Information Swarming and Physical Swarming
washingtonpost.com has an interesting article (below) along the lines of a CNET article I mentioned earlier, discussing the tech being used by RNC protestors and the police.

TxtMob.com shows up again, and appears to be the breakout technology star. Equally fascinating, I thought, was a reference to indymedia.org, which I had not previously heard of. It appears to be a distant cousin of my Micro-Local News concept, where individuals directly involved in an event act as reporters. I dug around on the indymedia site and found references to the video being distributed by P2P networks. VERY interesting. No better way to keep information available than spread through a bunch of people's machines and made publicly available, just ask the RIAA.

It further contributed to something I've been pondering, as well. Is the fact that we will have extremely large hard drives on which to store all of our everything an example of the Super Now fallacy? Will information instead be replicated across many machines everywhere and your need to have a very large drive be countered? Certainly not until bandwidth gets to be very large (back to the 10Gb/s topic), but what about then?

I know that there have been attempts at this kind of information distribution before, but I don't recall the details. Obviously your private data would have to be encrypted in such a way that only you could get at it, and held on enough geographically distributed locations so as to guarantee that you still have access to your data in pretty much any situation.

Thoughts?


RNC Protesters Using Text Messages to Plan

Independent Media Center | www.indymedia.org | ((( i )))

TxtMob.com


- posted @ 8:47 AM