Off the Top: Museum Entries
Showing posts: 1-7 of 7 total posts
Musee d’Orsay and the Three Mixed-media Arabs
I swear I have written about this before, well I have, but just in my notes going way back.
It took James asking about Museum memories for this IndieWeb Carnival March 2026 to get this out. James asked about museum memories and I have many (I may link a list of them which I may write on) and there were at least four that throw me and get me lost in a good way. One of these is this…
Musee d’Orsay and Three Travelers
In 1987 I had my first trip to Paris and was told by many I needed to go to the Musée d’Orsay and many had suggestions of what I must see. The expanse of the museum in an amazing spacious former train station is a gem of a work in and of itself. The stone and light play wonderfully in the space. As we started out for the museum we had to work around Le Tour de Francethat was racing into Paris that morning, it was great to see it. But, arriving in the museum I couldn’t remember what I “should see”.
Toward the end of the main room there were three sculpture busts that called me over. It was three mixed media pieces by Charles Henri Joseph Cordier that were listed together as The Three Arabs (Algerians). Each was a bronze face with alabaster hats and clothing that were moved by the North African breezes. But, one of the three really caused me to pause, consider, and think. It was the Arabe d’El Aghouat en burnous - Charles Henri Joseph Cordier | Musée d’Orsay who had an alabaster robe with hood that went around his bronze face and head.
Part of what struck me was the movement of the alabaster cloth. But, with the cloaked sculpture and a hood, I couldn’t sort out how the hood, face, and head worked. Each angle and time I’d look I was see another detail of the sculpture that drew me in and distracted me from the static mechanics of how it was done. Whomever I’m with often nudges me onward, but my mind is stuck and enrapt with the hooded in hard alabaster bronze face that seems to have the alabaster moving freely like cloth captured and frozen in an instance (yet crafted over much time).
The Returns
I have been back to the Musee d’Orsay three to five times since. With each visit I wander around a little, usually making sure to also see the sub-set of Monet’s studies of light of the West Facade of the Cathedral of Rouen up on the fifth floor. But, I first make sure the three alabaster and bronze sculptures are still there. Early in the visit I will make my way to the three sculptures and take them in anew again. Then I get drawn into the how the hood, head, and face work. The head looks full or mostly full.
This minor mystery to me will still be with me for years between visits. I run into people who are fans of Musee d’Orsay (but, who isn’t) and want to talk about the three Arabs, but nobody I’ve met seems to know they exist. I am so grateful to the museum to have these sculptures on their site, but also Google Maps has them in the 3D exploration of the museum. When others have said they did not see or didn’t notice these sculptures I have to go and check it wasn’t some personal mirage of my own, and it isn’t. But, the mystery of the hood is still real to me. My inspection of the mystery also has me (and sometimes my museum companion for the trip) a little concerned that a guard has flagged me for the close inspection from all angles with fear I am prepping to steal it.
When I am there and taking in the three pieces I am usually the only one around it looking at them for anything more than a few seconds or passing glance. It feels like they are hidden in plain sight.
The Others
The other two pieces are also really well done and I do feel like I have neglected them each visit. Homme du Soudan en costume algérien - Charles Henri Joseph Cordier | Musée d’Orsay is one that the museum site has a decent back story about the work and the artist. He has a strong pose and looks quite determined.
The other is Femme des colonies - Charles Henri Joseph Cordier | Musée d’Orsay and the bronze has more details with an under garment under the alabaster robe, and also has a piece of sturdy jewelry on her upper arm. Her hair stands out with is braiding and spikes. Her stance is mostly strong and confident, with a serious dose of “I’m over it” and taking a break.
These two pieces and the hooded one all do great justice capturing humanity and a moment in time, with more than an essence of being. In these works the museum as brought in everything but the breath of humanity in its glory.
Time to Notice
These pieces stand out to me and I wish others would see them too and be struck by them in the same, or similar, manner. But, I know they are actually there and amazing to someone as others walk by not giving much notice of any kind.
