Blogject is a neologism coined by Julian Bleecker for an object that gathers metadata about its interaction with people, other objects, or its environment. Just as people can blog about their interactions in the world, blogjects similarly gather and communicate this information as well. The term was first used publicly by Bruce Sterling during a keynote speech at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference 2006 in San Diego, California. Bleecker's use of the term is closely related to Sterling's own neologism spime.
The term evolved from Sterling's description of the spime as a central instrumentality of a future 20-30 years from the turn of the century. The Blogject was meant to provide a design framework, or conceptual object around which designers of digital interactive experiences might think about how networked objects might integrate with the social web. That is, how might networked devices participate in a meaningful way with humans to help enhance their understanding of the world around them in a way that goes beyond simple, rote dissemination of raw data? Can networked objects make the world more legible, or help mitigate social practices that are unhealthy or unsustainable?
The notion of the Blogject is explicitly formative. It's meant to describe a concept that might be thought of as the pre-spime, in that it is possible to have a Blogject world today, and one that would help shape the future world of the spime. Blogjects are possibly precursors to the spime, both conceptually and technically.
The significance of the Blogject concept is much less technical than it is about designing networked objects that can help one derive meaningful insights into what is going on in the world. While the notion of the Blogject as a sensor that is merely on a digital network, accessible via the public internet is interesting from a technical perspective, the more substantial motivation has to do with how that sensor data participates in impactful dialogues and conversations.
The use of the somewhat awkward neologism Blogject — objects that blog — was specifically chosen to reflect the meaning-making character of [Blogs]. If the internet is composed of many social beings, creating meaning, circulating culture and engaging in conversations, what would that network look like if objects also participated? And if objects participated, what would we want them to "say"? Would it be a valuable design goal to create such objects so that they produced meaningful, legible data that many people, not just specialists, could receive and then continue to circulate through analysis, however informal? In essence, "Blogject" is meant to be a move away from older forms of networked objects that might fall within the idiom of "Machine to Machine" or "Machine to Human" communication, which too deliberately excises the now important social practice component of networked publics.
It is possible the word is an evolution of the term Blobject used by Bruce Sterling during his SIGGRAPH 2006 speech in Los Angeles, California, although it is also possible that the term Blogject evolved out discussions during the Southern California Digital Cultures Group in which Bleecker served as a respondent to a discussion on Sterling's book Shaping Things.
Examples of blogjects
- Your car, gathering data about distance, weather, road conditions, speed, as you travel.
- Your house, who is coming and going, what is inside, environmental information
- Your applicances, gathering duration, frequency of use, types of food prepared
- Your computer, where you went, what you typed, how you interacted, duration
- Your cell phone, who you talked to, how long, your GPS ___location
- Your game console, what you played, how long, with who, what did you accomplish?