Fascinating. Tying messages to a space.

When I first read the pull-quote for this article, I thought they were a bit behind the times. You can already do this, I said to myself, using various bits of software and LiveJournal or other blogging software. But that wasn't quite how they meant this paragraph:

Got a view on the last film you saw or the last restaurant you ate in? Soon you may be able to post a review outside the front door using your mobile phone.

No, they didn't mean merely that you could post a review while standing outside the front door. They meant you could post a review tied to the physical location of being outside the front door, so that other devices, tuned to pick up on, would then alert their owners about it and let them listen to it (or read it, if it will accept text messages, I imagine).

There are all sorts of problems with this, of the same sort that came up when you could tie "notes" to a web page with third-party software. The article identifies the ones I can think of, as well, but the two big ones are (a) the likelihood of the 'host' site (ie, the restaurant, for example) to object to negative messages being put 'in their space', and (b) the ability to thin down to only what you want. Because I'm sorry, but even the useful information would get overwhelming. And you can't tell me no one will think of "air graffiti". It will happen. More, the messages would presumably be categorized/tied by user. But then you have to have some way to filter out obscenities and other inappropriate messages, and how exactly do you do that?

It's an interesting possibility, but I suspect that people will find it useless or actively counter-productive unless a lot of thought and care goes into it - and maybe even then. (Some of the special limited uses discussed in the article, where content is not creatable by the man on the street but is created by a business, historical society, etc., and you can tie your phone/whatever to pick it up, would be much more feasible and useful, since it would address the points above.)

Full article here.

Other fun outtakes....

An article from The American Enterprise magazine talks about how it's our duty to learn to defend ourselves, and how we are a culture of cowardice. They make a lot of good points. By the time the police arrive, it's often all over - for good or bad. (You want an example of that? Try the recent case of two teenagers taking down a suicidal classmate with a gun in a situation that could have become a classic modern school tragedy - and instead ended with no reported injuries.)

One thing I'd argue would be this statement, however: "Our world has changed over the last year, and with it our moral responsibility to defend ourselves." Actually, it has hardly changed at all. Our perceptions, awareness, and understanding of particular parts of it, however, have changed immensely. We see now some of the responsibilities - and some of the dangers - that we were ignoring.

My opinion, anyway.

Both links snagged off of InstaPundit, which is still going to annoy me very soon with sheer volume of posts, no matter how interesting some of the resultant links are. By those lights, I should be irritating to many people as well, but I already knew that.