Every one of our blog posts around here is like a delicate, magical snowflake that we nurture lovingly (if quickly) before we push it out the door into the harsh lonely world of the web. Many of them are well received (otherwise we couldn’t do this for a living) but sometimes we write something we’re really proud of and it just melts into the river of news without being read by as many people as we wished.

Thus we present to you, our staff’s hand-picked posts this week that we think you may have missed but would likely enjoy quite a bit:

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Frederic Lardinois has been covering the e-book market closely for months. This week he wrote up…
E-Books: After the Hype and Before the iPad

The e-book hype reached its apex just before the holiday season. Now seems like a good time to take a closer look at the e-book market, especially given that this business is heading for another disruption once Apple’s iPad launches.

Richard MacManus has been focusing on an emerging trend called The Internet of Things. Check out this interview he put up at the end of last month:
Everyware: Interview with Adam Greenfield, Part 1

Last week I had the privilege of meeting Adam Greenfield, author of Everyware: The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing. It’s one of my favorite books about the Internet of Things and is still ahead of the curve, even though it was written in 2005 and published in 2006. Greenfield was in my city Wellington for the week, so I sat down with him at a local cafe to get his views on the current state of Internet of Things and where it’s headed.

Sarah Perez lives in Florida and she’s regularly got super smart content posted before the rest of us have even rolled out of bed in the morning. Her latest sleeper fave?
Beyond Twitter Search: Semantic Analysis of the Real-Time Web

Many of you probably never heard of the Ellerdale project until this week, when Twitter announced it was one of the company’s new partners in receiving the “firehose” of Twitter data, a full feed stream of tweets that was, prior to Monday, only available to the major players like Yahoo!, Google and Microsoft.

What Ellerdale is now doing with Twitter’s 50 million tweets per day is definitely interesting – the service uses an intelligent data-parsing engine to analyze the context of tweets and the links they contain and combines that with other data sources like RSS feeds and Wikipedia to create a real-time search engine and trends tracker that provides more than just a list of tweets – it provides an understanding of the world’s conversations.

What would a new newsman say is news if a new newsman could say news was news? We asked Mike Melanson, our newest addition to the news writing team. He said his favorite under-read post this week was…
Ads with Eyes: Keeping Digital Signage in Check

While geolocation based services have been in the forefront of our minds lately, with websites like PleaseRobMe making us second guess announcing our whereabouts, another industry has been quietly ramping up its data collection practices.

The Center for Democracy & Technology issued a report yesterday addressing the growing “digital signage” industry, suggesting a number of privacy practices it might adopt.

Alex Williams helps make Enterprise tech news interesting and he posted some very important coverage of enterprise innovation this week in….

Will StatusNet Be Another Open-Source Star in the Enterprise?

What a week for StatusNet, the open-source, microblogging service that serves as the foundation for identi.ca, one of the first services to emerge as a focal player in the movement around the real-time Web.

Last week, the company launched StatusNet Enterprise Network, a microblogging service with a support program for the corporate market. Initial customers include Motorola Corporation and Canonical Ltd.

Kaliya Hamlin is a frequent guest contributor, events partner and friend of the family here at ReadWriteWeb. She wrote a great post this week titled…
Bending the Identity Spectrum: Verifiable Anonymity at RSA

Today at the RSA security conference in San Francisco, Microsoft’s Corporate VP of Trustworthy Computing, Scott Charney, spoke – opening his talk with this question: “Do you want anonymity or accountability? YES!”

But how can you have both? I created a spectrum of identity to help understand the different forms that exist on the internet. On one end is Anonymous Identity. Basically you use an account or identifier every time go to a Web site – no persistence, no way to connect the search you did last week with the one you did this week.

Finally, my personal pick from my own archive. I’ve been having a great time writing up narrative tales of leading technology innovators. This is one you may not be familiar with but I think it’s really a moving and important story.
What Does it Mean to Make 5 Million Maps? Platial’s Legacy

It’s not every day that a business shuts down but declares itself a success in helping kick off an unstoppable movement to change the world.

Community mapping service Platial announced this week that it is turning off its servers and asking users to move their content onto the servers of other providers. Just short of 5 years old, Platial raised some venture capital, bought other small companies and made a name for itself, but in the end wasn’t able to build a business. Co-founder Di-Ann Eisnor defiantly says that Platial changed the world anyway. Cartography used to be an elite practice of drawing borders around resources and power. Platial helped transform it into an accessible practice for millions of people to share how they have experienced the world around them.

