Matt Haughey on collaborative search-and-rescue
This is fascinating. Matt Haughey writes about his thoughts on the disappearance of CNet editor James Kim and his family:
If each recording is say 30 minutes long for a road, split it into 10 equal parts, 3 minutes long, and upload all of them to youtube. Ask viewers to leave comments pointing out when they see anything strange. The Kims were in a silver Saab wagon, so it’s probably something that can be seen from above. In total, there’d be 50 or 60 short clips and in a matter of hours you could have millions of people closely scan then and start pointing out the things worth looking into on the ground.
In his incredibly good (yet incomplete!) webcomic Spiders, Patrick Farley describes a world in which President Gore enacts a similar project in the aftermath of the 9/12 attacks on the World Trade Center and US Capitol Building. A million tiny robot spiders are deployed to Afghanistan in the fight against al Qaeda and the Taliban.
In one chapter, an unseen figure describes how surely this is some sort of psy-ops gimmick; the Americans would need a million operators to monitor the video of every spider. A second figure agrees, and is suddenly revealed to be Osama bin Laden himself, as seen through the camera eye of a tiny robot.
Meanwhile, thousands of kilometres away, a small girl is sitting at her computer. “Mommy? Daddy?” she says. “I think my spider just found that bad man.”
(Via kottke.org)