More…
I have more than 30 notes on memories of museums that I’ve been fleshing out a little. I may post the full list and sketch more out with words over time. There are three more museum piece I hope to write in the near future. There is also a piece about cities as museums I really want to finish framing and wrap up its writing.
Weeknote - 15 March 2026
I thought this week was going to fully turn the corner on a cycle of sinus tears, light infection, better, and then start it over again. It has been messing with sleep and having a clear head. I’m hoping thing are sorted.
Am I back posting weeknotes regularly? I love reading other people’s weeknotes and have a handful of favorites. I also miss getting things of interest shared out somewhat regularly.
Watched
Mission Impossible is Sort of Wachable
The tail end of last week I watched what I thought was the last (latest) installment, Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One - Wikipedia. I started watching late and I hadn’t looked at the length before I started. It was decent and enjoyable. I found it to be one of the better of the Mission Impossible series. I really liked the first movie and some along the way I have found to be decent, but some are a slog. I enjoy the travel and some of the film production, but the scripts are think and acting meh (I really am not a fan of Tom Cruise). But this 7th in the series was decent entertainment. As it ended I realized there was the actual “final” installment and given I thought the 7th was enjoyable there may be hope. I was not right, it was a slog with story segments far too long and with that there were logical gaps.
Seven Dials is Rewachable
Later in the week there was a quiet evening and I needed a break and opted for Agatha Christie’s Seven Dials - Wikipedia on Watch Agatha Christie’s Seven Dials | Netflix Official Site. I wasn’t expecting much as one of the Agatha Christie shows that Netflix had done in the last few years was not really watchable. Seven Dials was more than watchable, I found it to be quite good and a good interpretation. The Seven Dials is a Agatha Christie mystery that leans into a serious nod to P. G. Wodehouse, which I found to be well done (as well is something I was in need of). The main characters were really enjoyable.
Work
Search Me
I did a little tweaking around blog search for here, but not fully pulled it into this blog. It is sitting the Search from the Lab for vanderwal.net. I updated the database engine and switched to InnoDB to get search for 3 letter words and larger working.
I then had the issue of old blog entries where I didn’t have a title and the title is what I make linkable from search. I thought I only had a few handfuls of posts that lacked titles, but it was a few hundred. While adding titles is a good background repetitive task, I moved to adding a permalink under the body of the post snippet in the search results, but also added the post ID as a proxy header to give some consistency.
Category Tweaking
Through searching my posts across 25 years I would click to read a post and go to click a category that I believed would take me to other related content, I found I had categories missing. I added in about 5 or 6 categories and went back and searched and added the categories to posts.
Personal InfoCloud Posts
I have a few posts for the Personal InfoCloud site brewing. There are many things I have thought I have posted there over the years that are just written out in my notes and not edited nor posted. I have one I’m reworking a little.
I have also been going back through many Model of Attraction focussed posts and ones around the InfoClouds (Personal, Local, Global, and External) and sorting out what is posted and not. Related is sorting out what posts I have relate to the roughly 100 Complexity Lenses (at the top level - has also used Social Lenses as its main label in the past, but there is so much more in there than social) and the more than 1,500 nodes in all.
I also have a few posts around software development and product development around subjects that people, teams, and organizations seem to be continually missing or tripped up by.
General Posts
I posted the other day about Adding a Museum Category - Off the Top - vanderwal.net in relation to the IndieWeb Carnival - IndieWeb that James is running this month on museum memories - IndieWeb Carnival March 2026: Museum memories | James’ Coffee Blog. When James mentioned this a while back I was thinking I had a couple or small few museum memories I could post, but started a short list. That list turned into more than 30. There may be more than one post for sure. It may be a series or collection (hence added the category). But, I also have some broader theme posts that are growing on the subject.
My blogfodder list is rather long. But, modifications I’ve made to my workflow and blog management process in Obsidian
(I’ve been using it to sit over my nearly 30 years of text and markdown notes for the last 6 years and finding it really valuable) are making it better to get notes moved to blogfodder, and honed enough to post.
