Michael Boyle's weblog
at work. I feel like the first time I talked with theek about wireless broadband. It was so obvious – but mind blowing at the same time.
This is associated with how shitty my Behind the curtain entry is going to be – cause I worked all day Sunday on a proposal we had to submit by midnight. A lot of pics of me at my desk. Shhh… don’t tell anyone… it’s a secret until the 24th.
it’s a good thing or a bad thing that Paragraph Books has been sold to Quebecor. Paragraphe is the best English bookstore in Montreal (at least the best store selling new books), and until yesterday it was an independent bookstore. They practically invented the idea of having a cafe in the store at their old location on Mansfield – when I was at McGill I used to hang out there for hours at a time.
from Matthew Fuller, one of the i/o/d guys: WARNING… This Computer Has Multiple Personality Disorder; Eating Disorder: The Story of a Shape (from CTHEORY); Neurocity (from frAme); People would go crazy (from Nettime‘s archives); etc.
The idea of user-developed wireless networks is great in so many ways. First of all, whether the commercial space is ready for it or not, such open wireless access is how the whole thing will have to work for it to avoid ultimately being no more significant than Compuserve or the old Prodigy – which were important but couldn’t really last in the face of the internet. But it’s also pretty cool that the guy in London is using Web Stalker as his network mapping system. Web Stalker was an art project. An award winning art project – and very cool, if inscrutable. What I like about it is that it reaches back to an earlier era on the web – when people were still getting used to browsers in the first place, Web Stalker came along as an alternate browser, deconstructing an idea that had barely taken root in the public consciousness. Kind of like the wireless project itself.
! Willing to sell people down the river in the name of a free market. Jerks.
