The Telegraphic

I’ve only recently become aware of the concept of Hyperconnectivity: where everything that can be networked together, is. We are already seeing changes in the way we communicate: a lot of “Web 2.0″ apps are essentially hyperconnecting us (as human nodes) to each other. I am intrigued by the question: “How will we adapt?” Here’s a few links to some people’s thoughts on possible repurcussions:

• Hyperconnectivity Impact – David Martel. A quick look at why hyperconnectivity is inevitable.
• Journalism in a Hyperconnected World – Stilgherrian. “Hyperconnected” social networking sites send news faster than news sites – how will journalism adapt? A good read.
• Scary Stuff - Robert Ellis Smith. An eloquent and truly scary look at how privacy may fall by the wayside in a hyperconnected world.

I’ll be posting more on this sort of thing in the future. Stay tuned.

Something that’s causing a storm-in-a-teacup at the moment in my hometown is Nightkey – a new ID system that uses your fingerprint to create a biometric link between you and the ID you supply. It’s being sold as an “anti-antisocial behaviour” solution. I was outraged when I found out about it: I object because I feel that it’s treating your clientele like prisoners, and I believe this goes against the “innocent until proven guilty” philosophy our societal and legal paradigms are built up upon. Will it curb anti-social behaviour? Possibly. Is it treading the line between having privacy and living in a police-state? Most definitely.

I’m not going to discuss the huge body of privacy concerns in this post. What I would like to discuss is the possible extension of this machine into a marketing device, and the impacts that this would have upon going out, night-clubbing and society.

Welcome to the machine

Consider, if you will, the manager of a savvy club with Nightkey installed on the front doors. At the end of the night, she has a look at how many people came through the door: “Hmm. only 278 tonight, we’ll have to get some better bands next Saturday. And out of those 278, 178 were male – we need more females to keep the guys happy! I’ll contact my ad guy and get him to come up with some female-oriented ads. The problem is, it looks like girls under 25 spend on average $15 less than guys aged over 25. I’ll get my stats guy to find the ideal ratio and age for maximum profit.”

I hope the above monologue illustrates my point: something like the Nightkey system could easily turn you into a statistic. I’m not sure how much stat-crunching Nightkey can do out-of-the-box, but  even a little will give businesses a huge advantage in terms of clientele tracking. Is this a good thing, or a bad thing? I’ll let you decide.

Fancy meeting you here

Here’s a simple mash-up one could do: linking your Nightkey details to your Facebook account. And here’s a way around the privacy laws: “Add our application to your facebook profile and we’ll give you a free beer and VIP entry!”. Very tempting. The devil is of course in the EULA. Almost instantly, you have complete demographic information about your punters. Then it’s just up to advertising. You can play god with your own club (and get that power trip that the bouncers get when they turn someone away). Not that club owner’s don’t try and do all this already.

What I’m trying to get at is that this type of  technology means that you could build communties through statistical analysis. Hyperconnectivity could soon mould our physical social interactions. We could be entering the next social paradigm shift, the next renaissance. A Brave New World. If we could steer this in the right direction: minority groups could prosper, culture would be fortified, people could be connected to their perfect matches. In the wrong hands: I won’t go there.

Today I was delighted to find out that one of my favorite photos from my 2005 Japan trip has been used to promote green building practices on Green By Design. I released it free for use on sxc.hu along with a few other photos I thought might be useful for stock photography. While some of the photos I uploaded have been used for more unusual designs, I’ve generally been amazed by the pieces people have managed to create. And amazed at who uses the site: my photos have been used by KLM airlines, Harper-Collins and the World Health Organisation. It’s great to see them being used – which they wouldn’t have been, if they weren’t free. Viva la freedom of information, I say. But don’t get me started on privacy.

For a while now I’ve been in love with Picasa, and the release of Picasa 3 comes with a nifty Lightbox-esque photo viewer. I’m not a huge fan of Google’s photo services; I prefer Flickr (by their underdog rivals Yahoo), myself. Also – I’ve been using Snapfish (by HP) for photo printing, ever since they suckered me in with their 30 free prints.

I’m excited because I just found the missing piece: a nifty add-on to Picasa to link it up to Flickr’s Upload tool – picasa2flickr. With this and Picasa’s inbuilt integration with Snapfish (I wonder how much HP paid for the endorsement …), Picasa is very good-in-the-mix. The next step is getting all this working on Linux…

I’m sitting in “the coffee bean and tea leaf” café, which overlooks the transit lounge of Brunei airport. I feel like I’ve been transported back 20 years, into a middle eastern RSL club-cum-airport. A coffee and chicken pie costs almost exactly $10 AU, so I’m waiting for what will no doubt be lovely high class airport food. Scratch that, I have my high quality food and it’s quite edible. I love Brunei! As long as I don’t do something wrong and be punished by DEATH. With CAPS in the brochure.

I’m 3/4 the way through “The Cosmic Blueprint”, by Paul Davies, which is a good read although I haven’t been digesting it properly. I’ve already finished the web design mag I bought. I have a New Scientist left to read, which I hope yields a better reading-to-price ratio.

I got an emergency exit seat for the short trip, but have a killer 18hr leg left. Turns out the emergency exit isn’t thermally shielded so is a good place to cool down your water bottle. Think the flight attendant noticed me laughing to myself about how cookie cutter the buildings were. Hope I didn’t offend.

Saw a guy sleeping with his mouth closed but lips open. Thought that was strange. The Oreos on the plane seemed more salty than usual. Will investigate further if 491mg of Sodium is a lot. Main meal was dissapointing, canneloni was a bad choice.

Still have 2 hours to kill. Coffee bean guy keeps calling peoples names in a high pitch voice “Sir Steve? Sir Steve?” Planning on knocking myself out at exactly the right time to have a good first day in England.

Love you all
Dan