Productivity
Going Back to Bartender for Menu Bar Management for a Bit
I’ve been using Ice for my menu bar management on my MacBook Pro M4 since Bartender was sold and became questionable. Ice has not been updated since macOS 26 has been out (I don’t want anything Liquid Glass added) and with many apps getting a bit unstable on macOS 26 (particularly if they convert to Liquid Glass) and I’m trying to get things sorted.
I saw Bartender 6 had some recent updates and listing of changes and are now being more transparent. I also saw a quite reasonable upgrade price so went for a test of it and did the upgrade. It has been good and not all that different from Ice, but it doesn’t have the small bugs Ice had with the hidden menu bar displaying in odd locations under the menu bar.
Grammar Checking
Trying Harper for Grammar Checking
I stumbled onto and have tried Harper: The Private Grammar Checker, a medium capability grammar checker for English. It has an [[Obsidian plug-in]], which I tried. I realized running a grammar checker on my rough notes isn’t a great match for that part of my workflow. It is easy to flip on an off in Obsidian and often notes turn into something more and that is where Harper may provide assistance. Harper is OpenSource and available on GitHub as well, which means I can run it through DeepWiki to get a decent overview of Harper - Automattic/harper - DeepWiki.
Often my writing and planning starts as rough notes in Obsidian. Since everything is in markdown and markdown is great example of Small Apps Loosely Joined where the file can be picked up in various different applications and use the apps to their best. I pick up the note and initial rough pass in iA Writer to flesh things out more. iA Writer has some light grammar checking and in prep sharing the writing out I use Marked 2, which also has some grammar checking. I’ve been looking for something with a little more assistance. I’m going to try Harper in some other of its options.
In grad school I and for long after I used Grammatik as part of WordPerfect and I really liked both and miss both. Grammarly has never fully been a fit for me and with its recent issues it still isn’t going to be part of my consideration. I’m not a fan of AI involved in my writing process.
I Have Webmentions Working
I have had a partial setup for Webmentions for a few years. I have had getting it properly sorted on my to do list for a few years. In the last week ArtLung ~ Joe Crawford was on a call and started asking questions about it and two or three questions and adding one element to my headers completed the cycle. I now have webmentions enabled, but I receive them in my RSS feeds and am not (likely may not) exposing them.
I Have Webmentions Out Going working with Omnibear
A month or two back I joined a call to look at updates and testing for Omnibear, mostly to learn more about it. But, in about an hour i was running Omnibear as an extension in Firefox and I’m authenticating through my Micro.blog account and site as the foundation for sending replies to others through Webmetions. I really like Omnibear as it shows if a site has enabled to receive a webmention and allows comments, bookmarks, and favorites. Having this in the sidebar (well sidebar in my Zen browser where I use it most) is really nice.
Adding a Museum Category
A couple of things hit a confluence around museums in the past couple weeks. One is I was searching for a post (which I hadn’t written and therefore not posted) about the Musée d’Orsay and one of my favorite set of artworks. I also was searching for Marmottan – Monet Museum — Musée Marmottan Monet on my site to see if I had captured it somewhere (I hadn’t).
IndieWeb Carnival for March is Museums
The other force (it turns out) is the https://indieweb.org/IndieWeb_Carnival for March, that James’ Coffee Blog is running is focused on museums (IndieWeb Carnival March 2026: Museum memories | James’ Coffee Blog). I thought this would be a great way to capture the handful of museums I have strong fond memories of.
It turns out, I think I have strong fond memories or most museums and I have been to quite a few. I thought I may have a quick rundown, but then it turned into a list. If (more like when) I post them it will likely be a series. But, I also realized I don’t have a museum category, so that has been added. Doing a search I’ve added it to older posts where it is appropriate.
Museums are Part of the Social Fabric for Me
When James first mentioned his Carnival subject of museums I really liked it. I was initially only thinking of art museums, but quickly got to all the other museums I’ve gone to and enjoy. Museums are like fully immersive and in person non-fiction books. You can see (sometimes touch) and experience being in the presence with an object, but also find out background and context.
Cities that have and respect their history are much akin to museums. In Lyon I’d walk up a road most days and touch the stone wall built by the Romans in 300AD. In that quiet walk my mind would wander and think of all of those that had walked that road and touched that stone on their walks over 1700 years prior.
