From September 2005 to June 2006 a team of thirteen scholars at the The University of Southern California's Annenberg Center for Communication explored how new and maturing networking technologies are transforming the way in which we interact with content, media sources, other individuals and groups, and the world that surrounds us.

This site documents the process and the results.

locative media

Michael Liebhold Talk

Service Ecologies and The Geospatial Web

Mike Liebhold is here today to talk on the topic of the Geospatial web.

What does the IFTF do?

Brainstorm through possible, plausible, probable and preferred futures. Present a context for understanding the future. Up to clients to develop insights based on the foresights. Foresight to insight actions is the operating principle of the company.

Research areas are sociological impacts of technology.

Some IFTF clients: AMA, Johnson & Johnson, Alstate, Intel, Pepsico, Lego, Kraft, Kodak, Honda, McDonalds.

Methodologies: Mapping, Ethnographic, Expert workshops & interview; Scenario development & analysis; Surveys & quantitative analysis (sort of..); content facilitation; prototyping/artifacts (building objects from the future.)

Internet Platforms: Root Fragmentation?
* US / ICANN vs ITU / UN
* The Chinese future of IPv6
* Economies of scale drive specifications
* The Golden Shield

What happens if the US holds onto ICANN and others want to split off the root server infrastructure?

What is the lesson here? Chinese are buying lots and lots of Nextel, etc., so they can influence technology design by virtue of their force in the economics of design — they can say what they'll buy and when they're buying lots of something, they can shape design and thereby create protocols or variations of protocols independent of task forces.

Platforms: P2P Networks
* Mesh Networks
* Automotive Nets
* Sensor Nets
* Self-configuring Nets

What is interesting here? http://www.caida.org creates great traceroute maps of the Internet.

Security: Biometric Authentication

Usage: Immersive Entertainment 

Trend in the future for web-like experiences out in the world. Leads to the Geospatial Web.

What is interesting here? Imaginary world draped over physical world. Long standing area of interest for Mike. Profound new kind of world wide web, hypermedia objects are not just identified by URI or URL but by spatial coordinates — lat/lon/elevation. What are these? Text objects; sounds; images. Enormous amount of cartographic data that should be viewed in situ. Invisible attributes become visible. Sentient landscapes. Context-aware computing.

Geoweb Geospatial Ecosystem
* Geolocation Techniques
** location-aware software (triangulation)
** location-aware devices (e.g. GPS)
** location-sensing networks (e.g. E911)

What is interesting here? General concern with privacy, partially because there aren't open systems for these.
Placelab.org is an alternative, because it's open. Telco carriers have the location info, but they won't make it available because they want to charge you or worse. So the economics of that proposition are not compelling to end users who don't want to feel like they're getting nickel-and-dimed.

* devices for augmented perception
** smart phones & PDAs
** automobile computers
** body extensions (pens, cameras, earphone rigs, pens)

What is interesting here? Not at all clear how the device ecology will evolve.

* location-aware services
** walled gardens (sadly..)
** carrier services
** enterprise servcies
** Google Earth
** MS Virtual Earth
** Sony XYZ — head-mounted video, dashboard graphics.

What is interesting here? You may want to hold up a device to see things as you move around, rather than on a downward facing screen.

Geoweb Software Industry Ecology

What is interesting here?Open mapping services allow you to import standard maps into Google Maps — detailed in new book called Google Map Hacks by O'Reilly.

an open software ecology

What is interesting here? There's a software ecology and an industry ecology and a bit of confusion amongst them. Or maybe it's that the two "ecologies" don't overlap in that the industry ecology does not open up their platforms to the software ecology. Walled garden problem.

geospatial policies

* contextual privacy
* freely accessible geolocation APIs
* public geodata services

What is interesting here? Interesting practices for creating geodata — individuals, local groups, creating their own maps through grassroot means, and spunky, hacky techniques such as walking/riding with GPSs. Same sort of way that NAVTEQ does, only open. Also, Institute for Applied Autonomy's iSee.

Geodata Search

* clearinghouses
* gateways
* repositories
* namespaces
* geoweb servers

Integrated GIS & Web Hypermedia / Realtime Cubit Cartography

Usage: Computational Grids

* health mapping
** epidemiological + environmental maps
** health resources
** risky places
** people at risk
* security
* Geo Demographics
** microzone advertising
* at-risk ecologies
** eco-tourism
** green mapping
** indigenous mapping
* path-making (capturing folkloric knowledge of a place)
* pixel views: fragmenting places and spaces (micro views into a farm field)
* ground truth: empowering people in place (creating your own community information and stories in place)

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Submitted by jbleecker on October 28, 2005 - 4:11pm

Mash-up ecologies: the case of google-maps

With “A Journey to a Thousand Maps Begins With an Open Code

Submitted by fbar on October 20, 2005 - 11:33am

Mike Liebhold Lecture: The Geospatial Web and Mobile Service Ecologies

In collaboration with ARNIC, Michael Liebhold, Senior Researcher, The Institute for the Future spoke to the Networked Publics group on October 27, 2005 in the living room of the Annenberg Center for Communication at 2pm. 

 

Submitted by kvarnelis on October 19, 2005 - 1:34pm

Death to LBS?

I posted a brief note on LBS — Location Based Services — with a bit of inspiration from Russell Buckley's dispatch on the pathetic offerings recently announced for mobile phone-based LBS services from British Telecom.

It made me think of the door-before-the-house way of designing for social practices. When you put the meme-fetish-acronym du jour ahead of an appreciation of the practice you're supposedly designing for, you wind up with ATM finders.

Submitted by jbleecker on October 17, 2005 - 3:45am

Royal Grand Prix Derby Racing (On Air)

Royal Derby Grand Prix (On Air)

This is a pretty important netpublics theory object, I think. Discussed more fully here:

Royal Grand Prix Derby Racing (On Air) theory object.

Submitted by jbleecker on October 16, 2005 - 10:09pm

CFP: Location and Belonging in New Media Contexts

(Note the deadline for abstracts is October 14th)

Edited from: http://culturalfutures.place.net.nz/publications.html

To be published concurrently with the ultural Futures: Place, Ground and Practice in Asia Pacific New Media Arts symposium in Auckland, December 2005, Danny Butt, Jon Bywater and Nova Paul state that they have interest from international academic publishers in a book on issues relating to the conference from those not attending the event, including work outside the regional focus of the symposium.

Themes that may be addressed in the publication include:

* Place-based new media practices

Submitted by mtuters on October 11, 2005 - 6:15pm

Network City Proposal

“The Network City: Emergent Urbanism in Contemporary Life

Submitted by kvarnelis on October 6, 2005 - 4:35pm

Digital Derive and Redefining the Basemap

MIT's Digital Derive project will be shown at the M-City exhibition (curator: Marco De Michelis) in Kunsthaus Graz, Oct 01, 2005 - Jan 08, 2006.

"Digital Derive harnesses the potential of mobile phones as an affordable, ready-made and ubiquitous medium that allows the city to be sensed and displayed in real-time as a complex, pulsating entity... Digital Derive (re)presents the city displayed simultaneously in the Kunsthaus Graz and in a publicly accessible website... The Real-Time City Map will register and visually render the volume and geographic source of cell phone usage in Graz, thus showing a different layer in the use and experience of the city. Furthermore the users of A1 Mobilkom Austria in Graz will be tracked anonymously by 'pinging' their cell phones as they move through the city. The record of this movement will be collected, processed and finally displayed as set of dynamic traces showing their paths through the city on the same map..."

Submitted by mtuters on October 5, 2005 - 6:58am

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