Today is a historic day for the Netherlands –– no not because the timetables of all the trains have changed (first time since 1970 they say). Since today the Dutch public television does not broadcast an analogue signal.

I guess nobody has noticed.

I mean, who has a television with an old-fashioned antenna? Do they actually still produce tevees with antenna’s in the West?

Well, I have such a tevee. About 10 years old now. And I was very happy with it this year. In Kanne I can receive ARD, La Deux, België 1, Canvas on antenna, I even get a scrambled pay-channel (!) — and well, I could receive Nederland 1, 2 and 3 till yesterday.

I wonder what will happen with those frequencies. Are they free to use? Could you set-up an illegal station… no public channel that can be bothered? Well, in the Netherlands pirate television has not been around since the early eighties. (And well, who has a tevee with an antenna? You could start a pirate channel, but no-one will be watching).

Progression of technology leaves many unused possibilities behind. There’s only snow now…

This is a very simple and partial perception. When I started teaching HTML and webdesign, there were a lot of women and girls getting into that. That’s 10 years ago. When for the first time I did a guest lecture at an ICT-academy, some 3 years ago, the majority of students were boys, but at least there were some girls too. Next week I’l do a social software workshop at ICA in Arnhem and for the second time in a row all the students are boys. Not one single girl. Last week at the Mediamatic RFID-workshop all the participants were men/boys. Melanie Rieback was the only female & she was a speaker (and btw, by far the most hardcore technologist of all). Where are the girls? The problem is not that there aren’t any good role models… or no good female teachers, or developers around (in my immediate environment I can think of Joan Heemskerk of Jodi, Sher Doruff, Kristina Andersen, or fokky). (And Flickr was developed by Christina Fake). The thing is also that these workshops are not ‘about technology’ at all — and if they are about technology it’s really lo-tech. These workshops are much much more about social use — and I think it’s a very bad idea to let the whole field of developing and thinking up of new tools, to the boys only…

Ah well. Please tell me I’m wrong.

I’ve put a pdf of my presentation at the RFID-workshop online, for download. In my talk I dealt with the development of blogging-software as an example of the co-development of software and uses/users, using both Latour and Andrew Liu’s ‘Discourse Network 2000’ as an inspiration. Showing how a genre is constituted both by needs of users/writers and by software that is developed in response to those needs. Well, this goes through stages — for instance at one point it is blogging software that actually defines the genre. Next stage — where we are now — is when blogposts can & are used and re-used in different contexts, aggregation/syndication, when one is blogging without ever looking at the back-end of the blogsoftware, or even ‘blogging’ automatically. (Et cetera — hope you catch my drift). I’m trying to formulate what this means for the concept of ‘publishing’.

This is also what I will be discussing next week in my lecture in Groningen (15.00, Radesingel 6, Frank Mohr Institute).

Anyway, the pdf is for download here: http://www.ariealt.net/mediamatic_rfid/.
The first half is the actual presentation I did, what follows is a recap, and it ends with a collection of reserve ‘sheets’ that cover issues that I expected Julian Bleecker to talk about (but that I wanted to have handy, in case someone would ask me about it).

And then at the RFID workshop: short runthrough of different technologies and available stuff to work with, amongst which Mediamatic’s own Symbolic Table: http://www.mediamatic.net/article-11344-en.html.

Works at http://www.chrisoshea.org/ & blog at http://www.pixelsumo.com/. Where Rob was looking at all the political & privacy issues, he looks at RFID for artistic & playful use. References Peter Anders (2001) idea of ‘cybrids’. And then shows a lot of his work, with interactive works for musea and sound, works that incorporate RFID & games that uses RFID-playing cards…

Is starting with RFID in China… where they are working on their own frequencies and softwares. His background in literary theory (Rob used to be big into Walter Benjamin for instance), pops up too: a nice quote of McLuhan :-)

Again: stressing that RFID is a very simple technology… 2 Years ago he handed over his RFID report to all Dutch political parties & the only party that voiced interest and asked questions in parliament was the SGP (etremely conservative, orthodox protestant party).

“No more public. No more memory loss. No more people, just data clouds.” We have become fragmented in dataspace. There is no (political) general public with whom to discuss problems around RFID. With total tagging & tracing there will be no memory loss. Ambient intelligence & smart things instead of a laptop plus mouse.

Explains the set-up of an Internet of Things:
RFID – reader – EPC network – PML (physical mark-up-language) – ONS (object name server — built on top of DNS). Hmm: to google a bottle of beer in the Mediamatic fridge from a room in Tokyo.

Problem: convergence to just one company (Verisign) who’s in charge..

But: users have the possibilities to use the system for their own use, if you have a reader…

New word (for me): “glue code”. Code to tie everything together.

More Rieback: “RFID software is pretty complex and will turn in to bloatware as everything else”. “Security is designed inside the system. It is not something like a band-aid that you strap on later.”

Now listening at http://www.mediamatic.net/artefact-11944-en.html, to the talk of Melanie Rieback — a technologist connected to http://www.rfidguardian.org/ –. I came in late, but here are some of what I heard her saying:

“the RFID-technology is in a young enough state for artist & designers still to have an impact on the development of it.”

“performance art can be as effective as technology demonstrations….”

She gives a lot of examples of lo-tech, well, let’s say activist art-stuff, of ‘hacking’ RFID… which are possible because some (a lot) of RFID-tags are pretty unprotected, or, even because of the simple fact that RFID-tags can’t be read when inside foil.

It’s so nice sometimes to just make something, however simple it is, using old-skool html and some pictures.

This time I made screenshots of the different stages — or maybe different screens (rather than actions) — of writing & publishing a blog post. Respectively Blogger Beta, WordPress, Twoday.net and blogging from Flock.

No Typepad since I immediately erased my account after activating it and checking it out.

Big html-page here (may need refresh to have all the pictures load…): http://www.xs4all.nl/~ariealt/jve/2006_to_blog_small/to_blog.html.

Well, it won’t earn the prize for best design, and probably I should’ve resized the screenshots differently, but still, I like these kind of mosaics.

It would be too long to publish as a ‘post’, so I made it into a ‘page’: http://www.ariealt.net/a-very-simple-research/. I just counted, for 204 different blogs, what softwares they used…

Screenshots of all 204 blogs — resized to 10% of the original size — in one html-page: http://www.xs4all.nl/~ariealt/jve/204_blogs.html.