In Oxford a pub I’d occasionally go to to meet friend and have a pint was set up against the city wall built in 1000 to 1100AD. Who else had leaned against that wall while talking with friends and colleagues and what were they talking about.
My son over the past couple years as he has travelled will text and ask, “Dad, what is the oldest thing you’ve touched?” The wall in Lyon was the oldest thing I’ve touched, I would tell him. Then he would tell me a building or wall he touched and how old it was. When he was in Istanbul his first day he took a picture of an obelisk in the middle of a small traffic circle that was quiet when he took the picture. I sorted out where he was and what it was and it was from 3000BCE and originally from Egypt, but he said he didn’t touch it. We chatted about The ruins on the Asian side of Istanbul and many of the very old buildings and artifacts all around him (he was staying pretty much right on the old Hippodrome). But, he popped up with a picture of something from 5000BCE that he touched.
The city and culture cares about its past and broad and mixed past. A city, much like a museum can provide living moments of context and cultural understanding. It shares what a culture and society cares about.
Museums, whether art or artifacts provide a living fabric of what ties and weaves us all together.
Folksonomy Provides 70 Percent More Terms Than Taxonomy
While at the WWW Conference in Banff for the Tagging and Metadata for Social Information Organization Workshop and was chatting with Jennifer Trant about folksonomies validating and identifying gaps in taxonomy. She pointed out that at least 70% of the tags terms people submitted in Steve Museum were not in the taxonomy after cleaning-up the contributions for misspellings and errant terms. The formal paper indicates (linked to in her blog post on the research more steve ... tagger prototype preliminary analysis) the percentage may even be higher, but 70% is a comfortable and conservative number.
Is 70% New Terms from Folksonomy Tagging Normal?
In my discussion with enterprise organizations and other clients that are looking to evaluate their existing tagging services, have been finding 30 percent to nearly 70 percent of the terms used in tagging are not in their taxonomy. One chat with a firm who had just completed updating their taxonomy (second round) for their intranet found the social bookmarking tool on their intranet turned up nearly 45 percent new or unaccounted for terms. This firm knew they were not capturing all possibilities with their taxonomy update, but did not realize their was that large of a gap. In building their taxonomy they had harvested the search terms and had used tools that analyzed all the content on their intranet and offered the terms up. What they found in the folksonomy were common synonyms that were not used in search nor were in their content. They found vernacular, terms that were not official for their organization (sometimes competitors trademarked brand names), emergent terms, and some misunderstandings of what documents were.
In other informal talks these stories are not uncommon. It is not that the taxonomies are poorly done, but vast resources are needed to capture all the variants in traditional ways. A line needs to be drawn somewhere.
Comfort in Not Finding Information
The difference in the taxonomy or other formal categorization structure and what people actually call things (as expressed in bookmarking the item to make it easy to refind the item) is normally above 30 percent. But, what organization is comfortable with that level of inefficiency at the low end? What about 70 percent of an organization s information, documents, and media not being easily found by how people think of it?
I have yet to find any organization, be it enterprise or non-profit that is comfortable with that type of inefficiency on their intranet or internet. The good part is the cost is relatively low for capturing what people actually call things by using a social bookmarking tool or other folksonomy related tool. The analysis and making use of what is found in a folksonomy is the same cost of as building a taxonomy, but a large part of the resource intensive work is done in the folksonomy through data capture. The skills needed to build understanding from a folksonomy will lean a little more on the analytical and quantitative skills side than the traditional taxonomy development. This is due to the volume of information supplied can be orders of magnitude higher than the volume of research using traditional methods.
Design Engaged and Symposium on Social Architecture
I got back home late Tuesday night from Design Engaged in Berlin and Symposium on Social Architecture in Cambridge, Massachusetts at Harvard. I had a deadline to meet by midnight Tuesday. Much of Wednesday was spent unbolding e-mail and getting essential replies out (more of this to do today) and unbolding my feed aggregator (1500+ things). I also spent time posting photos of the trip to Berlin (currently at 216 photos, possibly a few untagged).
