The emergence of ‘the internet of things’ – the increasing merging of the internet and the real world as more and more devices act as bridges between the two – was brought home to be recently by the pigeon that blogs. This extract is from ‘The New World of Blogjects’ in Roland Piquepaille’s Technology Trends blog ( http://www.primidi.com/2006/03/14.html#a1467 ). Piquepaille is quoting from Julian Bleeker’s ‘Why Things Matter’ – a ‘Manifesto for Networked Objects’.

The Pigeon that Blogs

“The Pigeon that Blogs is a project by Beatriz da Costa. It’s a pigeon, or more precisely, a flock of pigeons that are equipped with some telematics to communicate on the Internet wirelessly, a GPS device for tracing where it’s been flying, and an environmental sensor that records the levels of toxins and pollutants in the air through which they fly. These are the bits of data that the flocks ‘blog’.

They disseminate their flight paths, probably viewable on a Google Map, together with information about the current toxic state of the local atmosphere. The Pigeon that Blogs is a mash-up of GPS, GSM communications technology and pollution sensors that represents a full-order species evolution...

About the utility of such a mash-up, (Julian) Bleecker uses this analogy: ‘Pigeons that tell us about the quality of the air we breathe are the Web 2.0 (or World 2.0) progeny of the Canary in the Coal Mine’.”

Why do leaders need to know this?

Because you need to know your organizations and people are increasingly operating in World 2.0 rather than just Web 2.0. The real world and the internet are merging.

Bleecker is a researcher at the University of Southern California, and published his paper earlier this year. ‘Blogjects’ are, like the pigeon, objects that blog. People have been using the phrase “Web 2.0” over the past year or so to describe the post-dotcom interactive internet where the user ‘mashes up’ internet content and applications to suit their needs.

Bleeker and others point out that the phrase “Web 2.0” is too modest and implies the Web is still safely behind the screen of your laptop. No, it’s not. It’s merging with the real world to create what Bleeker calls “World 2.0”.