Those are our picks for this week! Come back daily for the best tech blog coverage we can provide.

Snowflake photo CC by Flickr user YellowCloud

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Is ‘checking in’ at places using location-based mobile apps like Foursquare and Brightkite resulting in us enjoying life a little less? Is there such a thing as too much data for a fun activity such as running? We address these and other questions in the final installment of our interview with Adam Greenfield, author of Everyware: The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing.

Modern web applications are packed with features that ostensibly connect us more to the real world and our activities in it. Foursquare uses location data to connect us with places and people. Nike+ shoes deliver data from your feet to your iPod. All of this new data from the real world is good progress, right? Yes, the more data the better! On the other hand, is our focus on data distracting us from actually enjoying life?

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Adam Greenfield doesn’t like Foursquare, a location-based social networking mobile app that has become popular over the past year. He told me that he loved Foursquare at first and enjoyed ‘checking in’ at places. But then he found that he spent the first few minutes of going into a place updating Foursquare with his location, which he realized could be time better spent actually enjoying the place and socializing with the people around him.

Technology has always had an anti-social element to it. For example, Twitter. When you’re in a social situation and you stop to tweet it, that disconnects you from the real world (at least for 30 seconds while you tap out 140 characters on your mobile phone).

Step back further into the mists of technological progress and there is the issue of cellphone calls in social situations. When you’re talking with someone and that person’s cellphone rings, then they answer it and have a conversation with someone else on their cellphone – is there anything more annoying than that from a social point of view?

So technology can be anti-social; nothing new in that. But is a mobile location-based app like Foursquare not only anti-social, but also distracting us from enjoying our surroundings because we’re so intent on documenting where we are?

The counter argument is that products like Foursquare make it easier for you to meet up with your friends in real life, particularly if you’re young and socializing a lot. For example you might see that a few of your friends are at a local cafe or pub, so you go out to join them there. That definitely makes Foursquare a fun product. But it’s a use case that mostly applies to young, highly social people.

It’s not just location-based apps that are potentially killjoys.

Greenfield also spoke about his experience with Nike+ running shoes, which come with a sensor that tracks your run and sends the data to your iPod. As we explained earlier this month, Nike+ has its own social network. Nike+ can also send updates to Twitter and post a status report on Facebook.

According to Adam Greenfield, Nike+ changed the way he ran. Because the shoes could quantify his running performance, he said that they made him faster and more competitive. However, he also began to feel guilty if he missed a run – because the data would suffer as a result. So despite making him a better runner, the Nike+ shoes resulted in him "not having as much fun."

What do you think – are you finding that modern web apps, whether location-based mobile apps or products with sensors or something else data-driven, are making you enjoy life just a little less? Are you focusing too much on the data, rather than just living life? Let us know in the comments.

See also Part 1 of our interview with Adam Greenfield, in which we discussed the impact of the iPhone and other smartphones on the Internet of Things. We also talked about the differences between the U.S. and Asia in adoption of these technologies. In Part 2, we focused on how the iPad may become the missing link between Internet-connected items in your home, for example the Internet fridge, and the Web.

Photo credits: whatleydude; Ed Yourdon

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In part 1 of our interview with Adam Greenfield, author of Everyware: The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing, we discussed the impact of the iPhone and other smartphones on the Internet of Things.

In Part 2, we explore how the Apple iPad may also become a key device. Adam Greenfield thinks it may become the missing link between Internet-connected items in your home, for example the Internet fridge, and the Web.

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In yesterday’s post, we talked about how Asian cities are ahead of the curve in deployment of Internet of Things technologies. One reason is that quality of life can be more easily be delivered as a service in a country like Korea, because its citizens are more open to futuristic appliances like the Internet fridge.

The counter-argument is that the Western market has never taken to the Internet fridge because of the poor utility of such appliances. The answer may be a device that acts as an effective intermediary between the fridge and the Internet. The iPad could be that device.

Adam Greenfield explained to me that the iPad may become the kind of device that people carry around with them everywhere inside the house, from the lounge to the bedroom to the kitchen.

That got me to thinking. Imagine this use case: you’re feeling peckish, so you wander into the kitchen for a snack. Your trusty iPad is tucked under your arm, as usual, and you place it on the kitchen bench while you open the fridge. You guiltily pick up a chocolate bar and you’re about to close the fridge door when your iPad beeps. You glance at the iPad, where a diet management iPad app has automagically opened and is flashing the message: "Hey buddy, you’ve already had too many calories today – put that back!" Blushing, you return the chocolate bar into the fridge and pick up a punnet of strawberries instead. You glance back at your iPad, which now displays a large green check mark on its screen!

