Can you imagine a world where everything touchable (and some things that aren’t) radiates waves of identity, their status/situation, what they want and what they offer?

That’s presence. That state of being in, or at least near, the now.

Putting that noisy cacophony to use is presence too. Assembling related sources into sensor networks. Correlating information to discover interesting or actionable patterns. Making markets among people/things who can help each other (like helping a roomba robot and a power outlet discover each other and negotiate services with each other).

With GPS you might have had your rubber ducks not just report their positions but, with a little adaptation, flock (not terribly useful to the gent studying flotsam). Personally, if I was sticking smarts in rubber ducks, I’d help them sing in chorus, changing songs with their environs.

Quack.FM.

An example of the unexpected. I bought a Garmin Forerunner GPS watch, believing that knowing how fast and far I am running would improve my training.

Yes it did help but by far the most important contribution was something I did not expect at all. In recording the data I was automatically creating a running logbook, something that previously I had always tried to do but always failed to do.

And I found some weeks later that it was this automatically created running logbook that was doing more to motivate and improve my training than anything else.

To take advantage of the law of the unexpected we must, to quote an infamous leader, ‘let a thousand flowers bloom’.
And this is why we must fight tooth an nail the stifling effects of DRM, copyright extensions, software patents and other attempts to maintain monopolies. They deny us the delights, surprises and progress that always comes from the unexpected.

GPS, though would be interesting, although perhaps a bit costly.