Geostumbling regional activism communities

People On Page: YASNS...

...or Yet Another Social Networking Service. PeopleOnPage is a browser plug-in co-browsing app, which supports two views of other people in the system: Dating, and World. (Gotta love two-category taxonomies...) And they seem to be following the Liz Lawley dictum -- "Its the faces, stupid!" -- by providing a user-created POPCard with a photo.

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Add geographical services, and suddenly you have a live, roaming network of people who's cell phones are searching their local peer-to-peer network for compatible people.

Then you let someone watch your web browser, when you don't mind, and they can decide if they want to talk to you; it's like "hey, what are you reading?", Internet-style.

If all the personals people publish their client databases, minus an email address and location, plus a pgp public key. When you encounter someone nearby, you encrypt a greeting to their public key, sign it with your private key, and negotiate that you're you. They do the same, using the central registry for verification, and you've got basic identity verification.

Add a per-URL site filter, so that they can see when I surf sites that I deem appropriate for advertising: things that are on this list of organizations might be a good start; This would be another. There's a trend, here; I'm choosing how people see me, and they can interpret as they wish.

The web browser proxy software required to do this has been implemented as well, in POE; combined with a new link on the history page, Surf this site publicly. Stir in a Java app installed on my phone, reporting my location every two minutes to my website.

The killer app potential of this is that you can now show people an activism community's traffic, online, live. By tracking each person's individual comments on an issue (through their freely-provided and pre-configured blog), activism becomes a tangible, visible thing. It becomes something that people can see their effect on.

Some people will like watching the entire globe; I guess that's their priviledge; I prefer to watch who's nearby, because that's often more important. Perhaps if I could watch areas, with various thresholds and levels of "brightness", then I can track what's going on everywhere.

Some people will only focus their coordinates enough to signify, say, Eugene instead of springfield; mine are focused somewhat closer than that, I think.

This'd make a great screensaver to run on a wall at OPN's downtown office; combined with pamphlets explaining how to get involved in making your opinion heard next to the computers, and you enable those without internet to have a voice, too.

I found this on Corante:

Here is a nice post from last friday author, Nick Denton describes the same topic as clay, but adds more context. I like the way Nick expands the conversation.

http://www.nickdenton.org/archives/005681.html#005681

  (more) by Stephen Dulaney

Comments

[Mikel]

http://www.eyebees.com/ is pretty nice, though closed protocol, implementation of group browsing