Mob rules

James Harkin has an interesting piece in today's Guardian on the growing use of mobile phones for coordinated social activity, ranging from passing on word of celebrity sightings to warnings about SARS. (I find the Guardian never fails to interest me, even when I disagree with it. And they have had some terrific coverage of international news.)

The piece is obliquely critical of Smart Mobs, suggesting that the vision Howard Rheingold lays out is still kind of futuristic-- but that mobile coordination is happening in the here and now, and activist groups should take full advantage of it.

The essay is taken from "Mobilisation: The growing public interest in mobile technology," which is available as a PDF. Demos isn't an outfit I'd heard of before, but they sound interesting:

Demos is a greenhouse for new ideas which can improve the quality of our lives. As an independent think-tank, our aim is to create an open resource of knowledge and learning that operates beyond traditional parties, identities and disciplines....

For Demos, the process is as important as the final product. We bring together people from a wide range of backgrounds to cross-fertilise ideas and experience. By working with Demos, we expect all our partners to develop
sharper insight into the way ideas shape society.

[from About Demos]

[from Relevant History]

City sets up wireless as lifeline

City sets up wireless as lifeline

After spending millions of dollars to develop the downtown commercial area of Winston-Salem, officials in the North Carolina city are setting up free wireless service to serve as a technology hook to attract young professionals and help the area thrive.

For those who aren't familiar with Winston-Salem, it's a small city (about 200k people, I think) in North Carolina, not part of the Research Triangle Park, but looking to diversity its economic base (dominated mainly by agriculture, especially tobacco). This is not unlike the access program that Long Beach rolled out recently.

Another unscientific WiFi node count

This blog entry records results from a node count in a taxi, starting at 72nd and driving up Amsterdam Avenue:

Between there and 120th Street, I picked up 180 WiFi nodes; only 48 of them (27%) were WEP-protected. Of course, there’s no telling how many of them were willing to dole out an address to me, nor how many of them had filters preventing random computers from connecting, but that’s still damn impressive, and way more access points than I would have thought I’d see.

I think the basic fact w/ regard to WiFi counts is, no one really knows.

About 6 months ago, I e-mailed the heads of Wi Fi user groups, asking them how many Wi Fi nodes there were in their area. The universal response was, "We have no idea. Whatever the number is, it's growing."

Mimi in Miami Herald!

From Janine Warner, "Cellphones shape behavior patterns of teens in Japan," Miami Herald (7 April 2003):

Imagine how important your cellphone would be if using it were the only way to get together with your friends after school, compare notes about your classes, or keep in touch with your high-school sweetheart.

That's the reality for most of the young people in Japan today, arguably the most wired population in the world with 97 percent cellphone usage reported among Japanese college students and 79 percent among high school students.

''Kids get phones because they are excluded if they don't have one,'' said Mizuko Ito, a visiting scholar at the Annenberg Center for Communication at the University of Southern California.

P.S. I found this via Howard's Smart Mobs blog, which I think is a very nice model for what a group blog ought to be. There are 11 people who contribute to it; mainly the entries are links to articles, but there are also some entries that are more substantive and original.

Telespace increasing according to NYT

Today's NYT has an article on the increasing in commuting/telespaces (see the extended entry). The article, which mentions both 9/11 and Iraq, is little different than the NYT article on telespaces written after 9/11. Interesting enough.

The article seemed pertinent because of scene in one of Sunday's new hours. A newsreader sitting in a big studio was talking to a remote expert. This expert was sitting in some boring room somewhere and having his voice/image brought to the studio.

Now for a second imagine turning to your left and seeing your friend while you talk with her. Your friend is the same size as you, about four feet away, and have an aspect ratio that, from the waist up, is taller than wide.

Well, the in-studio display that the remote expert was presented on was one of the now ominpresent widescreen thin television monitors, turned upright. He looked like he was about four feet away from the newsreader, the same size, and looking at him. I don't know why, but the remote guy looked MUCH more real than he would have on a traditional wall-display or tv monitor.

Tamara and I were commenting that this one piece of equipment, a wide-screen display turned on its end, seemed to provide many of the telespace cues that are the focus of teleconferencing and VR projects.

Travel Fears Cause Some to Commute Online
By JONATHAN D. GLATER
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/07/technology/07TELE.html

As fears of terrorism, the mysterious respiratory disease known as SARS and consequences of the Iraq war have mounted over the last several weeks, many businesses are reducing travel in favor of virtual meetings, and more employees are learning how to telecommute.

The Sprint Corporation has seen minutes spent on teleconferences spike in recent months, rising 23 percent in March from February, and 58 percent from March of last year for its top customers, according to Jackie Bostick, a spokeswoman for the company. Sprint expects to have more growth in the coming weeks as businesses squeezed by the slow economy and constrained by travel fears switch to Web-conferences, video conferences and old-fashioned telephone conference calls ...

MobileTracker

I'm probably an idiot for not knowing about this already, but there's an interesting blog called MobileTracker that basically follows the mobile phone industry, in particular the device end. Looks like it's worth a regular visit.