The Talking Tree: Vegetation Does Social Media

Facebooking flora, or what biometric feedback has to do with broadening empathy.

We walk by trees all the time, rarely recognizing them as living beings rather than static objects. But that’s what they are — complex, delicate organisms that respond to their environment, from the weather to pollution to noise level, in ways too subtle for us to notice. If they could speak, what would they say? To find out, Dutch science magazine EOS decided to equip a 100-year-old tree in Brussels with a variety of sensors and devices. The Talking Tree was born. The tree has its own wifi station, sending data from all the different devices to custom software that then analyzes it to extract how the tree feels, eventually translating those feelings into words to be shared across the social web.

Between the ozone meter, light meter, weatherstation, fine dust meter, webcam and microphone, the tree was given a kind of technology-assisted eloquence that allowed it to “comment” on its living circumstances through constant biometric feedback translated into human language. The Talking Tree then shares these sentiments on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. A Flickr stream documents its immediate environment regularly and a SoundCloud set captures its auditory surroundings. (Which reminded us of Diego Stocco’s bonsai symphony.)

Lots of trees in big cities have a hard time due to the pollution. But when you’re walking past a tree that’s sick you don’t always see that there is anything
wrong with it or how he’s experiencing his environment. So, naturally, we got the idea to let the tree talk about how he’s experiencing all this.” ~ Ramin Afshar

The Talking Tree is part of EOS‘s Low Impact Month initiative, rallying for carbon-minimalist living in the month of November. But, more importantly, beneath the cheeky concept of social-media-savvy flora lies a profound provocation of how we relate to other beings, broadening our scope of empathy to encompass complex, sentient species beyond our own.

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SwiftRiver: Intelligence for the Information Age

What humanitarian crisis management has to do with brand monitoring and natural language.

Information management is easily the greatest challenge of the digital age, only intensifying as we go forth. While most of us make do with a careful selection of tools and a handful of trusted content curators, a holistic solution to information overload has been largely missing. Until now. Enter SwiftRiver, a brand new open-source intelligence gathering platform for managing real-time streams of data.

Developed by our friends at Ushahidi, whose platform of crowdsourced crisis information was the single most effective data management platform during the Haiti earthquake, SwiftRiver offers five different web services for validating and filtering real-time information:

• SiLCC is a natural-language processing tool that extracts semantic value from text — essentially, figuring out the human meaning of digital bits
• SULSa adds location context to content, which can be a life-or-death factor when responding to crisis information
• SiCDS reduces the number of duplicates, such as RT’s on Twitter that relay identical information without adding semantic value
• Reverberations measures the influence of content by weighing its popularity as it propagates across the social graph
• River ID scans the other four services to determine what and who is of value to different communities

Swift isn’t about replacing humans — it’s about maximizing their time.” ~ Jon Gosier

What makes SwiftRiver particularly noteworthy is its incredible range applications — from humanitarian crisis management to brand monitoring to political intelligence and beyond. What’s even more valuable is the multi-dimensional, relational way in which it approaches content — because the value of information is rarely absolute but, rather, relative to the context of who we are, what we do, where we live, and what else we know.

We have high hopes for SwiftRiver as the first tangible ray of hope for “curaggregation” — the holy-grail intersection of curation and aggregation. Give it a try.

via White African

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7 Ways to Have More by Owning Less

Inconspicuous consumption, or what lunching ladies have to do with social web karma.

Stuff. We all accumulate it and eventually form all kinds of emotional attachments to it. (Arguably, because the marketing machine of the 20th century has conditioned us to do so.) But digital platforms and cloud-based tools are making it increasingly easy to have all the things we want without actually owning them. Because, as Wired founder and notable futurist Kevin Kelly once put it, “access is better than ownership.” Here are seven services that help shrink your carbon footprint, lighten your economic load and generally liberate you from the shackles of stuff through the power of sharing.

NEIGHBORGOODS

The age of keeping up with the Jonses is over. The time of linking up with them has begin. NeighborGoods is a new platform that allows you to do just that, allowing you to borrow and lend from and to your neighbors rather than buying new stuff. (Remind us please, what happened to that fancy blender you bought and used only twice?) From lawnmowers to bikes to DVD’s, the LA-based startup dubs itself “the Craigslist for borrowing,” allowing you to both save and earn money.

Transparent user ratings, transaction histories and privacy controls make the sharing process simple and safe, while automated calendars and reminders ensure the safe return of loaned items.

Give NeighborGoods a shot by creating a sharing group for your apartment building, campus, office, or reading group — both your wallet and your social life will thank you.

UPDATE: Per the co-founder’s kind comment below, we should clarify that NeighborGoods also allows you to import your Twitter and Facebook friends from the get-go, so you have an instant group to share with.

