I wanted to point to a few posts elsewhere discussing the kirkyan concept. One of the people most interested in the idea is Woody Evans over on the ISHUSH blog. I’ve linked to him previously. He’s been moving the idea closer to where I think it needs to be: the point where information meets physicality (I’ll come back to that in a second).
About a week ago I posted a rather long comment on his blog which he then posted as a separate entry (Link). Soon after I answered some questions he had in a kind of interview. You can read my rambling responses (Link) as well as the important comment I added, but please ignore the “visionary” tag and also know I’m doing my best to remove the phrase “to be honest” from my vocabulary (I have a new respect for developers who answer email interview questions without coming off as complete boobs).
I also wanted to call attention to a post over on the Simulation blog (Link) that got me thinking more in the direction Woody is going. There’s a basic functionality missing in what’s presented in the post, but it led me to an idea of what the first kirkyan could be. To my knowledge it doesn’t exist yet, but it could. Rather than blurt something out the way I did on the SL Future Salon site when I first started talking about this concept, I’m going to try to do some visuals (I really liked how the Applied Dreams “reputation system” presentation was handled). Hopefully that will convey enough of the idea to avoid any confusion.
The kirkyan is completely removed from Wikipedia, it seems. But there is a request for an article on the subject up now, there. Also a request for a definition of the word at Wiktionary…
To me it just comes down to the fact that there was no word that tied the concepts together before “kirkyan” — but now there is, and it’s just unfortunate that it happens to be a ‘neologism’. It’s an important word because it packs important ideas in its letters.
… But I’m wondering if a better way to go about it all might’n’t be to create a kirkyan object, call it a kirkyan, and make it cute and funky and blobby, and techy and gizmody… give it away as a ‘learning object’ to univs and high schoolers… or have them made to order, cad-fabbed from an online order form… okay, this is just brainstorm, pardon now, but : info/mods spread by rfid relay… the fun of the ‘thing’ is that when you get close enough to another of the ‘things’, the things invisibly talk, share code that causes a new physical behavior — a new set of robotic instructions… your ‘thing’ used to avoid blue light — now it avoids yellow light on Thursdays and seeks blue on Mondays… seeks shade all other days, and seeks wi-fi signal for downloading public domain .mp3s of doumbek drumming for an intense period of 5 hours fortnightly… replays song samples when it goes too long without light… Collect Them All!… the behavior is a physical change.
And they’re terribly cute, and they’re useful as flashdrives too. And it taps social networking — you’re sitting on the subway when your kirkyan beeps — it’s made contact with another kirkyan… a great way to meet people… and the kirkyans auto swap the owners’ ‘myspace’ profiles. and so on.
Not an issue that it’s off Wikipedia.
As for fabricating one, that would take some time, some help and some effort. Short of all those at the moment. However, I can mock up something that will communicate the concept in more concrete terms. Simpler than the oil spill idea. Core concept. Closer to the boundary separating information from object. I’ll try to get something done over the next month or two. My life got much busier today.