Traffic Report

It's been much more than a year since my last blog post. People have been asking me if I have a blog, and my blogging friends have suggested that I get back to it. (Some have also mentioned that my flickr photo stream--and my descriptions/comments--provide what is essentially a blog in a different form.)

I stopped writing the blog for the most part because it was focused on politics, and I'd become so dispirited with where our political system was (and still is) and the vitriol on all sides that I just couldn't get myself worked up enough to feel like I was contributing anything of substance. I still care passionately about certain issues (and if you've read my blog, you can likely figure out which ones those were), but I essentially pulled myself out of the system. I still read Daily Kos, but never contribute. I feel anger and disgust towards certain politicians, but I don't vocalize as often as I would. And I'm happy about the prospects of what's coming up in November, but not overly excited or optimistic about it as I might once have been.

So my problem wasn't with the concept of blogging, it was just that I didn't want to blog about what I had been blogging about.

So what got me blogging again?

It's funny--it's a minor feature of a Microsoft product. I read an entry on some new features on Yahoo! Local and Microsoft Live Local. I invariably use Google Maps for just about any search I'm doing, but one feature mentioned in the article intrigued me. Techcrunch mentioned that Microsoft Live "already offered a service to simultaneously connect your phone and a business’s phone with one click." I was curious about how that worked (I do work in a telecom-related group doing non-telecom stuff at the moment), so I went over there.

But that's not what I found most fascinating. When I was playing around with it, I saw a mention of "Traffic." If you pull up a map and click on Traffic, you can see the current traffic conditions and any accidents/incidents (as little exclamation point icons which, when hovered over, provide detailed information). Now I can pull up a traffic map and see immediately what the traffic will be like on the way home--and where incidents are.

I've mostly been using sfgate.com traffic for as long as I can remember. It's nice, but it doesn't say where there are slowdowns--it just lists accidents and such. There have also been other sites that list the same information as MS Live Local, but not in a map that I can also use for other things. I mean, I can easily find out how to get from Stanford the the MLK Library in San Jose and see the traffic conditions along the way. I don't have to correlate the places I'm going with a list of incidents--it's all layered on top of the same map.

Why would this prompt me to blog? Because traffic is one of those things I've actually been fascinated with for a long time. (It's a bit surprising since I didn't even get my license until after college because I was afraid to drive.) I even did a final project in school on the computer simulations done for the Big Dig (and got to interview Fred Salvucci, one of the principals that initiated the project).

Maybe it's just part of my fascination with presence in general. My Hear&There project for my Master's thesis involved dropping audio in an augmented space using GPS information, and more recently I've gotten into geotagging my photos (way before flickr introduced their built-in maps). Traffic seems to be nothing more than presence on the move, right? It's also (usually) what is keeping you from getting from one presence point to another.

So instead of posting a blog about politics, I figured I'd bring in something else I found interesting. And maybe I'll do this again before another year passes...