* Camera phones and pocket organizers with sensors;
* Weblogs ('blogs), Moblogs, Cyborglogs ('glogs);
* Wearable camera phones and personal imaging systems;
* Electric eyeglasses and other computational seeing and memory aids;
* Recording experiences in which you are a participant;
* Portable personal imaging and multimedia;
* Wearable technologies and systems;
* Ethical, legal, and policy issues;
* Privacy and related technosocial issues;
* Democracy and emergent democracy (protesters organizing with SMS camphones);
* Safety and security;
* Technologies of lifelong video capture;
* Personal safety devices and wearable "black box" recorders;
* Research issues in "people looking at people";
* Person-to-person sharing of personal experiences;
* End of gender-specific space (e.g. blind man guided by wife: which restroom?);
* Subjectright: ownership of photograph by subject rather than photographer;
* Reverse copyright: protect information recipient, not just the transmitient;
* Interoperability and open standards;
* Algebraic Projective Geometry from a first-person perspective;
* Object Detection and Recognition from a first-person perspective;
* Computer Vision, egonomotion and way-finding technologies;
* Lifelong Image Capture: data organization; new cinematographic genres;
* New Devices and Technologies for ultra miniature portable cameras;
* Social Issues: fashion, design, acceptability and human factors;
* Electronic News-gathering and Journalism;
* Psychogeography, location-based wearable computing;
* Augmented/Mediated/Diminished Reality;
* Empowering children with inverse surveillance: Constructionist learning, creation of own family album, and prevention of both bullying by peers and abuse by teachers or other officials.

Surveillance	Sousveillance
Sur-veiller is French for "to watch from above".	Sous-veiller is French for "to watch from below".
God's eye view from above. (Authority watching from on-high.)	Human's eye view. ("Down-to-earth.")
Cameras usually mounted on high poles, up on ceiling, etc.	Cameras down-to-earth (at ground level), e.g. at human eye-level.
Architecture-centered (e.g. cameras usually mounted on or in structures).	Human-centered (e.g. cameras carried or worn by, or on, people).
Recordings of an activity made by authorities, remote security staff, etc.	Recordings of an activity made by a participant in the activity.

"Inverse surveillance is the imminent device-driven tsunami whereby we commoners take back our commons. We will be using our always-on videophones to capture the passing scene. The result will be that our blanket, overlapping and corroborating public record captured by our high-res private devices will overwhelm the spotty, lo-res record of incidents captured by so-called public surveillance devices."

"The ASN is a blue sky vision for the future of online community. It stakes out some conceptual territory, presenting a civil society vision of how the Internet could evolve — particularly addressing the issues of Identity and Trust (two packed terms that have a pretty specific meaning in this context). It provides a clear alternative to the dangerous direction the Internet may well be heading in — a corporate/government panopticon. But it’s not enough to stand against digital disempowerment and control; we need to stand for something. The ASN shows that by coordinating the writing of standards and protocols between several different, previously separate technical areas (persistent identity, interoperability between community infrastructures, matching technologies, and brokering) you could add a layer of functionality to the Internet that would be greatly in the public interest."

Planetwork was founded in 1998 by Erik Davis, Jim Fournier, Elizabeth Thompson and David Ulansey. It is a network in which activists mingle with technologists. It’s aim has been to connect issues of global ecology and information technology. Politically speaking Planetwork is a civil society initiative that strategically positions itself as part of Silicon Valley, while at the same time celebrating the Seattle protests against corporate dominance. A typical post-dotcom phenomena, one could say. They are not so much driven by selfish libertarian greed, as once propagated by Wired. Rather, they are an incarnation of the hippie values and ideas that once circulated in the Well. I know, in California such distinctions may seem problematic, but it is nonetheless important to stress that there is still, or again, a progressive agenda within the IT-sector.

Jordan enumerates shortcomings of current social networking systems such as Friendster:

1. They are non-interoperable walled gardens.
2. Profile info is thin, not nuanced; it isn’t context sensitive (the boss and mother problem).
3. The profile information is static, not effected by your actions elsewhere.
4. You have limited control over your own profile information (“It calls for a new class of services: identity brokers”; you also want a “digital bill of rights” that enables you to exert control over access.)
5. The sites are exclusive, invitation-only clubs. [Note: I believe this is the exception rather than the norm].

I can’t help but notice how close weblogs come to fitting the bill - apart from restricting you to a single context and making it difficult to control acess, everything is in there. (See Dina Mehta and Lilia Efimova on blogs as SNSes.)

