Wiring a City and the Internet of Place

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.

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.

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.

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...

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.

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.

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.

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 has LCD displays at bus stops and subway stops, alerting when the train or bus is due or if there's a delay.

Her name is Twitter

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.

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. :)

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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

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).

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.

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

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

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:

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.

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?

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.