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What is the End of Cyberspace? About the end of cyberspaceCyberspace is a "metaphor we live by," born two decades ago at the intersection of computers, networks, ideas, and experience. It has reflected our experiences with information technology, and also shaped the way we think about new technologies and the challenges they present. It had been a vivid and useful metaphor for decades; but in a rapidly-emerging world of mobile, always-on information devices (and eventually cybernetic implants, prosthetics, and swarm intelligence), the rules that define the relationship between information, places, and daily life are going to be rewritten. As the Internet becomes more pervasive-- as it moves off desktops and screen and becomes embedded in things, spaces, and minds-- cyberspace will disappear.

Both groups had the classic problem of notification -- getting a user to tune in requires interrupting their current activity, not something users have been known to relish. Billions were spent on Web School applications that assumed users would bookmark for a return visit, or would happily accept email alerts, but despite a few well-publicized successes like Schwab.com and eBay, users have mostly refused to "check back often."

We constantly rely on the cognitive capabilities of individuals in software design -- we assume a user can associate the mouse with the cursor, or that icons will be informative. We rarely rely on the cognitive capabilities of groups, however, though we rely on those capabilities in the real world all the time.

The suggestion about general web accessibility for the CoDeck interface came in the form of a rhetorical question -- "Why not make it as broadly accessible as possible?" In the Web School, of course, the answer is "No reason", since more users are always A Good Thing, but for CoDeck there were several good reasons for not simply turning their project into a Web video app. First, the physicalization of the interface, using the gutted BetaMax deck, provides a communal affordance that it is impossible to replicate over the web. Second, since CoDeck serves a tight community, the density of communication among ITP video makers would be diluted by general accessibility. Third, having the video deck in the lounge makes it self-policing; the cohesion of the community keeps it largely free from abuse, whereas a generally accessible and password-free "upload and critique" video site would become a cesspool of porn within hours. Finally, serving a local community maximizes use of free bandwidth on the local network, enabling features that would saddle a public system with crippling costs.

To get back to the notion of annotating space -- I would argue that people will annotate space much like they annotate the web, or annotate their photos... More in a notebook sense, a journaling sense. The annotations are explicitly *not* "meant for other people" -- they're meant for yourself, they only have to make sense for yourself, and if others stumble across them, great, fine.

I'm surprised by how many people will provide book reviews on Amazon, movie reviews on IMDB, restaurant reviews on Citysearch, etc. These people are using reviews as a way to both share with a larger community and to do some journaling for themselves. It's similar to traditional blogging. A friend of mine and I started a website a couple months ago to allow people to describe places in San Francisco using blog-like entries, maps, tags, and photos. Initially, we thought that people would use the site primarily to criticize or review places but instead the posts have largely migrated towards journaling, as you suggest here.

About Planet Geospatial Planet Geospatial is an aggregation of public weblogs written by GIS Professionals and hobbyists. The opinions expressed in those weblogs and hence this aggregation are those of the original authors and are not reviewed before posting.

The Bio Mapping tool allows the wearer to record their > Galvanic Skin Response (GSR), which is a simple > indicator of the emotional arousal in conjunction with their geographical location >.

Architecture and Situated Technologies A 3-day symposium bringing together researchers and practitioners from art, architecture, technology and sociology to explore the emerging role of "situated" technologies in the design and inhabitation of the contemporary metapolis.

...is a project to develop experiential forms of journalism and nonfiction storytelling for use at specific locations. Stories are presented through text, images and audio files that participants can download from the Web to their handheld computers and take with them to the place of interest.