June 23, 2009 30 Comments

Wiring a City and the Internet of Place

Manhattan Traffic

Leave it to Dave Winer to get me thinking. His premise is simple: how come there’s no simple news feed for a city? Why can’t we not see immediately (or even with an hour delay) all the various goings on within our city? It’s not like the information isn’t captured. More likely, there’s just no mechanism in place to push it out.

But think about it: cops pushing their efforts into RSS. Ditto the fire and ambulance. Schools realtime streaming their goings on. Why couldn’t every traffic sensor in the city work for me? Why can’t I touch every data point and then shape it the way I want it?

Tie hot location data to this. Imagine the bus tells me it’s coming. The subway lets me know I’m only a few minutes from my next possible opportunity. Imagine the opt-in of individuals who want to meet other types for business meetings, who want to connect with other members of their self-proclaimed groups.

Before we even get to marketing, we have dozens of gorgeous interactive possibilities. What would this city do for you? Do you see the Minority Report, or potential?

The Internet of Place is here: we just haven’t hooked it up yet.

Related posts:

  1. The Web is Your City
  2. Homeless Nation Gives a Digital Place to The Displaced
  3. YouTube is Not the Internet but She Has a Point
  4. Third Place in Cyberspace
  5. Small Boxes 22- The Gray Place

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  • http://stephenpickering.com StephenPickering

    I was playing around and built a Twitter feed for my city, Little Rock, Arkansas (@LittleRockArk) and I just kept shoving every feed related to the city into it, and still do. The problem is, I wouldn't subscribe to this feed. It tweets a hundred times or more a day. So the problem is refining it. Still, I like to see what surprises me, what pops up. Oh they're coming to town? Cool! But other than fun, I don't know how to make something useful out of it.

  • http://twitter.com/marc_reppin Marc Reppin

    It would be great to create your own city dashboard that pulls in all the data that's meaningful to you, and a few into the mix just for fun. You're right — most of the data is being captured already, from widely disparate sources. Making it all interoperable and customizable is the great challenge.

    Once we have that, I see great artistic possibilities. Discovery engines like Spezify touch on this a bit by pulling in documents, tweets, photos and videos when you search for a city, neighbourhood or even street corner. What you get is a multimedia collage that defines a location at a moment in time.

  • http://www.ShawneeOK.org/ Stephen Nolen

    I've done something similar – @ShawneePD, @ShawneeFD, and @CityofShawneeOK – real time police and fire calls for most calls, City info, meetings, agendas, job openings, etc.

  • http://dannybrown.me Danny

    I think some of the issue is security. Post-9/11 and Columbine, US cities and officials are incredibly protective of what information is publicly available (and understandably so).

    Though the subway and bus alert system is already happening. The UK underground has it in place and Toronto's TTC system also LCD displays at bus stops and subway stops, alerting when the train or bus is due or if there's a delay.

  • Pingback: Could Fort Worth Have a City Data Feed? | Fort Worth Renaissance

  • http://thelostjacket.com Stuartfoster

    Have you ever heard of Every Block Chris? It's a really cool start up that is essentially trying to do this with local news. Basically setting up listening posts to decode and send out information on an RSS base level. Pretty cool stuff…plus the guy that started it developed Python.

  • http://twitter.com/Ed Ed Shahzade

    Her name is Twitter

  • Mr_Simple

    Not perfect, but it does a lot of what you are asking for. http://www.everyblock.com/

    It is a great project running out of Chicago.

  • lisanewton

    Not news related by city related. When I first started writing about Los Angeles, I couldn't find any real listing of the city's bloggers, so I just created one.

    As time goes by, I hope to be able to create a feed of the blogs listed. We have some great writers in LA, and I just want to show them off. :)

  • http://chrisbrogan.com Chris Brogan

    It's not exactly twitter, or not twitter 100%, because if you think about it, no one is beholden to report the bus schedule all the day long. No one should be reporting arrests all day long except cops. So, it's the aggregation of this news, but some of it is mechanical in nature. Know those sensors that cars roll over to signal their speed, the flow of traffic? They need an RSS feed. Buses need to tweet automatically. Everything needs to be wired to send this information on its own volition, I believe.