SNAPGOODS

Similarly to Neighborgoods, SnapGoods allows you to rent, borrow and lend within your community. SnapGoods takes things step further by expanding the notion of “community” not only to your local group — neighborhood, office or apartment building — but to your social graph across the web’s trusted corners. The site features full Facebook and Meetup integration, extending your social circle to the cloud.

You can browse the goods people in your area are lending or take a look at what they need and lend a hand (or a sewing machine, as may be the case) if you’ve got the goods.

LANDSHARE

Growing one’s own produce is every hipster-urbanite’s pipe dream. But the trouble with it is that you have to actually have a place to grow it. And while a pot of cherry tomatoes in your fire escape is better than nothing, it’s hardly anything. Enter Landshare, an innovative platform for connecting aspiring growers with landowners who have the space but don’t use it.

Though currently only available in the U.K., we do hope to see Landshare itself, or at least the concept behind it, spread worldwide soon.

SWAPTREE

swaptree is a simple yet brilliant platform for swapping your media possessions — from books to DVD’s to vinyl — once they’ve run their course in your life as you hunt for the next great thing. Since we first covered swaptree nearly three years ago, the site has facilitated some 1.6 million swaps, saving its users an estimated $10.3 million while reducing their collective carbon footprint by 9.3 million tons.

Inspired by the founders’ moms, whose lunch dates with girlfriends turned into book-swap clubs, swaptree makes sure that the only thing between you and the latest season of 24 is the price of postage.

GIFTFLOW

Most of us are familiar with the concept of regifting. (No disrespect, but the disconnect between good friends and good taste is sometimes astounding.) Luckily, GiftFlow allows you to swap gifts you don’t want for ones other people don’t want but you do. The platform is based on a system of karmic reputation, where your profile shows all you’ve given and taken, building an implicit system of trust through transparency.

So go ahead, grandma. Hit us with your latest sweet but misguided gift. Chances are, there’s someone out there who’d kill for that kitschy music box.

ZIPCAR

We’re big proponents of bikesharing but, to this point, the concept has failed to transcend local implementations. While some cities like Paris, Amsterdam and Denver are fortunate enough to have thriving bikesharing programs, we’re yet to see a single service available across different locations. Until then, we’d have to settle for the next best sharing-based transportation solution: Zipcar, a 24/7, on-demand carsharing service that gives its members flexible access to thousands of cars across the U.S., U.K. and Canada. Zipcar has been around for quite some time and most people are already familiar with it, so we won’t overelaborate, but suffice it to say the service is the most promising solution to reducing both traffic congestion and pollution in cities without reducing the actual number of drivers.

SHARE SOME SUGAR

Lend me some sugar, I am your neighbor. More than an Outkast lyric line, this is the inspiration behind share some sugar — a celebration of neighborliness through the sharing of goods and resources. Much like SnapGoods and NeighborGoods, the service lets you borrow, rent and share stuff within your neighborhood or group of friends

* * *

For more on the culture of shared resources, do watch Rachel Botsman’s excellent TEDxSyndney talk. Her forthcoming book, What’s Mine Is Yours: The Rise of Collaborative Consumption, hits bookstores in two weeks and is an absolute must-read.

UPDATE: Botsman’s book, What’s Mine Is Yours: The Rise of Collaborative Consumption, is now out and landed promptly on our best books in business, life and mind shortlist for 2010.

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it’s a sickness: The Obsession Network

What deviled eggs have to do with Jason Bateman, gay rights and The Beatles.

Obsessions. We all have them. (If you’ve been reading Brain Pickings long enough, you know some of our more esoteric ones include bookshelves, data visualization and David Byrne.) But, historically, obsessions have either been banished to reclusive clubs or shoved under the carpet altogether. No more — it’s a sickness is a bold celebration of obsessions through short tribute films in which people get to, quite simply, geek out about what they’re passionate about.

We believe that no one is ever more interesting than when they talk about what they love. To do your sickness justice is to own it. It is to prove how dedicated and enthralled you are with it. It is to geek out.”

From to Harry Potter to E. E. Cummings to the 80’s, a multitude of obsession groups spanning the serious (gay rights), the necessary (The Beatles) and the tongue-in-cheek (robot uprising) already exist and you can start a new one of your own anytime. Obsessions can be captured in anything from text to image to video, making the platform a Tumblr-like digital scrapbook for your fiercest fixations.

The lounge section features obsession-confessions by celebrities and micro-celebrities, from Jason Bateman’s fixation on classical music (we love you, Jason) to Marisa Tomei’s obsession with hula hoops to Seth Herzog’s devilish lust for deviled eggs.

Beautifully filmed and irreverently candid, the videos are just the kind of thing to put you at ease with your own obsessions by offering a very human angle on famous people’s.

it’s a sickness is part cathartic celebration of our obsessions, part hallmark of the universal need to define and differentiate who we are through what we do and own, part charming zoetrope of human eccentricity.

via

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