Accept no substitutes

Flavor of the Future; History of ibiblio

Took a phone interview and an email interview at the same time on two different topics trying to prove I could multiprocess and move in both directions at once today.

The phone call was with Dawn Vaughan of the Herald Sun (in Durham). Dawn asked the unanswerable:

Do you think there will be significant changes in home technology — beyond advances in computer hard/software? Will we use the Internet more/differently? Will we use desktop computers, or everything handheld? Any new “intelligent” home appliances? Will we watch/listen/learn on one piece of equipment? What will it look like?

I answered that the future of home entertainment is would be life-sized fully interactive revival of Flavor of Love reruns controlled by grills and a large clock worn around the home participant’s neck.

Well, after that I tried to get serious to talk about control by voice, gesture and presence, about houses and devices learning your habits and anticipating your needs based on past behaviors, about presense being sensed by various bioprofiles, facescans, heat images, jewelry and implants, about augmentation of the body, about wires vanishing, about widespread fuelcell use. And about a fetishism of the outdoors. Much as trains are now romanticised, the outdoors will be seen as something that we need to visit to make up for the lack of contact with the unpredictable world of nature. Like trains, we’ll talk about nature and our lovely relationship to it more that we actually experience it.

At the same time, I was answering email from Glyn Moody of Linux Weekly News about Open Content (LWN is not Open Content as near as I can tell, they want you to subscribe but Glyn’s open access article is accessible openly). Glyn had done a piece on Open Access earlier and this would be a follow up.

Glyn asked about Sunsite/Metalab/ibiblio’s hosting of Linux, the Linux Documentation Project, Creative Commons, Project Gutenberg and about contributor-run digital libraries. I answered and will publish what I wrote after Glyn has his cut at making sense of it all. I’m sure he’ll do a great job based on what I read in his Open Access article.

1 Comment

  1. Glyn Moody

    Thanks for the vote of confidence: I hope I can live up to it. Just to clarify: LWN’s approach is that all content becomes freely available a week after it is first published for subscribers.

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