. If this conversation is maintained and made consequential through
hourly RSS feeds and visualizations of that same routine data, this Blogject is go-
ing to get some trackback.
(via Beyond the Beyond)
