I'm a text messenger from way back. Way back being when BlackBerries were only pagers and we text messaged each other while in important meetings or out of the office to make sure that we all had the same information and were all telling the same stories.

Howard Rheingold has a great bit on Jeff Axup—a Ph.D candidate in Australia's University of Queensland's Information Environments program—and the importance of observing homo sapiens in their natural environments whilst communicating in motion ala MoSoSo.

Gossip as a form of primary travel information. Blogs as a form of friendly gossip. There is something so wonderfully real or near-real time about gossip, especially friendly travel gossip. Our Gadling blog here at Weblogs, Inc. is a form of friendly travel gossip. Blogs encourage this manner of swapping stories, especially in ongoing comments, trackbacks, tagging, digg-ing, slashdotting, flickr-ing, etc.

Howard has some great quotes from Jeff Axup, a snippet of one: "...Technology greatly influences how people act…" and, i believe, people's actions greatly influence technology. People create tools. A lot of people create a lot of tools. Engineers often create tools that serve some of the people some of the time, and often very little attention is actually paid to observing the utilization of these ''some of the time'' tools ''in the field'' or in the daily motion of our lives.

Imagine a world where the tools you used actuallly fit your needs? Or, could morph to meet them?

tagged: MoSoSo;Howard Rheingold;Gossip