There are many other scenarios I could describe, but the point is the iPad may well become a linking device between Internet-connected appliances and objects in your house, and the Web.

Adam Greenfield explained that the mistake we’ve made with Internet fridges in the past was to think of them like a dumb sensor. He remarked that it’s not the instrumentation that is important in an Internet fridge – it’s the network.

The data will probably be collected by the fridge, in time via RFID-enabled food packaging. But the fridge itself is a clumsy interface to that data. Early examples of Internet fridges have tried to be an interface for the consumer. Although some have had tablet-like devices that could be disconnected from the fridge and used on the kitchen bench, users have not found even those very compelling. There are a variety of reasons, including limited utility of fridge-tablets, poor user experience, and the sheer awkwardness of attaching a tablet to and from a fridge.

The iPad, however, will be used anywhere and everywhere by its users – inside and outside the house. So it’s a natural device to use to connect (virtually, not physically) to your fridge – along with other appliances and objects.

This isn’t restricted to inside the house either. We’ve written before about cars as a service. This is where you, the consumer, can effectively subscribe to a car or a car provider. This is already happening with the American service Zipcars. Greenfield noted that cars will become a "network resource" – addressable, scriptable, queryable, and so on. And once again, the iPad may be the device which connects you to cars and all of the data that is pumped out by cars and connected web services.

In the not too distant future, household appliances and other real-world objects such as cars will be connected to the Internet. The iPad may well become the connector to all of those things.

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Last week I had the privilege of meeting Adam Greenfield, author of Everyware: The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing. It’s one of my favorite books about the Internet of Things and is still ahead of the curve, even though it was written in 2005 and published in 2006. Greenfield was in my city Wellington for the week, so I sat down with him at a local cafe to get his views on the current state of Internet of Things and where it’s headed.

If you’re unsure what the world will be like when everything is connected to the Internet (hence the term ‘everyware’), then read on for Greenfield’s acute observations and examples of what’s already happening. This will be a multi-part post, published over the course of this week.

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What’s Changed? Mobile Phones!

Since it’s been nearly 4 years since Everyware was published, I asked Greenfield how Internet of Things has evolved since that time. In particular I wanted to know if anything major had changed since the book was first released.

He replied that the mobile phone has been the biggest change. According to Greenfield, the "single biggest failure of imagination in the book was that someone would decisively re-imagine what the phone is."

I think he’s being overly harsh on himself, as the iPhone wasn’t announced until January 2007. So in 2005/06, nobody but Steve Jobs and some of his team at Apple could have possibly imagined what the phone would turn into. It should also be noted that Adam Greenfield was a very early adopter of mobile blogging (he coined the term "moblog") and he is currently Nokia’s head of design direction for user interface and services. So if the evolution of the mobile phone since 2005/06 surprised even him, that tells you something about how much of a sea change the iPhone has been.

RFID

One thing that hasn’t changed as much as first thought is RFID. Greenfield ruefully noted that "this stuff is taking so long." There are scenarios in Everyware that haven’t come to pass yet, such as RFID in credit cards and home theatres.

However he thinks that RFID will eventually be usurped by superior item identification and tracking technologies. See this ReadWriteWeb post for more background on the state of RFID.

The City

Currently Adam Greenfield is working on his next book, called The City Is Here For You To Use. I asked him what cities he’s been most impressed with, in terms of their use of Internet of Things technologies.

He mentioned Korea and Singapore, noting also that municipalities in East Asia have made a lot of progress.

According to Adam Greenfield, a more interesting question may be: what kind of responses are those cities getting from companies? He said that technology companies like Cisco and Intel are responding with products and services for Internet of Things.

I asked Greenfield what he thought the differences were between adoption in Asia and the U.S.? He replied that public motivation in Asia may be one differentiator. In many Asian countries, there is a belief in ‘progress’ and a future life that will be better because of the "heroic investments" of governments and big companies. He said that quality of life can be delivered as a service in a place like Korea, for example an Internet fridge. Whereas westerners tend to question the utility of things like that.

To get a wider understanding of Internet of Things, I recommend you purchase Everyware now on Amazon. Neither myself or RWW is making any commission on this, I just think this book deserves a wider audience. Stay tuned for more from Adam Greenfield in Part 2 of this series.

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