Design Engaged
Design Engaged was somewhat different from last year's event in Amsterdam. It was still interacting with many of my favorite people, but it was a little larger, in a new space, in a new city (one I was not familiar with), and had a larger representation of women. All of these turned out good, but I felt a little more disconnected. The disconnection I think was attributable to an unfamiliar city, staying at a hotel away from where the sessions were, and not having most of the people staying at the same hotel. I tended to stick with those staying at my hotel, which was good for those relationships. But, part of this was tied to my unfamiliarity with the city.
This unfamiliarity changed for the better and I have learned something about myself, and that is all good. The unfamiliarity shifted to familiarity. I got to know some incredible people and spend time with people I knew, but now know much better. I got to know Berlin. I have not been to a completely new city that I had time alone in quite a while (Brussels last month was new to me, but I was with a large group I had become familiar with, I all were staying in the same hotel, and I had very little interaction with the city itself). My first impression of Berlin was good, nothing more and nothing less. This was formed on an outing to Potsdamerplaz and walking back through Mitte.
Part of the Design Engaged experience is interacting with the city. A group of us headed out to Friedrichshain, which was part of East Berlin and is not being torn up and made western to the degree that Mitte or Alexanderplaz have been and are going through. This was the perfect outing for me as I really wanted to understand East Berlin or get a flavor of what pre-unified Berlin was like. I was interested in the Soviet style architecture and the working neighborhoods. Why? They are something I do not understand and had not experienced. I was utterly thrilled with our exploration of the area, both on our own and with a local who life is in that neighborhood.
I also learned a fair amount about myself on the Berlin part of the trip. I use various supports to explore that which is new. I use friends to guide in new surroundings and meet new people. Familiar surroundings to best embrace new people and expand my knowledge of the surroundings. I learned that having much new causes me to fall into an observation mode and a little less interactive. There are people I really wanted to get to know better and spend more time with. I tended to spend time with the people I already know well, in part to catch-up and get to know better. I also spent a lot of transit time trying to take in as much of my surroundings as possible. Understanding the lay of the land, the flavor of the neighborhood, trying to glimpse what the neighborhood was, what that neighborhood is becoming, and the expression of the people who live in and move through that area. The architecture, design layers (planned and emergent layers -- painted and overlayed), traffic patterns, lines of sight, etc. are all important components to understanding the people, their interests, and indicators of importance. Digging through the international layers (Starbucks (particularly behind the Brandenburg Gates is problematic), Duncan Doughnuts, American brand advertising, and global mass produced products), which in my opinion are disruptive to the local culture.
After returning home I know I have a much better understanding of Berlin and it is a city I would love to return to so to spend more time and explore. Now that I have a foundation of understanding I am ready to drink in more. I also realized that observation limited my getting to know others better than I would have liked. Ever single person at Design Engaged this year was utterly fantastic. It is a very special group of people. There are no egos. There are no agendas. There are people who love sharing, learning, embracing, and exploring. This is something very special and something very different from most any other gathering. Part of it is the event is not about certainty, but exploration, asking questions, listening, and growing all in a shared experience. Unfortunately I am more ready to engage others and interact now that I am home, but hopefully there will be more time.
Symposium on Social Architecture
Counter to the Design Engaged the Symposium on Social Architecture was in a somewhat familiar place, but I only knew a few people prior. I knew many from digital interaction, but personal "in place" interactions were limited. There were more people who knew of me, than I knew of prior. I was continually having to put people in context of digital and idea spaces (some of this is now connecting). I had somewhat slept much of the journey from Berlin to Boston (transferring in Washington, DC) so I was not really dealing with jet lag. On the first night there was a reception at the Harvard Faculty Club and I met many fantastic people. I noticed there was a fair amount of clustering by gender, which was bothersome as there were a few women I wanted to chat with, but I found some very good discussions in the men's clusters and did not break free. There are many women whose work I find insanely helpful and wanted to say thanks and engage in some longer conversations.
The symposium was utterly fantastic. Every session had something I really enjoyed and there was a lot of reassurance of my own understandings and directions. I am not as fully engaged in the social software realm as I would like as it is an insanely important component of how we do things on the internet and it is growing ever more important. Much of my work discusses the Local InfoCloud as an intersection with the Personal Infocloud.