    Yes, it might be twitter and RSS as a backbone, but I'm thinking a blend of automated plus human.

  • http://windycitizen.com/ Brad Flora

    Hey Chris,

    Almost 2000 Chicagoans are currently creating a feed just like this over at WindyCitizen.com. It's a local social news site. Submit and vote up the stuff you like. Last month we had over 4000 local submissions, links to news, blogs, events, people, places, businesses –anything folks in Chicago find interesting. Drop me an e-mail at brad@windycitizen.com. I'd love to tell you (and anyone else!) all about it.

    If you're in Chicago and would like to help test out new features, drop me a line.

    Bonus: We're signing up local advertisers to our real-time news program and will be self-sustaining by summer's end.

  • http://windycitizen.com/ Brad Flora

    Hey Chris,

    Almost 2000 Chicagoans are currently creating a feed just like this over at WindyCitizen.com. It's a local social news site. Submit and vote up the stuff you like. Last month we had over 4000 local submissions, links to news, blogs, events, people, places, businesses –anything folks in Chicago find interesting. Drop me an e-mail at brad@windycitizen.com. I'd love to tell you (and anyone else!) all about it.

    If you're in Chicago and would like to help test out new features, drop me a line.

    Bonus: We're signing up local advertisers to our real-time news program and will be self-sustaining by summer's end.

  • http://twitter.com/dave_lo Dave Lowe

    Make it useful by allowing the user to easily refine the stream through check boxes. Like StumbleUpon, I may care about traffic but not blank, so I self-refine.

  • http://maxsell.net bnix

    I want my city to broadcast stats of elected officials' voting records (like rezonings and budget votes). I want to know who is attending local events (like concerts in the park and beer festivals) before I decide to go. I want to know the progress of road projects and trail systems. I want to be able to dissect everything a city does like I can with my fantasy baseball roster. Show me stats, graphs, projections, trends, upcoming events, breaking news, video updates, live scoring. I want CBS Sportsline Fantasy Baseball type interface for all things City of Woodstock, GA!

  • http://stephenpickering.com StephenPickering

    Most businesses and local agencies are afraid of engagement. Why? because of the 5% who abuse you, rather than the 95% who are grateful and will reward you. Besides its easy to get rid of those 5%, politely but emphatically. And you don't have to worry about hurting their feelings because they know they're trying to take advantage of you. But walk into almost any store, especially the bigger ones, and how do you get treated? Almost always like you're one of those 5%. A lot of $$$$$ is being left on the table.

  • http://www.pr-mom.com/ Therese

    It would be nice to have this all in one feed. I have a feed for 2 of my local news stations and then I have e-mail updates with police updates, but I am pretty sure they do not have a feed option.

  • everamazed

    Boston's police have a twitter account and a sense of humor!

  • Coen Wit

    These guys are doing something along these lines, though not exactly RSS-feed based:
    http://www.sprxmobile.com/blog/
    It's an overlay for your mobile phone cam with internet based information from sites like google and hyves (dutch face-book like service).

  • http://freedombusinesssystem.com/ ryanvines

    Nice view .I appreciate you.

  • http://www.soapboxincluded.com/ Brandon Mendelson

    Give this one two years (tops). The media is just now learning about how powerful “local” is and they have the dollars to make this sort of thing happen in a fast, stable way.

  • http://www.facebook.com/people/Pat-Lazure/1422134425 Pat Lazure

    WikiCity does a lot of this. It launched on Thursday. Here's the press release: http://news.prnewswire.com/ViewContent.aspx?ACC…

  • http://www.facebook.com/people/Pat-Lazure/1422134425 Pat Lazure

    Stephen, Check out the Little Rock city wiki, which already provides a live Little Rock Twitter feed: http://www.wikicity.com/wiki/Little_Rock%2C_Ark…

  • http://stephenpickering.com StephenPickering

    Oh that's cool, Pat, I didn't think to add in a feed of every mention of Little Rock, Duh!!!!!! Thanks a lot for showing me that.

