Urls for things : Dynamic wine labels

This is quite cool… or kindof a taste of things to come maybe

from

It’s a QR code on a wine label – so your cellphone can read it and point you at a website with more information. A really primitive (dare I say it?) early implementation of Augmented Reality… and another example of the Science Fiction Singularity… where we can recognise something that’s actually mind-bogglingly advanced, and only just been invented… as a primitive early stage of something.

This comes from Bruce Stirlingland as part of his Spime-Watch thing… the idea of a Spime (I think) is an artefact that primarily exists in virtual space, and is occasionally precipitated out into a real-world product. Being a virtual thing, it has it’s entire history / designs / bills-of-materials / documentation etc etc online.

I think he’s overcomplicating it… I think that all it is, is giving real-world objects URIs – Unique Resource Identifiers. These then link to various data silos etc on the web. The truth is far scruffier than fiction.

This is what various governments round the world want (especially the British, Oh dear lord yes, they wants it, they wantsss it, they waaaantttsss it) to do with people. They want a unique ID on all people, with associated data trackable, traceable etc.

In many ways it’s not a bad idea, but it shouldn’t be the government that does it – they simply aren’t trustworthy enough – it needs to be open-sourced.

Somehow.

Till, then, chin chin etc.