Some of those things that blog
Posted: February 7th, 2006 | 1 Comment »Working on the blogject workshop debriefing, I tried to gather some examples of ‘objects that blog’, or objects that upload their story up to web.
The simplest form Alex Pang from the IFTF suggested me are webcams but they are rather passive instruments, “reporting” whatever they see. Another simple example is a lamp which can show a history of persons who have entered a specific room (see this aula lamp on page 4).
Another suggestion (by fredhouse) was this project at EPFL that had a bunch of RSS feeds for sensor data from a mote-based sensor net. Using an embedded server component that publishes RSS data feeds and a datablogging platform could be a way to upload these information.
The point, as Gene described would be that every connected thing has syndication as a default capability, which is one of the thing we discussed in our workshop the other day.
Of course, there is the AIBO blog (see the aibo blog aggregator too) and the pigeon that blog thing I blogged about last week is very close to this: “Pigeons with GPS enabled electronic air pollution sensing devices, capable of sending location based air pollution data as well as images to an online Mapping/Blogging Environment in real time“.
Those things exist already, now there are some thoughts that begin to pop here and there:
Sascha think about something quite beyond that:
I spend some time thinking about object that would tap into the flow of money within Google AdSense, ultimately ending up with an artifact that could make (grow?) money for you. I believe that this would be especially interesting because you then could give people that have no access to these abstract means of generating value (e.g. having a website or blog) or are even illiterate the means to access it and even make a living using paradigms that are coming from a completely different background.
Imagine an artificial plant that would generate clicks (money) on it’s own AdSense-equipped website whenever its solar cells are being exposed to the sun, thus combining the most
Overall, I like the datablogging concept because it’s really close to the idea of various data aggregated with a potential goal, as in blogjects.
Well, we still have to write the workshop report 
Technorati Tags: blogject, blogjects
Hi Nicolas! Thanks for the kind words about datablogging. Sorry I missed the conference!
We’re in the process of expanding from our focus on the feature of datablogging to the concept of life capture, sousveillance and blogjecture so I’d like to stay in touch with you. Our mission is to help people extract the most memories from their personal data… potentially many years after they capture it.
As for examples of things that blog, there’s a piece of Pocket PC software called PI GPS that will send out a GPS location beacon every 5 minutes. This is a clear tie-in to blog-by-email and blogjecting. Our datablogging platform has special file support for polar heart rate meters so that you can graph the resultant heart rate data in a number of ways. The hrm doesn’t itself blog as it requires the interim step of upload… but it’s close. We’ve played around with email lists that blog themselves… very simple email forward-to-blog rules… nothing fancy. Same goes for legacy systems that send out email warnings of down servers to a blog via email.
And come to think of it, you could probably consider the evil splog spammers as entities that blog themselves. They concatenate strings intelligently and autonomously while attempting to emulate real blog content.
And of course you’re up to speed on all of the ubiquitous computing things that will eventually dump data into the personal repository a’la blogjecture.
Do you have any events coming up soon? And is there any chance I can get a copy of the debriefing?
Best, Joe