We grant everybody the right to construct the microscope using the here-published design for private or educational purposes. On these web pages all necessary diagrams, drawings, material descriptions and software-source-codes are published for free access. While granting the right to build the microscope we make it mandatory that new developments, improvements or other applications of our design are also made openly available for private or educational purposes.

Imagine building your own location-based game, such as a treasure hunt or a spy game.

Imagine creating a thread of local resources that would be useful or important to you if you lived in this area. For instance specialist food shops, bookstores, places to learn new things, exercise classes, social services, free concerts and films, public toilets and local dumps.

Imagine creating your own story woven through the area. For instance a romance or crime story, science fiction or horror (English country pursuits)!

Imagine annotating places for local activist campaigns or issues. For instance local pollution and the environment, building developments and regeneration, globalisation and local transport.

Imagine creating your own personal map of Bloomsbury. For instance quiet places to sit, favourite parks, family histories, unhappy memories and bad smells!

With Chandler, users will be able to organize diverse kinds of information for their own convenience -- not the computer's convenience. Chandler will have a rich ability not only to associate and interconnect items, but also to gather and collect related items in a single place creating a context sensitive "view" of many types of data, mixing-and-matching email, mailing lists, instant messages, appointments, contacts, tasks, free-form notes, blogs, web pages, documents, spreadsheets, slide shows, bookmarks, photos, MP3's, and so on (and on). Data in Chandler is stored on repositories on the user's local machine, on others' machines, and on shared resources such as servers.

This is a very different approach from that of today's common PIMs. For example, users can usually only view a given email message in one specific folder, grouped only with other email messages. In the user-centric world of Chandler, the basis of the ‘relatedness’ of items is completely at the users discretion and is merely facilitated, rather than imposed by the software.

Chandler lets the user keep track of lots of concurrent, ongoing activities. Managing activity extending over time requires the ability to collect just the right sets of related items. Too much information and the user the can't find what's relevant. Too little information and the needed item goes missing. This ability to gather relevant information from disparate sources is at the heart of Chandler's design. A Chandler user could, for example, relate a variety of emails, contacts, documents, and calendar events into an ad-hoc collection related to a specific project.

Chandler will provide unified search over all of the user's information, both on her own personal computer(s) and stored in other Chandler repositories across the network. It will allow searches to be saved for re-use.

Chandler will give non-programming users the ability to customize and extend the program in all sorts of ways, for instance, providing ways to automatically manage complex, asynchronous tasks like organizing a meeting and to automatically respond to events as they arise.

A window between cities that allows people hundreds or even thousands of miles apart to meet and talk could make its debut in Britain next year.

Tholos, named after a type of circular ancient Greek temple, consists of a large round screen nearly 10ft high and 23ft wide.

Its designers hope to see one of the first two in the world become a new tourist attraction in the centre of London.

The London Tholos would be linked to an identical one in Vienna. Through them, people in both cities will be able to see and hear each other in real time.

The cylindrical structure contains technology that simultaneously transmits and receives high definition live moving images.

People standing in front of London's Tholos would see a wrap-around picture of the scene in Vienna. At the same time, a similar London image is displayed in the Austrian capital.

Citizens in both countries would be able to face each other and talk via an array of directional microphones and loudspeakers, which keep conversations private.

Effectively, it is like meeting up in the town square - except that you might be on different continents.

The trend started innocuously a few years ago, when novelty cameras that plugged into mobile handsets were marketed to gadget-obsessed kids in Japan and Europe. But in the past few months, a global phonecam revolution has begun to emerge. Take the device's portability, add its ability to post images online, multiply by its growing ubiquity, and what do you get? A cheap, fast strain of DIY publishing in which everyone is an embedded reporter. The rise of the technology resembles the leap from late-'90s personal homepages to today's weblogs: Like blogs, phonecams are a fresh combination of familiar elements that equal way more than the sum of their parts.

"What's incredibly exciting to me is that a confluence of factors e.g. ubiquitous computing, networking, web and RAD technologies, the state of the job market - in essence, loosely coupled systems and loosely coupled minds - have created what amounts to a petri dish for experimentation in systems for social network formation, management and interpersonal interaction. An exciting time to be exploring what may happen to social structures, to organizations and to society when the friction between our minds can be reduced to zero ... to the point where we can truly have superconductive relationships."

