I attended another of the Brussels Information Architecture Meetup group yesterday. What i like about those meetings is that they offer a different perspective. They have a more abstract take on things. Where implementation can be terribly nitty-gritty, they take the long view.

Last night Joe Horwood gave a talk about how we’re going towards a world where physical objects are linked to the web. Barcodes (1D and 2D) and RFID are URI of physical objects. As of now, software is not intelligent enough to recognize all objects by themselves, so we do need those “labels”.

Now in Japan (ah, Japan: smell the future), most phones have the software to parse bar codes. This means that for instance, at a bus stop you have a bar code: you scan it, this is parsed to an URL, and you get information about busses etc. Or you have loyalty programs for drink vending machines – you scan the bar code every time you come buy and this gets you points.

It is a fact that mobile devices are coming up, that ubiquitous computing is becoming more of a reality. So links between the physical and the web are no longer unthinkable. One vision (NTT advertisement spot i couldn’t find on youtube) pictured augmented reality, something that has been in the news.

Yesterday was half a presentation, half a brainstorming session/debate, and one subject that came up a lot was the issue of privacy. How much information is conveyed when you use your mobile device for such applications (triangulation with phones could convey your location + identity) ? Is the consumer informed about what he is disclosing using such services ?
Picture being data mined on your every action.

Resources close to home:
Semapedia
amazon
Delicious Library isight scanning