Posts tagged outside.in
Route Blogging
Oct 12th
At dConstruct in Brighton last month Steven Johnson talked at length about his startup, outside.in, that collects together place-blogs to display aggregates commentary and information on a block, neighbourhood and city level. The site is US-only at the moment, which made it a curious presentation for a largely non-US audience. Their toolset for extracting geographical information from blog entries is impressive, but a number of us were talking afterwards about what the real value of such aggregation is for those who might already live in an information-rich or tightly knit neighbourhood.
I find outside.in handy for keeping up with news from Grand Rapids now that I no longer live there, but even if it were available in the UK I suspect its main use would be for identifying other local people rather than learning what’s going on. And even then, there are existing community discussion groups and other fora that work well.
What would seem really compelling is a way to connect with the places that only get our partial attention. A couple of times a week I take a bus past a local leisure centre. It’s not somewhere that I’m likely to use at the moment, but with big life changes coming up it may be somewhere I’m more interested in before long. It wasn’t until after the fact that I saw that it was the centre of some controversial planning decisions, far too late to engage in the debate.
We all travel along a variety of paths all the time. Often only a few of the places on our routes get much of our attention, but most of them are of some importance to us. I’d really like to have a site that was aware of my most common (or preferred) routes and helped me engage with them more deeply. Presumably it wouldn’t be much more work than that outside.in does to assemble place-blogs. That geo-data just needs to be mapped to a trajectory rather than a simple locale.
More on “Are Online Social Networks the new Cities?”
May 21st
I promised a few of my own thoughts after liveblogging the “Are online social networks the new cities” at yesterday’s Innovation Edge conference. I’ve not had much time to reflect on the session, which is a shame as it’s a question that touches on a lot of areas of interest for me, but being so broad it can be hard to impose an appropriate structure on the conversation, particularly with such a large audience.
I very nearly gave up making notes during the session as it seemed to wander quite some way from the intended topic, spending a lot more time on the implications of social networking sites for education and family life. Certainly family life and the education system are key components of city life and looking at them is part of answering the question, but too much time was spent on that topic when none of the panel were really in a position to discuss it in any great detail.
Michael Birch’s comments that they had thought a lot about urban development when planning Bebo were probably the point that most piqued my interest. His reference to the problems of fabricating a community in the way that Milton Keynes, Welwyn Garden City and other similar towns were created is an important point for anyone seeking to design online social spaces. It’s a shame he wasn’t encouraged to develop that further. This is one area where our understanding of the web is very clearly still in its very early stages; we’re only just beginning to see platforms that allow people to mould their surroundings in a way analagous any good physical city allows and developing that way is likely to push at many of our preconceptions.
As with so many conversations about the web—whether we’re talking about the differences between the so-called Webs 1, 2 and 3, the relationship between blogs and traditional journalism, or social networks and other forms of interaction—I got a sense that there were false dichotomies. As the panel thankfully noted, teenage behaviour may look different online but in most respects what we’re seeing is an extension of the teenage norms we’ve seen over several generations. And similarly the most fertile conversations about cities and social networks seem to hinge on things like our local ning group, the Facebook Neighbourhoods app, outside.in, and tools like some of those MySociety is building. The web doesn’t simply replace spaces, but whether limited or pervasive it can augment them, as Andrew Blum discussed in a piece from October.
Maybe a future session of this sort could work better if it were focussed more tightly on innovation in the overlap between urban spaces and pervasive internet.