  • http://www.deceptionsecrets.com/ Jef Nance

    Talk about information overload!

    Sorry guys, but don't sign me up for this one. Chris, I know I'm the odd man out here. Obviously lots of other commenters are on board, but I've already got enough access to information as it is, no more, thanks.

    There's no doubt a market/demand for this kind of feed, and you're on the cutting edge as usual in bringing it up–I just think anybody would be nuts to add this to their load. Do we have to keep up with EVERYTHING that's going on? I'm runnin' from this!

    -jef

    -jef

  • http://www.nethosting.com/ nethosting.89

    I agree with StephenPickering 's word. It would be great to create your own city.This is truly innovative and insightful information- thanks a lot for the post.Thank you so much for the priceless information. I found it so useful. :smile:

  • http://www.hungrygarden.com/ Hungry Gardener

    I think if you take a broader view of what Dave Winer is asking for you'll find that “location” is one of the basic internet “filters” and one that is becoming increasingly important for a number of reasons I'll mention but briefly. First a recap.

    One of the first examples of an internet filter was the “gopher” protocol. Gopher was an early “alternative” to the web protocal and it too provided document storage and retrieval. The way you used Gopher was by browsing an “ontology” in this case a hierarchical structure. Yahoo's, early subject index is another example of a early filter. It was hierarchical, browsable, organized web pages by subject, was similar to how a library would organize books, and was maintained by volunteers that created, edited and curated topics and listings. It was a user friendly way to filter web pages. An updated version is still available.

    Then came Google with PageRank — a new way to filter web pages by assigning “authority” or “reputation.” In Google's case “popularity” as determined by analysis of the incoming and outgoing hyperlinks in a web page. It didn't hurt that Google's algorithm proved an efficient way to handle massive amounts of data at a time when the web was literally exploiting with new content.

    Each advent of a new filter typically spawn entrepreneurial ventures that apply and exploit the new filter by mixing and matching the best of the old with the new.

    Twitter created the filter of “time” or better expressed — timeliness. By taking the previous filter of social and applying it to time Twitter gave users a new, useful way to filter large data sets and get at previously unreachable, or at the least hard to reach, user content.

    Now we come full circle to the new filter of location. The advent of new technologies such as GPS, geolocation, mapping software and most importantly the mobile web and a cultural shift to increasing comfort with 'publicness” in our personal and professional lives, allows development of what I call 'geosocial' applications.

    As Dave Winer points out weather crime and other typically institutionally generated data is available. mappable and valuable to a segment of users or all users at some point in time. However, to my mind the real value will be combining social with location, and possible timeliness, in developing new applications that organize user generated content in new, interesting more meaningful ways.

  • http://realsmartnow.net/ Andrew Lightheart @alightheart

    This is another one of those -I like it but I'm scared of the potential implications- things.

    I'm also a little wary of my location data being easily accessed by loads of unpoliced systems (and/or especially policed systems!). If the sanctity of data was certain I might be more comfortable with it, but the two-way nature of it makes me squint.

    Am I old-fashioned?

  • http://www.nethosting.com/products/VirtualPrivateServer/ virtualserver11

    I agree with StephenPickering 's word. It would be great to create your own city.This is truly innovative and insightful information- thanks a lot for the post.Thank you so much for the priceless information. I found it so useful. :smile:keep blogging.

  • huangqin
  • steve

    They should pick a small rural town out in the middle of nowhere. To provide speeds that put the rest of the nation to shame, would provoke other small rural cities to wire their own towns for fiber. Typically these cities suffer and if you can get DSL or Cable, its never the advertised speed.

    You wont see Google choose a major city as the local bells will instantly sue the city to prevent Google from wiring them up.

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