l.m. orchard is doing some good ol' fashioned brainstorming with Zauri, BlogWalking, Smart Mobs and other oddities :

"A strange little idea I had on the way home today: Movable Type on a Sharp Zaurus equipped with wireless ethernet? Or maybe Bloxsom if/when it has static publishing? Just use rsync to publish whenever the thing finds itself on a network, wireless or otherwise. Maybe that happens while you're out Warwalking - better yet, maybe that wireless network detector you cobbled together autoblogs what it finds while in your pocket.

But, beyond that, I wonder what else having your blog in your pocket might give you? Toss in a GPS unit somehow, maybe some other things like a thermometer device? A compass? Thinking about ways to automatically capture metadata about your present environment."

it would certainly be interesting to see a stew of parts/pieces like wifi, blogging, rss, presence [ in the instant messaging sense ] and maybe something like rdfmap could begin to lay the foundation for the oft theorized, seldom implemented vision of context aware computing :

"Context-aware computing is a mobile computing paradigm in which applications can discover and take advantage of contextual information (such as user location, time of day, nearby people and devices, and user activity). Since it was proposed about a decade ago, many researchers have studied this topic and built several context-aware applications to demonstrate the usefulness of this new technology. Context-aware applications (or the system infrastructure to support them), however, have never been widely available to everyday users. In this survey of research on context-aware systems and applications, we looked in depth at the types of context used and models of context information, at systems that support collecting and disseminating context, and at applications that adapt to the changing context. Through this survey, it is clear that context-aware research is an old but rich area for research."

it's not like there that far away from this type of vision on wifi enabled college campuses these days:

"Take Ben Kasdon, a Dartmouth exchange student with spiky, bleached-blond hair. Kasdon recently applied for a patent on a personal-security device that uses the network's base stations to pinpoint the location of campus emergencies. About the size of a cigarette lighter, the gadget attaches to a key chain and, when its panic button is squeezed, links up with nearby wireless access points to triangulate and transmit its position.

When I meet up with Kasdon, who's working on a double degree at Dartmouth and Skidmore, he's relaxing in the Collis student center, just in from traversing the campus with an open laptop to look for holes in the network's coverage. Asked to name the biggest difference between the two schools, he gives an answer that should stop phone company executives -- and anyone else who's betting on the cellular carriers' version of the future -- in their tracks: "Nobody here knows anyone's phone number.""