Sensors, games, recession indicators, and book prep in today’s four short links:
- New Networks Take Nature’s Pulse – an article in Christian Science Monitor about sensor networks. Makezine pointed out that hobbyists are building low-cost versions with Arduinos. Sensor networks are part of the “Web meets World” change we’re in, where the Web ceases to be something you sit down to interact with. Instead, our everyday life will inform and be informed by the Web in ways we won’t realize.
- Interactive Fiction Goes to Market – a company, Textfyre is readying new text adventure games (“interactive fiction”) for the iPhone market. I dream of a day when the text adventure world becomes lucrative again (the tools like Inform are divine) but I can’t help think that the iPhone is the wrong platform. The make-believe keyboard makes text entry such a chore that it would seem to count against text adventures. I hope and wish that I am proven wrong and some day the CEO of Textfyre buys the house next to me just so he can build a huge mansion and paint on the walls “Nat Torkington thought the iPhone was the wrong platform for text adventures”.
- You Know It’s a Recession When More People Search for Coupons Than Britney Spears – interesting tidbit from Bo Cowgill, who runs Google’s internal prediction market. His blog is full of fascinating pointers to prediction market research. Between him and David Pennock, my prediction market cup runneth over.
- How To Write a Book – Steven Johnson writes, on BoingBoing, how he uses DevonThink to gather and organize his book thoughts and structure before actually sitting down to produce the words. I love reading about the act of literary creation (I have a long shelf of “how to write mystery novel” books that I can almost quote chapter and verse), the way it’s so different for every author yet so the output is so similar.