Coming soon: Cyberspace
February 5th, 2006 by HenI’ve been reading Peter Morville’s Ambient Findability recently. Peter was one of the two authors who brought us the seminal Information Architecture from O’Reilly, even after all these years - my favourite IT book. Incidentally Barnes & Noble have it available for very little money in their sale section. Buy, buy, buy. One of the interesting and not fully realised parts of that book was the concept of search and navigation; mostly because when it comes down to “where are you going to put stuff?”, “how are you going to find stuff?” is an enormous part of getting to the answer.
One thing, among many, that Peter talks about is RFID. I’ve not finished that chapter, let alone the book, so maybe Peter will point this out, but with IPv6 meaning that every object on the planet can have an IP address, and RFID/GPS and other technologies meaning that every object on the planet can have a lat/long, I’m starting to get scifi deja vu. Let’s pretend that every RFID can be looked up in a database for its avatar; or maybe RFID-2 allows larger objects to carry their own avatar (for all I know RFID allows this already). This means that one can use a browser (or VR environment) to experience a matrix-like cyberview of anywhere on the planet.
I’m sure there are lots of smart people out there talking about this, and iterating the actual steps needed to get there, but this was my “hey it could happen” moment.