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Magazine of the Future

November 1st 2004 around lunchtime

In the wake of demo-saturated sponsor week, I decided, despite my lack of any screen charm, that I would post a link to my part in a series of videos the group shot in exploring some opportunities for the future of the magazine. In the span of about twenty-four hours, I scrambled to assemble a demo that would allow publicly posted paper products to serve as a gateway to digital content and participation. The bridge in this demo is facilitated on one side by RFID tags which are attached to the public posters and on the other side by a PDA with an onboard reader. Thumbnail of Magazine of the Future movie clip Somehow at the last minute, the scenario of torn pages was also introduced. I'm still trying to decide if there is anything interesting there. Certainly, there is some historical support for users tearing, redistributing, and remediating material from magazines, but at the time, I was a little too tired to give much thought to the scenario. I also tend to agree with Noah's assessment of RFID as not being ideal for these scenarios. A method of optical tagging, like that of barcode systems, would probably make more sense, especially if the tags could be read by the camera phones most of us are carrying in our pockets these days. Also, the Bluetooth network stack that is becoming more common on phones seems like an interesting mechanism for distributing content. For now, though, the future of the magazine is merely food for thought as we dive back into the Treehouse Studio and its underlying architecture. I have a lot of cleaning up of the SMPL code base that was muddied during the frantic kicking and flailing that makes up sponsor week.

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#1
c-diddy
...add a bikini, and you're the best booth girl ever.Now that you've moved on to writing your own protocols, though, I'm not sure we can hang out anymore.Actually, I like the barcode idea a lot, or a similar use of barcode that would involve a small scale, embedded around or near the text or images (enabling different content for different areas, like a hyperlink I suppose). The only problem is what do you read it with? Do new devices have to come equipped with such a reader, or is it possible to modify another interface to do it for you (maybe a cameraphone that has some OCR software that translates the barcode to get a hyperlink). I dunno, but damn good for 24hrs...I trust you're gonna show me what cool stuff is there and I'm allowed to see, to whatever extent you have some free time, when I get up there.
#2
kellegous

I suspect the system would look a lot like this:

http://semacode.org/

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about kellegous.com

kellegous.com is the personal site of kelly norton, a designer and engineer living in Atlanta, Georgia. Kelly used to be a graduate student at the MIT Media Lab but graduated in the summer of 2006. Before that, he was the Senior VP of Technology Development for Connexxia, a small technology company in Atlanta. He now works as a Software Engineer for Google. (more…)

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