Cows with Weblogs

From Charlie Stross:

Charlie's Diary: News from the Weird: Yes, that was the subject of conversation in the pub last night. I can't provide any URLs, but I am assured that the dairy industry in Scotland is extremely interested in fitting their herd with telemetry to track everything from their location (via GPS) to their blood pressure, activity levels, and possibly even emotional state: an eventual goal is that the subjects of this exercise will effectively become spimes. As Bruce Sterling (who coined the term) explains it, "a Spime is a location-aware, environment-aware, self-logging, self-documenting, uniquely identified object that flings off data about itself and its environment in great quantities." Presumably the blogging bovines would emit an RSS feed that their owners could browse (or should that be "graze"?) in order to determine that Daisy has gotten into the bottom field again, or is overdoing the clover.

NB: I want the wikipedia admins to know that I am very annoyed that someone has deleted the wikipedia article on spimes. It's all very well to do the housekeeping, but it's gone too far when useful resources are being erased before I can link to them from my blog, dammit...

Comments

[Ian Whitchurch]

Stuff epidimiology. You'll be able to run regressions of locality vs yield and milkfat yield, as well as cross-reference to medical history and so on, and those things will help you micro-manage your herd.

Obligitary IT joke - the software for this is Herd, running on Hurd.

[arcseed]

The paranoid speculation I've heard among the dairy farmers of my acquaintance: the idea came up for a national database of cows in this country, ostensibly for epidemiology, but really to make sure people pay royalties on the offspring of patented cattle breeds.

[airie]

"..possibly even emotional state"

So it's true that all cows aren't "happy cows"?

[Minnesotachuck]

The Urban Dictionary has a definition:
http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=spime