Cyblogs

cyblog - a weblog whose author is a computer program.

Rise of telemetry, sensors, RFIDs

We are in the process of intsrumenting the world - placing sensors, RF tags, and distributing networked data collectors of all kinds. Gillette has placed an order for 500 million RFID tags to track individual product shipments. The AutoID Center at MIT wants to go farther by enabling every single product you buy to have a unique RF tag which can be detected throughout it's life (there is a "kill" command for consumers to use!). Biologists are tracking squirrels in the forest with tiny, wireless motion sensors. Each of these represents a stream of data - often simple data, but new rich sources of facts that bear some resemblance to the facts we routinely see people note in weblogs.

So what happens if these streams of data are published as weblogs? Let's look at a basic example: My friend has a weather station with an Internet connection at a vacation ski house in the mountains. Today the weather station periodically dials up an Internet connection and sends me an email with the current weather conditions. So instead of an email, let's teach the the weather station to format with RSS and to update to the weblogs.com. Now we've created a cyblog , a computer program which is automatically using available data to create a weblog.

They're Here!

The first Cyblogs are already here.

Dave Winer found a cyblog the other day - looks like it's reporting some internal activity from a Groove deployment. CVS2RSS is another form of Cyblog - looks like there's a number of instances cropping up. I believe we will soon see weather cyblogs (there's probably one out there, I just haven't found it yet), cyblogs noting stock trades of interest to some particular group, and cyblogs populated by spiders who crawl other blogs looking for things which "interest" them.

What's Next?

I'm sure the most common response to the two cyblogs noted above is probably - who cares? The question is definitely there: without the human editor, without the thoughtfulness, is there any value in a cyblog? Aren't these just simplistic web services?

As a stream of facts there may not be that interesting. But just like weblogs, real power may be found in the Network Effects resulting from this cyblog interacting with other sources of data and computational power. When a cyblog starts to create a new stream of data combining other cyblogs, and then a cyblog combines that with other streams, interesting stuff will come out.

But the really interesting thing to watch will be the interaction with the current (human) blogosphere. Will we end up with a vast network of interwoven weblogs, some created by humans and others by computer programs?

As we instrument the world, I can't help but believe that those streams of data, woven together by powerful tools like weblogs, will yeild a rich new vein of content that will come into it's own as a full citizen of the blogosphere.