inignoct wrote:
] sure. like i said, and that's it's only technological
] advancement over the cuecat.

In the sense that the automobile is only technological advancement over the horse and carriage.

] that could be cool, but i think GPS will become small and
] cheap enough, soon enough, that this tech won't stick.

Thats certainly a possibility, but only time will tell. One advantage that this has over the GPS model is that it can be attached to things which tend to change their location.

] the article was super lite on info all in all... i wonder how
] much data a given watermark can represent,

Watermarks contain numbers which are indexes into an online database which can contain as much information as you want.

] and i wonder just
] how it's made not too visible to consumers, but identifiable
] by software processing a low rez photo.

In this case by making color changes that are inperceptible to the naked eye but picked up by your CCD. Most audio and photographic watermarks are designed to survive extremely lossy data conversions without being perceptible.

] I also wonder how much you'll have to pay for both the
] service and the licence to create watermarks of your own...

I think *I* can create a service which does this. I'll be looking into it. Expect it to be inexpensive. The encoding technology you need is already in photoshop. I need to look into how much the decoding technology costs.

] better feel for why it's a good thing to be able to tag the
] earth with URLs, especially when it's a literal, physical,
] nonbiodegradable tag, potenetially many of them, all over
] everything.

Well, my example was just that. In most cases we already have these tags all over the place. Everything is permiated with ads. I'm not really suggesting that people sticker up the whole planet. I think it would be neat to play with, but its not scalable. If we really want this stuff everywhere then there ought to be a well known watermark and centrally assigned numbers like the UPC bar code system. That way anyone can build a database off of the index numbers. There'll be an offcial system that gives you url resolutions, but you can query the tags against other systems which might offer different kinds of information.

] while a ways off, a better solution is to tag digital
] resources with the geographical location (or region, or state,
] or whatever) relevant to them (if any). So, if you want to
] know things about "here", whereever you are, let the gps
] inform the network of what "here" is, tell it what degree of
] specificity you want (again, regional, state, city, or
] right-fucking-here-where-im-standing) and get back results
] from the network of documents relevant to your location.

I definately want this too. Wanted it for a while now. I'm just excited about this technology because its a way that I can have something sort of like the GPS utopia, but I can have it right now.

RE: Watermarks connect IRL objects to the web...