Today I’m mostly decompressing after meeting a major deadline over the weekend (which may be of interest to readers and collectors of high quality limited edition genre fiction books, which I presume includes a few of you), and as such I’m struggling to do The Clever*.
So to tide you over until NEW FICTION later in the day (oh yes!), here’s a couple of items from my newsfeeds that chimed together:
- A chap called Aram Bartholl is doing one of those increasingly common tech/art/sociological experiment/installation things that involves cementing USB thumb drives into public walls as a sort of digital “dead drop” service [via BoingBoing].
- Meanwhile, a gang calling themselves the Archive Team have released a nearly-a-terabyte torrent archive file that contains a substantial proportion of the now-defunct Geocities proto-web ghetto, blinking tags and under-construction GIFs presumably included [via TechDirt].
At least a couple of story ideas and talking points in the collision of those two chunks of news, wouldn’t you say? So just for a change, I’ll shut the hell up and you lot can think out loud in the comments. Go on – it’s Monday, after all, and even your boss is probably slacking with a Halloween hangover…
[ * No change there, then. ]
As was remarked in the many comments on the web site with the article on the ‘art project’ USB devices embedded in the wall, there are a lot of things that could have been better thought out about it.
On the other hand, it’s an interesting idea, if executed a little differently. Wirelessly would seem to be the way to go – BlueTooth or WiFi.
Comes down to it, I think it’s not really going to take off – too much physical effort involved to connect to it. The same sorts of people that are geocaching might continue to use it, on a very small, low-level niche level.
Otherwise… *yawn*. It’s the same as slipping a note into a library book, or ‘Kilroy was here’, or possibly the act will be classed with graffiti or vandalism.