Open Access News

The Internet of Things has evolved into a nascent conceptual framework for understanding how physical objects, once networked and imbued with informatic capabilities, will occupy space and occupy themselves in a world in which things were once quite passive. This paper describes the Internet of Things as more than a world of RFID tags and networked sensors. Once “Things” are connected to the Internet, they can only but become enrolled as active, worldly participants by knitting together, facilitating and contributing to networks of social exchange and discourse, and rearranging the rules of occupancy and patterns of mobility within the physical world. “Things” in the pervasive Internet, will become first-class citizens with which we will interact and communicate. Things will have to be taken into account as they assume the role of socially relevant actors and strong-willed agents that create social capital and reconfigure the ways in which we live within and move about physical space. To distinguish the instrumental character of “things” connected to the Internet from “things” participating within the Internet of social networks, I use the neologism “Blogject” — ‘objects that blog.’...[B]logjects in the near-future will participate in the whole meaning-making apparatus that is now the social web, and that is becoming the "Internet of Things." The most peculiar characteristic of Blogjects is that they participate in the exchange of ideas. Blogjects don’t just publish, they circulate conversations. Not with some sort of artificial intelligence engine or other speculative high-tech wizardry. Blogjects become first-class a-list producers of conversations in the same way that human bloggers do — by starting, maintaining and being critical attractors in conversations around topics that have relevance and meaning to others who have a stake in that discussion....A Blogject can start a conversation with something as simple as an aggregation of levels of pollutants in groundwater. If this conversation is maintained and made consequential through hourly RSS feeds and visualizations of that same routine data, this Blogject is going to get some trackback.

Comment. I didn't blog this article because it's about OA. I blogged it for what the underlying idea can do for OA. I see this potential falling into two categories.

1. Blogjects can help monitor OA progress. Imagine OA repositories blogging their deposits --either through raw tallies, showing their growth, or through metadata about the new articles themselves, showing what's going in. Imagine OA repository registries or directories (like OpenDOAR and ROAR) blogging the world growth in repository deposits, broken down by country and discipline. Imagine OA journals blogging their new TOCs. Imagine book-digitizing projects blogging their progress. Few of these feeds would be directly interesting to human readers. But they could be inputs to software monitors or feed aggregates that give human readers an instant and up-to-date overview, something like OA by the numbers but not limited to numbers, not confined to a small number of sources, and not slowed the need for human updates. (Of course the same technology could tell us about non-OA research but here I'm focusing on what it could do for OA.)

2. Blogjects can help disseminate OA data about anything. Some scientists want to keep their data to themselves until they publish, but others are willing to (sometimes compelled to) share their data in real time as it is generated. For scientists in the second camp, blogjects could feed data to all who care to plug in and process it. Imagine blogjects feeding weather and pollution data, geospatial data, census data, crime data, economic data. Because blogject feeds automatically contain their own histories, they lend themselves just as much to longitudinal studies as to instanteous sampling. In many of these areas we have the equivalent today --but for the XML mark-up and standardization of the feeds, which permit RSS, mash-ups, aggregations, trackbacks, pings, and the other information connectors introduced with the blogosphere. One of the many network nodes monitoring a blogject data stream could be a LOCKSS system, capturing it for long-term preservation. Blogjects could not only accelerate research, but inform actions (weather prediction, pollution control, investment) and improve policy-making in all areas that depend on real-time open-access data feeds.