At the MIX06 conference the most provocative and exciting idea I heard was from Tim O’Reilly who also posted about this today on his blog. Tim suggests that we are on the verge of the evolution of a sort of *deviceOsphere* (I think this is my term not Tim’s), where the staggering amount of device data gets collectively shared in new mashup style applications.

Think of a traffic map where thousands of drivers are sharing in real time their personal observations and auto measurements (e.g. ONSTAR and GIS system data) about weather, road conditions, CRIME events, alternate routes, pictures, suggestions for restaurants. A moveable data feast where the conversation never stops and includes thousands of observers/reviewers.
Flickr has shown that people really want to share photos with the world. This notion gets really exciting when you broaden the idea of “content available to mashup” to include ALL the digital content that often simply swirls around in it’s own little world. Transportation road cams, navigation data from individual cars, camcorder and cell phone feeds and crime reports are only a few things that generally just swirl around in a limited space and are discarded or relegated to obscurity.

O’Reilly’s suggesting that this data store, combined with the collective intelligence of the burdgeoning online community, could generate masterpiece applications. And the best thing is that it’s not going to require a Leonardo Da Vinci to do it.