I have a lot of notes from the day (but more complete notes will be expressed in a later posting). I heard a lot of mention of local (closeness drawn through interconnection in social contexts), which was a reinforcement of my understanding as well as the language (or problems with the language) I have been dealing with at times. I heard a lot of discussion of all current social software is simple software, as it is easy to understand what the value is and the barrier to entry is a relatively painless in comparison to the reward received in the perceived value. Many also discussed building tools that got out of the way, they just let people interact. This was explicitly stated by Tina Sharkey of AOL, which made me very happy as it was a large social portal that expressed they understood what to do and have done it. It is not the tool that is important, so much as it is the social interactions that are the key. The tools should be a platform for connecting and communicating not for controlling.
I also met one of the people responsible for Steve, The Art Museum Community Cataloging Project, which could be the most important folksonomy and tagging endeavor that is ongoing. The importance is in part their work, but the research into tagging and folksonomy is insanely helpful and seems to be the best work out there at the moment. The work proves the strong positive significance that tagging and folksonomy plays in connecting people to objects and information. Having the world framed in a language or vocabulary is incredibly helpful and that is not often a result of formal taxonomies as they tend to optimize toward the norms and not embrace the edges. I will be writing about Steve more in the future, but I was so excited to meet somebody tied to the project so I could have more conversations and learn what they have found to be helpful and not so helpful.
The panel on politics and social software, particularly in relation to Katrina, was great. It highlighted the problems with politicians and their lack of understanding technology that could better connect them to their constituents, but also technology that could better enable solutions and resolution for their constituencies. I was completely moved by this panel.
The piece I had disappointment in was the closing. Er, the closing was Stowe Boyd interviewing me about what I found of interest from the day and what I would take home. Stowe asked the perfect questions, but I learned something about myself, I framed my responses literally and too personally. I let myself down in the responses as they were too general and did not capture the whole of what I got from the day nor the strong themes I noted. I was still taking in the politics panel and re-digesting the day based on that context. When I get a new perspective or new information I run the world I perceive through that lens and adjust accordingly and then emerge with a slightly reshaped or more inclusive framework. I think my closing remarks were poor, because I was integrating the last panel into my understandings. The rest of the day went largely as I expected, but the wonderful politics panel disrupted me in a positive manner. I apologize for the poor closing observations. For me it was the poorest part of a great event.
Removing the Stench from Mobile Information
Standing in Amsterdam in front of the Dam, I was taking in the remnants of a memorial to Theodore van Gogh (including poetry to Theo). While absorbing what was in front of me, I had a couple people ask me what the flowers and sayings were about. I roughly explained the street murder of Theo van Gogh.
While I was at the Design Engaged conference listening to presentations about mobile information and location-based information I thought a lot about the moment at the Dam. I thought about adding information to the Dam in an electronic means. If one were standing at the Dam you could get a history of the Dam placed by the City of Amsterdam or a historical society. You could get a timeline of memorials and major events at the Dam. You could also get every human annotation.
Would we want every annotation? That question kept running reoccurring and still does. How would one dig through all the digital markings? The scent of information could become the "stench of information" very quickly. Would all messages even be friendly, would they contain viruses? Locations would need their own Google search to find the relevant pieces of information. This would all be done on a mobile phone, those lovely creatures with their still developing processors.
As we move to a world where we can access information by location and in some cases access the information by short range radio signals or touching our devices there needs to be an easy to accept these messages. The messaging needs some predictive understanding on our mobiles or some preparsing of content and messaging done remotely (more on remote access farther down).
If was are going to have some patterning tools built in our mobiles what information would they need to base predictions? It seems the pieces that could make it work are based on trust, value, context, where, time, action, and message pattern. Some of this predictive nature will need some processing power on the mobile or a connection to a service that can provide the muscle to predict based on the following metadata assets of the message.
