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The increasingly inaccurately-named blog of journalist and futurist Chris Taylor. Either the most sporadically brilliant amateur blog, the most brilliantly amateur sporadic blog, or the most amateur sporadic brilliance on the Web since 2001.
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Daily Blah FAQ
Who are you?
I'm the newly-appointed Future editor at Business 2.0 and the former San Francisco correspondent for Time Magazine.
Wow, so does this mean everything you write reflects Time Inc's opinion? Or do you perhaps have some sort of standard disclaimer to the effect that it doesn't?
Naturally, the opinions contained in this blog are not those of my employers. In fact, some opinions may be the polar opposite of my employers. Some may be the same, for all I know. Hey, it's not like I ask my employers their opinions about everything in the news, okay? Let's just say that if this were a Venn diagram with one circle marked "my opinions" and the other one marked "my employers' opinions", there would doubtless be some overlap. But neither I nor my employers are able to pinpoint exactly where that overlap is.
What is this Daily Blah thing?
An experiment for a column I wrote about blogging back in December 2001. All these years later, I haven't been able to kick the habit.
Do you write any other blogs, by chance? Could that have something to do with the fact that Daily Blah isn't always Daily?
Yes -- the Future Boy blog for Business 2.0. And yes. If you want true, editorially-mandated daily coverage from me, that's probably the best place to look.
Mister, you talk funny. Are you one of them furrners?
Why yes I am, as it happens. I was born, raised and educated in Great Britain. I've been living in the U.S. since 1996 and identify as British.
I say, old chap, you forgot the "u" in "colour."
No I didn't. I may identify as British, but I am also an American journalist writing for an American audience about mostly American issues. These two different sides of me are a constant source of tension. Nevertheless, Daily Blah will adhere to American English grammar and spelling.
Praise for Daily Blah:
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Daily Blah for... Tuesday, October 24, 2006
Wascally Wifi Wabbit
So a couple of days ago I took delivery of my first Nabaztag. No, I'm not talking about the scary flying creatures in Lord of the Rings (although when I first saw a Nabaztag, I kept calling it a Nazgul). A Nabaztag is a rabbit. A plastic rabbit, with two dots for eyes, a "T" for a nose and mouth, and two magnetically-attached ears that look like something Good Vibrations would sell. The Nabaztag is so minimalist, in fact, that it looks like what Steve Jobs and Jonathan Ive would design if they got into the toy business. The overall effect, though, is so surprisingly rabbit-like that it's a prime example of the smiley-face effect: the human brain need very little information to create the image of a face. We're hard-wired for it. Evidently, we're hard-wired to see rabbits, too.
Anyway, I'm rambling, which is appropriate, because it's what the Nabaztag does. This, you see, is a wifi rabbit. Unpack him, plug him in, name and register him on the Nabaztag website, and he will automatically detect and log onto open wireless networks around him. Thus hooked up, he can be customized for a variety of services: telling you the time, the weather, the air quality, local traffic information, much of it via glowing symbols on his face and chest. He'll read you his favorite bits of the Wall Street Journal and New York Times. He will read out emails sent to him via the Nabaztag site if you press the button on his head (the only button on the whole rabbit -- told you it was Jobs-style minimalism). He'll make snippy, Marvin-the-Paranoid-Android-style comments. His ears will do tai chi. And if you link him up with another wifi rabbit anywhere in the world, the ears will settle into the exact same position as that other Nabaztag's. It's terribly cute -- but not a little problematic in the implementation.
To look at Nabaztag, you might presume he was Japanese or Korean. In fact, he's French. And that appears to be part of his problem. Now, I'm no Francophobe -- well, I'm English, so take that with a grain of salt. But the English version of the website has a few teething and translation troubles, and it's hard not to get the sense that the French version is easier to navigate. Perhaps it's a plot: get a device in every English-speaking household, then use it to force us all to start learning French.
A small example: Nabaztag's default is to operate on French time, even after you tell it your zip code and country. I assumed that the zip code information would mean it would set its own time zone -- this is, after all, very much touted as a set-it-and-forget-it device -- and that my Nabaztag, named YawannaBuya (after the Spike Jones comedy song from the 1950's: You Wanna Buy A Bunny?) would thus heed my instructions to sleep between midnight and 8am. No such luck: YawannaBuya woke me up at 1am to say that he would like me to move him so he could have a change of view, and again at 3am to complain that he was hot, and would like me to fan him down. The next day, grouchy and irritable, I finally tracked down the part of the Nabaztag site where you set his time zone. On further reflection, I thought, I should have named him Bugs. LotsaBugs.
And despite having set specific times for him to do so, I've not yet heard YawannaBuya read the papers to me. Perhaps, in true French style, he will only do so when he's ready. Perhaps he'll read me Le Monde instead. I dunno. The weather, air info and messages seem to work, at least. (You can send him an email, or get him to play me an MP3, by sending it to yawannabuya@nabaztag.com.)
Despite such troubles, Nabaztags appear to be taking over the tech world at a rapid clip. The online contact company Plaxo, for example, recently invited its 15 million users to send in praise and complaints via the Plaxo rabbit. A hundred Nabaztags played a symphony at the Wired NextFest. You can download a Google Earth layer that will show you nearby Nabaztags. And at the recent DEMOfall conference in San Diego, the updated Nabaztag 2.0 (now with microphone, voice recognition and the ability to "smell" carrots) was the most blogged-about item at the show. I get the sense this guy is here to stay. I'd better buy a fan so I can keep him cool at 3am.
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