kisscasting and dancecasting

Remember the beginning of the Brady Bunch, where everyone in the family gets their own little square on a grid? I wanna be able to find all the live streaming videos of people doing x, e.g. kissing or grocery-store-shopping, and make a similar grid. You might feel more inspired while cleaning the toilet. And dancecasting would make a fantastic screensaver.

I used to make rhythms out of emails.

I'd do a search for emails I sent you and you sent me, note the dates, speed up the timing, loop it, and make a crude rhythm out of our emails. But now we can get precise. And fancy. Like Fernanda Viegas and Carolin Horn do with email visualization, or what Aaron Koblin does with data sonification. So, email sonification, or visualization for that matter...why? Just for the beauty of music composed from the rhythm of our communication? That too. But also for the emergent patterns that say something about our relationship. Roughly: you and I as senders are represented by different notes, changes in subject lines are represented by changes in pitch. Back and forth and back and forth, looping the whole thing over and over. There are moments that sound like ping pong. And others that feel like a desert. Why am I always the last to send an email right before we hit a desert? And why do deserts always precede ping pongs? Could we guess what was going on at that particular moment in our correspondence just by listening to it? Mmm.

Now imagine incorporating all media of communication. An orchestra!

I was just wondering.

I s t h i s n e t a r t ?

we the value chain

When we interact with objects, we interact with the people who participated in their production all the way down the value chain, from manufacturing, processing, packaging, retail, and distribution to maintenance, consumption, and (if you regularly interact with people in the future) disposal. Socially responsible consumers like to know who these people are, especially those hanging out upstream. Meanwhile, objects can tell stories via barcodes, RFID's, geotags, etc. Which means that objects can tell stories about the people participating in their production, and these stories can be crowdsourced from these people themselves. This might add a little sentimentality/creepiness to shopping at garage sales and second-hand stores, but when you swipe your cell over the toilet seat at a night club and see a photo of Maria who has to clean your mess on her 3am shift, you might be less likely to make that mess in the first place. Sorry to be so graphic, but etcetera...

To: [let google find it]

Make the "To:" line in gmail into a google search box. That way, if you wanna email someone who's not in your contacts, you can google their address. Or if you're 'feeling lucky,' google can suggest their address, the way it already does for URL's in the latest version of Firefox.

mob flashdancing down the Wal-mart isle

I heard that Wal-marts film a bird's eye views of their customers. I imagine the footage is sped up and analyzed to detect patterns useful for Wal-mart's 'zero inventory' strategy. (If what we buy and when we buy it can be algorithmicized, then Wal-mart can reduce its inventory to near-zero.) But this also makes Wal-mart vulnerable to the way we move. Hmmm. And flash mob + dance = some kinda mob flashdance. So how about a mob of us flashdance down the wrong Wal-mart isle looking for the wrong product at the wrong time? It probably wouldn't bring them to their knees, begging us to consume-as-usual so as not to confuse their inventory strategy, but it would at least be entertaining for whoever's behind the camera. And it would make for a fantastic Carrotmob video:


Carrotmob Makes It Rain from carrotmob on Vimeo.

(Yes, that's me in the brown hat lathering myself with paper money on the floor of the supermarket isle.)

I used to think aliens were just us in the future.

And that our future selves had learned to travel through time. But when we traveled backwards, our current selves didn't recognize our future ones, so we called ourselves aliens. And now it's happening. Virtual worlds are approximating David Brin's Transparent Society. Etcetera etcetera.

feed aggregators for e-petitions

One-stop shopping for the e-activist in you.