data / online collaboration

Free to share, the user is no longer passive and helps create and mold these sites either by directly imputing something, their knowledge, their data or even their time, thus creating online communities and developing the relationship between the internet and the user. This is the internet of things.

Pachube (pronounced 'patch-bay') is a platform in which users input live data streams from around the world which are then shared between users and monitored on the site. This creates a strong community with users as they help develop the site and generate it's growth by adding that data from electricity use monitoring information to

The message on the founder's page says it all: "Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge. That's our commitment." Their commitment has obviously pulled off as wikipedia is now a globally recognized resource created by the users for the users. This is the future of online collaboration on a global scale of information sharing.

These websites inspire the user to gather information but digitizing it is not the only way forward as more creative methods can still be adopted...

By collecting energy values from different rooms in the house and accumulating the data, different graphical representational graphs were made using string.The image on the right depicts a circular graph with pins plotted by watt of electrical item, by the period of time it was on. This displayed using the circle as a clock thus chronologically. The bottom two images show a graph using imagery to depict the electrical product whilst the amount of time it was on was shown by wrapping the string along the outside once for every hour it was on. Thus when looking at the graph from the side, one could see the layers built from the separate sets of data.