Mapping Hacks

I just spent three days at the O’Reilly Emerging Telephony Conference. Short coverage: wow! It was great. The ‘Conference Coverage’ page has lots of stories, and they are planning to release video of all the sessions where the presenters sign off.

A lot happened, and a lot of it gave at least a nod to location. Marc Davis, the head of Yahoo Labs in Berkeley, gave a warm speech where he talked about the trails we leave as we pass through time and space. Nicely worded, but no surprise there. But then he added the third vertex on the triangle and added a social dimension. We have spatial, temporal, and social.

He gave the example of the people in the conference all forming an ad-hoc social network, and he showed some sample images of tracks through the spatial, temporal, and social dimensions, and pointed at the ‘knots,’ clusterings of points where people double back on each other (presumably only in the spatial and social dimensions right now), and form loops and clusters. Almost like strange attractors (and boy were those folks strange…bada bing!). The clusters can then be used to extract and extrapolate meaning from the data.

About once a year I find myself driving I5 with dive buddies to go diving in the Channel Islands. The last time people were feeling a bit antsy, wanting a break, food, gas, stretch the legs, and the driver, Mike, asked what was coming up. It was easy enough to browse through upcoming exits on my GPS looking for places with food and gas, but that didn’t provide enough context (and frankly, the handheld Garmin GPS UI is not conducive to finding things-I’d be happy to consult with a GPS company that wanted to improve the user experience of their units-please consult with someone on that!).

Fortunately I had a laptop full of context. I dug into my saved track logs and found the log from a previous trip, then browsed through it looking for time stamp discontinuities that were near to our current location. And I found one, 20 miles ahead. I didn’t have a way point set saying ‘this exit is a good place to stop on I5,’ but the time stamps let me see the places where we had stopped and spent time in past trips. I see this is a simplistic pre-cursor to some of what Marc was talking about.

Because our trips are infrequent I was able to ‘finesse’ part of the temporal search-since I only do that trip once or twice a year it was easy to find the right log, and also, because I mostly do it with the same people I didn’t have to think about the social dimension. And with those limitations we were still able to extract meaning.

A tool that tracked location, plus tracked who we were with, would allow us to answer questions like ‘what was that cool restaurant Jonathan and his friends and I went to after Dorkbot?’

Tracking who we are with is really hard (and creepy) to do completely, but it is pretty easy to do something useful today with Bluetooth. An application on the phone that woke up every minute, did a bluetooth scan, and logged the phones that it saw and the time, would do most of what you’d want.

Having seen the presentation I suspect that my ideas on the subject mostly amount to waxing the floor and dusting the cutlery in the castle of Marc’s vision.

There were a heck of a lot of other great things that happened. Norman Lewis, the english guy working for France Telecom (as opposed to the french guy who works for British Telecom and spoke after Norman) had a stunning speech on Thursday. The day before one company had gained great laughs with their voice response system created for MTV to refresh the Beavis and Butthead brand. It has been a bit, and B&B had slipped from the popular mind a bit. The system was funny in that way where you laugh, but feel cheap for doing so. Norman was merciless: repeatedly asking if that was the best we could do. What I heard was ‘we have technology to change the world and Beavis and Butthead is the best you can do?’

I don’t think Norman is against laughter, just pretensions over the importance of trivia. I saw Norman laughing at a couple of Mark Spencer’s (the original Asterisk programmer) IVR clips. The Spam IVR was great. ‘Press 1 if your penis is too small’ ‘Press 4 to speak with the president of Nigeria’ …

The main Call To Arms came from David Isenberg, the least likely technology Rock Star you are likely to see (even more improbable than Brewster Kale), and his please for net neutrality. He claimed that it was inspired by Dr. Seuss, but it was missing scansion, rhyme (other than slant), and rhythm. What it did include was the most pointed observations about the state of technology freedom and policy that I have heard (and I read Cory Doctorow-so I’ve ‘heard it before.’). He led the whole room in a change, awkward and self conscious at first, it ended with a rousing course of the Tim Bray mantra:

(please join in at home!)

Fat Pipe
Always On
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