Trust is based on who left the message and whether you know this person or not. If the person is known do you trust them? This could need an ensured name identification, which could be mobile number, their tagging name crossed with some sort of key that proves the identity, or some combination of known and secure metadata items. It would also be good to have a means to identify the contributor as the (or an) official maintainer of the location (a museum curator annotating galleries in a large museum is one instance). Some trusted social tool could do some predicting of the person's worthiness to us also. The social tools would have to be better than most of today's variants of social networking tools as they do not have the capability for us to have a close friend, but not really like or trust their circle(s) of friends. It would be a good first pass to go through our own list of trusted people and accept a message left by any one of these people. Based on our liking or disliking of the message a rating would be associated with this person to be used over time.
Value is a measure of the worthiness of the information, normally based on the source of the message. Should the person who left the message have a high ranking of content value it could be predicted that the message before us is of high value. If these are message that have been reviews of restaurants and we have liked RacerX previous reviews we found in five other cities and they just gave the restaurant we are in front of a solid review that meets our interests. Does RacerX have all the same interests?
Context is a difficult predictive pattern as there are many contextual elements such as mood, weather, what the information relates to (restaurant reviews, movie reviews, tour recommendations, etc.). Can we set our mood and the weather when predicting our interest in a message. Is our mood always the same in certain locations?
Where we are is more important than location. Yes, do we know where we are? Are we lost? Are we comfortable where we are? These are important questions that may help be a predictor that are somewhat based on our location. Or location is the physical space we occupy, but how we feel about that spot or what is around us at that spot may trigger our desire to not accept a location-based message. Some of us feel very comfortable and grounded in any Chinatown anywhere around the globe and we seek them out in any new city. Knowing that we are in or bordering on a red-light district may trigger a predictive nature that would turn off all location-based messages. Again these are all personal to us and our preferences. Do our preferences stay constant over time?
Time has two variables on two planes. The first plane is our own time variables while the other relates to the time of the messages. One variable is the current moment and the other is historical time series. The current moment may be important to us if it is early morning and we enjoy exploring in the early morning and want to receive information that will augment our explorative nature. Current messages may be more important than historical messages to us. The other variable of historical time and how we treat the past. Some of us want all of our information to be of equal value, while others will want the most current decisions to have a stronger weight so that new events can keep information flowing that is most attune to our current interests and desires. We may have received a virus from one of our recent messages and want to change our patterns of acceptance to reflect our new cautionary nature. We may want to limit how far back we want to read messages.
Action is a very important variable to follow when the possibility of malicious code can damage our mobile or the information we have stored in the mobile or associated with that mobile. Is the item we are about to receive trigger some action on our device or is is a static docile message. Do we want to load active messages into a sandbox on our mobile so the could not infect anything else? Or, do we want to accept the active messages if they meet certain other criteria.
Lastly, message pattern involved the actual content of the message and would predict if we would want to read the information if it is identical or similar to other messages, think attention.xml. If the Dam has 350 messages similar to "I am standing at the Dam" I think we may want to limit that to ones that meet some other criteria or to just one, if we had the option. Do we have predictors that are based on the language patterns in messages? Does our circle of trusted message writers always have the same spellings for certain wordz?
All of these variables could lead to a tight predictive pattern that eases the information that we access. The big question is how is all of this built into a predictive system that works for us the moment we get our mobile device and start using the predictive services? Do we have a questionnaire we fill out that creates our initial settings? Will new phones have ranking buttons for messages and calls (nice to rank calls we received so that our mobile would put certain calls directly into voice mail) so it is an easier interface to set our preferences and patterns.
Getting back to remote access to location-based information seems, for me, to provide some excellent benefits. There are two benefits I see related to setting our predictive patterns. The first is remote access to information could be done through a more interactive device than our mobile. Reading and ranking information from a desktop on a network or a laptop on WiFi could allow us to get through more information more quickly. The second benefit is helping us plan and learn from the location-based information prior to our going to that location so we could absorb the surroundings, like a museum or important architecture, with minimal local interaction with the information. Just think if we could have had our predictive service parse through 350 messages that are located at the Dam and we previews the messages remotely and flagged four that could have interest to us while we are standing at the Dam. That could be the sweet smell of information.