Themes

Tuesday tech links

Sep 08

Rather than talk about specific technologies, this week I thought I would post the technology/social media authors or researchers that I believe are worth paying attention to.

One. Alice Marwick is a PhD candidate at the Department of Media, Culture and Communication at New York University and her dissertation is on social status and elitism in Web 2.0 communities. I originally began to read her for her earlier work on microcelebrity and internet fame.

Two. Jane McGonigal is a game designer and researcher, who focuses on pervasive gaming and alternate reality games, and is currently the Director of Game Research and Development at the Institute for the Future. She is especially interested in the way games can be used to improve the world and impact player’s cognitive processes, social relations and public participation, an interest that can be clearly seen in her work in World Without Oil, a multi-player online game designed to examine the challenges of a future without petroleum.

Three. Aleks Krotoski is a journalist for The Guardian newspaper and hosts their technology podcast, and also an academic in the process of completing her PhD in social psychology, where she is examining how information spreads through online social networks. She is also currently working on the BBC series Digital Revolution, about the social history of the Web, for broadcast next year.

Librarian glasses…in the future

Sep 08

We all know librarians wear glasses. Well, Nokia has decided to give us a glimpse of what may be possible with librarian’s eyewear in the near future, complete with soundtrack. A vision of the Nokia Research Centre, Nokia Mixed Reality…

…allows to you to experience immersion and effortless navigation in an Augmented Reality environment. New types of interactions involving near-to-eye displays, gaze direction tracking, 3D audio, 3D video, gesture and touch. Through these new types of social linkages people will be connected in innovative ways between the physical and digital worlds.

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And what about those of us who want to break this librarian stereotype? Just wait for the augmented reality contact lenses, of course.

Tuesday tech links

Sep 01

One. Google Maps will now be displaying live traffic data for more roads, not just the major highways. While it is clear that they are still working on the technology and its application, it gives us a good idea of what will be possible in the future as real time, mobile technology, and location based applications develop.

Two. A Ph.D thesis “Passion at work: blogging practices of knowledge worker” by Lilia Efimova.

By describing the practices of knowledge workers who blog, this research provides a view into the changing nature of work that becomes increasingly digital, nomadic and networked. It shows the power of individual knowledge workers, who bypass existing authorities and use their networks to stay informed and to get things done. It documents the blurred boundaries between what is personal and what is professional, as well as the growing need to know how to deal with transparency and fragmentation of one’s work.

Three. Bruce Sterling’s keynote, “At the Dawn of the Augmented Reality Industry“, presented at the launch of the Layar Reality Browser. Just watch it!

Wildcard. Personas is a component of the Metropath(ologies) exhibit from the MIT Museum, created by the Sociable Media Group from the MIT Media Lab.

It uses sophisticated natural language processing and the Internet to create a data portrait of one’s aggregated online identity. In short, Personas shows you how the Internet sees you. Enter your name, and Personas scours the web for information and attempts to characterize the person – to fit them to a predetermined set of categories that an algorithmic process created from a massive corpus of data. The computational process is visualized with each stage of the analysis, finally resulting in the presentation of a seemingly authoritative personal profile.

And in case you want to know what the final outcome looks like, here is my online Persona.

Persona

The importance of culture

Sep 01

As the deadline for proposals to the 2010 National Diversity in Libraries Conference is fast approaching, I thought it would be appropriate to post examples of intersections between culture and mobile technology.

A cellular company, Zain Uganda, which allows clients to pay for fuel purchases via their mobile handsets through the ZAP service
The predictive text programme which predicts Welsh words as you type, launched by the Welsh Language Board at the National Eisteddfod in Swansea
LG Electronics two mobile handsets that include features specifically created for Muslims, including a Qiblah indicator, Adhan and Salah prayer time alarm functions, Quran software, Hijiri calendar and a Zakat calculator

I believe that in the near future we will begin to see examples such as these been created for libraries and targeted to the specific cultural groups that make up their users. If you are interested in learning more about the intersection between technology and culture I would suggest “Human-Built World: How to Think about Technology and Culture” by Thomas P. Hughes and “Of Bicycles, Bakelites, and Bulbs: Toward a Theory of Sociotechnical Change” by Wiebe E. Bijker.

Tuesday tech links

Aug 25

One. The news of the closer of tr.im URL shortener a few weeks ago highlighted issues with dependence on a third party in content creation. ReadWriteWeb has posted a useful guide to hosting your own URL shortening service and as more libraries begin to join Twitter and post content, it may be a good idea to have the maximum control over that content.

Two. Twitter has released an API that will allow developers to add latitude and longitude to any tweet. And as for possible applications, well…

… with accurate, tweet-level location data you could switch from reading the tweets of accounts you follow to reading tweets from anyone in your neighborhood or city—whether you follow them or not. It’s easy to imagine how this might be interesting at an event like a concert or even something more dramatic like an earthquake.

Three. TinEye is a reverse image search engine which is the first to use image identification technology. Upload an image or a URL and it will tell you where the image came from, how it was used, show you modified versions of the image and find higher resolution versions. Also, check out Multicolr Search Lab where you can choose up to 10 colours from a palette of 120 different shades to browse through Flickr’s Creative Commons images and find ones that share those same colours. Both applications are developed by Idée, a company based in Toronto.

Wildcard. For a while now I have been playing around with mobile social networking applications, including Brightkite and Plazes. However, I have been waiting not so patiently for the arrival of Foursquare north of the border. Now my dream might some through thanks to Ashton Kutcher. Yes, the web was a flutter today that he had joined the service. Remember what happened when he joined Twitter? Expect to see Oprah on Foursquare very soon.