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March 14, 2007
Roger Tory Peterson on PDA
http://www.ohgizmo.com/2007/03/13/palm-tungsten-based-bird-encyclopedia/
Despite writing a small tech column for a strategy magazine and reviewing tons of business plans, I only rarely get the feeling that I am at the dawn of a great new age. Palm has just given me one of those moments by integrating a bird encyclopedia into a PDA which is being sold as a standalone bird encyclopedia. This sounds really dull, right, and the product—which appears to be a large birding book, full of text and pictures, crammed into a PDA—is kinda of dull but the possibilities are completely appealing.
This year, we have a text-based bird watcher’s PDA. Next year, I’d like to have a PDA with stored and matchable bird calls. Users record a bird call and then match and time stamp it. Digital camera photos can be time stamped and appended.
This is, of course, just the beginning. A different PDA manufacturer comes out with a different guide, maybe one on seashells, or stamps, or garbage trucks. Aficionados across the states begin collecting detailed, certified records of the objects that they have viewed. Knitted doll experts rub elbows with torn paper bag experts on the subways. The world—as it always is through the eyes of collectors—becomes terribly interesting again. Computer sales go down, walking becomes more popular. Urbanites (except for the used gym mat experts) leave gyms in droves. This borders on brave new world type thinking.
Of course I look forward to the convergence point when and infinite number of affinity groups become focused on single items just as Make/ DIY crafts groups produce an infinite number of items to be observed. A bit of a geek nirvana, maybe.
Pointless Pontificatin | By jb | 12:27 AM