"Korea is emerging as one of the most advanced Internet nation in the world. Young Koreans, in particular, live and breath Internet, each belonging to large number of online communities. One would expect them to be well informed and objective, yet they are not. Their views are warped and often radical. While all the world's information is at their fingertip, they consume information subjectively and produce misinformation biased by their views. Adding highly effective social software to this is frightening to me.

When I was last in Korea, a close friend of mine told me he was thinking about sending his six-year old daughter to schools in the US. I was shocked. How could he think this way? He said he initially thought the idea ridiculous, but he changed his mind after talking with people he knew, people who are just as well-to-do as his family. Apparently, they are all thinking the same thing and this warped his common sense."

The Law of Accelerating Returns is the acceleration of technology, and the evolutionary growth of the products of an evolutionary process. And this really goes back to the roots of biological evolution.

Evolution works through indirection. You create something and then work through that to create the next stage. And for that reason, the next stage is more powerful, and happens more quickly. And that has been accelerating ever since the dawn of evolution on this planet.

The first stage of evolution took billions of years. DNA was being created and that was very significant because it was like a little computer, and an information processing method to store the results of experiments, and to build up a knowledge base from which it could then launch experiments and codify the results.

The subsequent stages of evolution happened much more quickly. The Cambrian Explosion only took a few tens of millions of years to establish the body plan to evolve animals. And we see that evolution, like certain technologies, has become mature and stopped evolving. Evolution has concentrated on other issues, specifically higher cortical functions. And that happened much more quickly than the Cambrian Explosion. Humanoids evolved over many millions of years, and Homo sapiens over only hundreds of thousands of years. And there again, evolution used the products of its evolutionary processes, which was Homo sapiens, to create the next stage, which was human-directed technology, which really is a continuation of the cutting-edge of the evolutionary process on earth, for creating more intelligent systems.

In the first stage of human-directed technology, it took tens of thousands of years, which is what you would expect for the next stage via the wheel, or stone tools, and that kept accelerating, because when we had stone tools, we could use them to build the next stage. So a thousand years ago a paradigm shift only took a century, like the printing press. And now a paradigm shift, like the World Wide Web, is measured in only a few years’ time. The first computers were built with screwdrivers and were designed with pencil and paper, and today we use computers to create computers. A CAD designer will sit down and specify a few high-level parameters, and 12 different layers of automated designs will be done automatically. The most significant acceleration is in the paradigm shift rate itself, which I think of as the rate of technical progress. And all of these are actually not exponential, but double exponentials because not only does the process accelerate because of our evolution’s ability to use each stage of evolution to build the next stage, but also, as the process, as an area gets higher price performance, more resources get drawn into that capability.[..]

The whole 20th century, because we’ve been speeding up to this point, is equivalent to 20 years of progress at today’s rate of progress, and we’ll make another 20 years of progress at today’s rate of progress equal to the whole 20th century in the next 14 years, and then we’ll do it again in seven years. And because of the explosive power of exponential growth, the 21st century will be equivalent to 20,000 years of progress at today’s rate of progress, which is a thousand times greater than the 20th century, which was no slouch to change.

The last six months have seen a new embryonic internet emerge into the light.
This new internet is more decentralised, structured, logically interconnected, people centred, and increasingly location aware

..maybe you have a newsreader that goes and gets rss feeds to save you trawling your favourite sites, maybe you have a blog which kicks out a structured rss feed and pings a blog search and analysis engine. Maybe you use one of the new selective blog search engines like feedster or blog link analysis engines like blogdex and technorati, or even a blog extended family tracker like blogstreet. Maybe you see the patterns emerging at a higher level. Blogs are now less interesting than the relations between them. Blogs are things to be aggregated, searched for patterns, ranked, indexed, analysed, those results being valuable to ordinary users as much as academics. What are bloggers tripping out on right now? Check blogdex. Feedster has a lag of about an hour, Google sometimes as much as a month. These tools are selective and they can become more so, answer questions like: what is this extended familly of bloggers tripping out about, what are my friends tripping out about?

All these new capabilities are emerging through distributed collectve tweaking.

This article from SPACE.com about the Interplanetary Internet (IPN) is not science fiction. Rich Gray reports it is becoming a reality.

The IPN would form a backbone connecting a series of hubs on or around planets, ships, and at other points in space. These hubs would provide high-capacity, high-availability Internet traffic over distances that could stretch up to hundreds of millions of miles.

Gray adds that all the planets and satellites in our solar system have already Internet addresses and that NASA is already communicating with its earth-orbiting missions through its internal Deep Space Network. The rest of us will have to wait until at least 2005 when IPN-equipped satellites are launched

Check this column for more details.