Blogjects

Blogjects are an interesting concept somewhat related to my previous post.

Blogjects is a neologism short for "Objects that Blog." The term was coined by Julian Bleecker to denote objects that tell the world about their experience, and also react to comments or messages left to them. Julian has a nice paper that sums the subject; see "A Manifesto for Networked Objects: Cohabiting with Pigeons, Arphids and Aibos in the Internet of things". On top of the blogging characteristic, Julian says Blogjects manifest three (rudimentary) characteristics :

• They track and trace where they are and where they've been.
• They maintain histories about their experiences.
• They have some form of agency; they can participate, stir up action, and show some form of autonomy.

Julian then takes this toward the idea of "things" that blog. He describes an example done by Beatriz Da Costa using pigeons that were equipped with GPSs, air pollution sensors, and wireless communications, mashed up with a map service to track air quality.

The reason I am telling you about this, however, is that if we think about the characteristics above and the EDA-enhanced SOA mentioned in my previous post, you can see that there are distinct similarities.

The services concept in the previous post has services that "blog" their state, know their history and have increased autonomy , and manifest the participation and action taking characteristics mentioned above. I think that is an interesting approach to take when you think about your publication contract for a service.

By the way, if you want to make your objects literally blog, take a look at RSSBus which, as its name implies, is a service bus implementation that utilize RSS.

Posted by Arnon Rotem-Gal-Oz at 05:26 PM  Permalink