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sobriqueOK, so what if there was a portable 'thing' that incorporates the basics of a wireless router, and a lightweight webserver?
A portable module, that allowed someone to ... more or less carry their 'profile' with them, but also act as a more flexible peer to peer communication relay - and ideally each of these ... well, thingies should be able to latch onto a 'real' netlink, to serve as a gateway.
You'd end up with something not entirely dissimilar to the early internet, albeit with somewhat less static routes across it, and allow you to ... well, share much of the same things as people are sharing via stuff like twitter and blogs and stuff, but in a proximity oriented domain. Maybe you share some artwork with everyone in the room, or some kind of informational content - perhaps you do this with GPS co-ordinates and a static 'emplacement' that's tagged with a full entry about that picture on the wall.
Oh, and you'd get more flexibility in net access, as you'd be building a daisy-chain of sorts to the nearest public hotspot. Ideally though, you'd have to incorporate something a little more ... tolerant of outage. But hey, once upon at time, stuff like email was a store and forward protocol - mail servers would relay to each other as and when they could, because 'being online' required a modem and a phone line.
Is this awesome?
A portable module, that allowed someone to ... more or less carry their 'profile' with them, but also act as a more flexible peer to peer communication relay - and ideally each of these ... well, thingies should be able to latch onto a 'real' netlink, to serve as a gateway.
You'd end up with something not entirely dissimilar to the early internet, albeit with somewhat less static routes across it, and allow you to ... well, share much of the same things as people are sharing via stuff like twitter and blogs and stuff, but in a proximity oriented domain. Maybe you share some artwork with everyone in the room, or some kind of informational content - perhaps you do this with GPS co-ordinates and a static 'emplacement' that's tagged with a full entry about that picture on the wall.
Oh, and you'd get more flexibility in net access, as you'd be building a daisy-chain of sorts to the nearest public hotspot. Ideally though, you'd have to incorporate something a little more ... tolerant of outage. But hey, once upon at time, stuff like email was a store and forward protocol - mail servers would relay to each other as and when they could, because 'being online' required a modem and a phone line.
Is this awesome?
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Date: 2009-02-27 12:30 am (UTC)IIRC, there was a plan to introduce solar-powered Wifi relays in street lamps in Africa. While we probably would be better served by wind power or combined wind/solar power, I can see where this would be of benefit. Ah but the council tax implications would put people off wouldn't it?
Mind you, the price for a data centre just dropped big time - imagine a package consisting of a cable link, an open WiFi router, a power strip with SheevaPlugs and some attached terabyte book drives with Cat5e.
So who knows? Maybe the infrastructure is there after all...