Brian Kerr

All Streets. All Roads. Always forever now. We’ll split it right down the middle, like they split God’s country. I’ll metrate, you emerge. Let’s go.

(tags: commas god maps photos roads split streets)

I finally gave up on Plazes — after two years, after they totally broke it (by, in one majestic batshit swoop, redesigning the site and discontinuing the API and junking up the desktop client), and after everybody else in the local nova mob stopped using it.

But: there’s some slightly unknown collective action that Plazes didn’t enable — and neither yet has anything else. All those little timeslices of Plazes-attention over all those months got me: a sense of space, weird trivia about University buildings, and a few happy excuses to meet a new person in an airport ✈ or cafe ♨.

Here are my notes about Plazes from 26 months ago.

(tags: annarbor cybernetics maps micro-elegy networks nova-mob plazes space swoop)

I habitually miss out on meetings in Second Life because I don’t have the client installed, etc. — so this afternoon I took that bold step, and ended up spending a solid few hours exploring.

Liana took me to some cheerfully Victorian environment; I figured out that you could create and shape objects, so I made a donut.

Later on, after I’d acquired some menswear, Liana showed me the way to the Black Lodge. (There’s always a Black Lodge. Seems to be a real White Lodge shortage — but, that’s life, first or second or otherwise.)

In a moment of nostalgic weakness, I honored the Ministry of Information by visiting the Michigan Library Consortium in Second Life and picking up a free MLC t-shirt. It’s about as crappy as it sounds: a set of empty buildings where you can use laggy computer objects to search the catalogs.

The nicest area I found was ZERO POINT, a sculpture park which cheerfully remediates a generation’s worth of Radio Shack attract mode VHS crap, early nineties computer animation meatloaf c/o dead-ender Silicon Graphics overspill, except that instead of blurry rotating goblet composites and morphing quicksilver faces and sharp-jointed glassy bugs, you have a truly awesome mouselook trudge through tunnels that approximate Tranquility levels being sucked into toothless black holes. The pictures don’t do it justice, since everything is moving, or at least palette-shifting.

I played around with the object building kit, fantastic chunky 3D modeling fun, but you have to get involved with the game economy to do anything serious (i.e. huge, persistent, or using your own textures and media).

The key fact about Second Life is this: most places are empty, and the places that aren’t are running some scammy popularity-contest almighty one-eyed Linden dollar angle. In Second Life, the streets find their own uses for things, but it’s an attention economy, and there aren’t that many streets — why walk when you can fly or teleport? So the choice is, for the most part, between half-baked, mostly-empty built environments, or hugely overcrowded XXX nudie fashion beaches, where bulked-up or slimmed-down avatars brandish their anatomically correct, hilariously outsized prostheses and/or mega sparkling lens-flaring silver and gold, tops low-cut or not at all. You can buy clothing and you can buy junk trinket objects. You can make boring objects really easily, but — but. In my case, I had a lovely little roughshod statue garden going, singing Adam West Batman cubes and all, but then a litter of cigarette-smoking furries walked through and that was that. Why would I build my stuff in a desolate sandbox where nobody would see it? Why build it there, where it’d disappear after I was gone (much, presumably, to the relief of the narcotic-puffing mammal pride). So, I picked up my objects and went home: ⌘Q.

All the above to note that (1) my handle in Second Life is ExoMicroBioUnitAlpha Raymaker and please say hello if you see me, although (2) today was probably the greatest amount of time I’m going to spend with this hollow thing.

(tags: games maps media photos remediation visual)

Matt Hampel and Kyle Mulka have added a mapping tool to ArborWiki. There’s a cool, visceral sense of place that comes from seeing maps on these pages, even if the maps aren’t as immediately useful as street address or intersection details. For examples, see Sweetwaters and Pierpont Commons.

Each page on ArborWiki has an Attach Map link, which lets you match up the page contents with a place that the Empire database already knows about. The interface for attaching a map is still a little rough, whereas the map displays are just great (one suggestion: default zoom level should be a little farther out, since it’s more relevant to see surrounding streets than it is to see a detailed satellite photo).

Thanks to both of these guys for a nice integration.

(tags: annarbor maps wiki)

Finally signed up for WalkerTracker. The bkerr step blog records my short pedestrian lurches around town, possibly annotated with my pithy urban ranger observations.

Over the summer I picked up a pedometer as a feelie for some contract work. I’d been recording steps:

• as a crazy pixel graph made with Pixen,
• as a Python dictionary, and finally
• on paper.

This was fun, but unmutual. More recently, I was planning out a shell-to-feed script for keeping track of steps, Animal Crossing stalk market prices, etc. — but using the existing tool and maybe plugging into it later seemed prudent.

WalkerTracker is a [blog | forum | map | pedestrian-brinkmanship] site wrapped around a form where everybody types in the number of steps they took that day. It’s maintained by Ben in Portland, OR, who has several very cool projects at ideacog.net.

(tags: maps urbanranger walkertracker web weblogs)

Greasemap is a one-year-old Greasemonkey user script for Firefox which, on web pages containing human-readable addresses or machine-readable location metadata, will embed Google Maps in the pages.

Here are Greasemaps in my browser on this site, and at NEW:

One of the things I’ve really enjoyed about using Firefox is the hard work others have done to expose attributes and behaviors of sites that are otherwise invisible, or at least non-obvious. The locality of web browsing is probably the coolest example. Greasemap is fun to use alongside the GeoURL extension which, from pages with location metadata, reveals a list of physically nearby pages and sites. It’s not cyberspace, but kind of what we got instead: a logical grid bolted on top of the meat grid.

(If you’re interested, I made a slight patch tidy up Greasemap’s appearance.)

(tags: maps web)

Plazes is a web service that lets you articulate some basic info about internet access points — wired and wireless, public and private — in your area. Plazes has an undisclosed business model, a cheerful, can-do web presentation, and a functioning API. It’s also easy to use. The workflow of identifying and describing new networks is really smooth on a Mac.

Bonuses: careful attention to privacy or anonymity concerns, and an OS X launcher with a decent Applescript dictionary.

Plazes, along with sweet, sweet del.icio.us, represents about the best I’ve seen of the present web. It has all the hallmarks:

• a stupid name,
• an ambiguous funding structure,
• Google Maps stuff,
• something slouching towards valuable linkage, and
• a uniquely web-like blurring of private v. public utility.

Plazes in Ann Arbor

As usual, Ed is way out in front. He introduced the service by writing that:

proximity is the killer app. There’s nothing quite like knowing not only that the person you are looking for is available but also that they are within 2 km of you and it would be easy to walk there to see them.

Murph wants to use it to ping housemates.

At this writing, there are 30+ Ann Arbor locations listed in Plazes, about a third of which are public wifi. There’s already a pretty nice mix of coffee shops, public spaces, offices, homes, and University stuff.

Although grabbing a list of nearby wifi access points is the least interesting way to use Plazes, this Angell Hall-centered listing is already a better resource for finding campus- and downtown-area internet access than either the U-M wifi listing (of sites requiring a uniqname / U-M password) or Ed’s coffee shop wifi listing, which is a dump of a now-extinct wiki page.

Over the next few days, I plan to mark up some more of my frequently-used University of Michigan wireless networks. The first time I tried, I had a surprisingly hard time locating campus building street addresses (optional, but really helpful, data for Plazes) — at least until I stumbled upon this address lookup page, and a corresponding paper listing.

(tags: annarbor design maps web)