Blogjects in the World of Interconnected Things

Prior to LIFT06, I participate to the Blogjects in the world of interconnected things workshop organized by Julian Bleecker and Nicolas Nova.

Blogjects – a neologism Julian Bleecker came up with for objects that blog – exemplify the soon-to-come ‘Internet of Things’, i.e. a network of tangible, mobile, chatty things enabled by the miniaturization, the ubiquity of consumer electronics and a pervasive Internet. In its most basic form, a blogject is not dissimilar to people that blog – it is an artifact that can disseminate a record of its experiences to the web. It would report the history of its interactions with other objects and with people. (…) this topic ties into the idea of proximity-based interaction and usage scenarios for mobile contexts.

The aim of the workshop: is to discuss usage scenarios of blogjects, the design issues they raises as well as their significance in various usage and design contexts.

I hope to bring an engineering perspective that takes into account real-world constraints .

Objects become networked components
Technically, interconnecting things is nothing new. The industry has already come up with frameworks like Jini, the Java-pushed framework for spontaneous interaction between devices regardless of their hardware/software implementation, or UPnP an industry initiative designed to enable connectivity among stand-alone devices. These technologies that make devices become network components have mainly be used to design the good old house or workplace of the future (some of them you would definitely like to avoid in the future). The emergence of IPv6 is key for some of the “Internet of Things” scenarios to become reality (for example to associate an RFID tag with an Internet address). The current vision of a blogject is humble. A blogject is meant to have a web presence and not necerraly to be network centric. However, to become context-aware, a blogject will need to really on its network-centric

Context-awareness
Blogjects record their experience and interactions with other objects and people, therefor need to be context-aware. Valuable context-awareness (i.e. making sense of contextual data like a position, temperature, luminosity, speed, noise, user inputs,…) is hard to achieve in uncontrolled environments. Mismatches between the physical, measured and virtual spaces might become important. People will need to grasp these mismatches and not expect ubiquity. Blogjects might even play with their own limitations instead of shamefully hiding them.

Social features
Blogjects might be the first objects to enter the social virtual spaces only occupied by humans so far on the web. Blogjects might just be the physical replacements of the virtual bots that still inhabit the web and some Internet applications. Since, blogging is also about nurturing the ego, I would expect a blogject to have something similar to an ego. Blogging is also about false information, biased analysis, over-simplification, bad mental models and transactive memory. Should we prevent blogjects from acting like human bloggers or should they embrace these features? In terms of scale up, how do we overcome the “web noise” generated by millions of blogjects?