My friend Haym Hirsh points to this story:
Josh Kinberg . . . [has developed] a bicycle that receives text messages and prints them in foot-high chalk letters, then blogs a digital photo and GPS map of the printing, all while the rider cruises along. . . .
Kinberg will officially roll out the bike during August’s Republican National Convention in New York, but he says the project is as much performance art as protest. The project homepage can be found at bikesagainstbush.com. See video of it in action in QuickTime or Real Video. . . .
I doubt that this will get mass-produced, but if it does, expect the billboardization, especially for commercial advertising, of yet another surface. (Of course, people have chalked messages in the past, but the difficulty of doing many readable, appealing-looking messages has been a natural check on that.)
For those interested in the legal angle, I expect that right now there isn’t one — my guess is that writing in chalk on a sidewalk is generally legal (though if you have positive evidence — rather than just rumor or vague memory — of some prohibitions on it, please let me know). UPDATE: My guess was wrong — sidewalk chalking seems to be prohibited in New York City. See here for a follow-up.
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