Pachube facilitates interaction between remote environments, both physical and virtual

Take a look at Pachube at http://community.pachube.com/?q=node/1. Although it seems they are still in the early stages and have not yet achieved widespread acceptance, this is yet another example of how people can collaborate in an area of knowledge that government agencies have tended to dominate in the past. It also raises concerns about privacy and security. But, it seems, if something is possible, someone on the Internet will try it despite those concerns. Note: This was brought to my attention by a friend who is architect/urban planner/artist and has been working on setting up network-based artistic "phenomena" (for lack of a better term). So, for example, he helped create a network of high schools to share what they each saw as the effect of the sun's shadow on their buildings at exactly the same time of day. The students were fascinated by this. I'm not sure if you could call this "performance art", but you could understand why he might see some unusual uses of a service like Pachube. Norm ----------------------- From their website: Pachube is a web service available at http://www.pachube.com that enables people to tag and share real time sensor data from objects, devices and spaces around the world. The key aim is to facilitate interaction between remote environments, both physical and virtual. Apart from enabling direct connections between any two environments, it can also be used to facilitate many-to-many connections: just like a physical "patch bay" (or telephone switchboard) Pachube enables any participating project to "plug-in" to any other participating project in real time so that, for example, buildings, interactive installations or blogs can "talk" and "respond" to each other. Pachube is a little like YouTube, except that, rather than sharing videos, Pachube enables people to monitor and share real time environmental data from sensors that are connected to the internet. Pachube acts between environments, able both to capture input data (from remote sensors) and serve output data (to remote actuators). Connections can be made between any two environments, facilitating even spontaneous or previously unplanned connections. Apart from being used in physical environments, it also enables people to embed this data in web-pages, in effect to "blog" sensor data. Relevant URLs: - http://www.pachube.com/ (the home of Pachube) - http://haque.co.uk/pachube.php (background) - http://eeml.org/ (Extended Environments Markup Language) - http://eeml.org/library/ (EEML library for Processing)