Slashdot Mirror
Net Sticky Notes All Over London
An anonymous reader writeswith a link to a BBC story which mentions in passing the Urban Tapestries project for distributed, collaborative location-based note-taking, excerpting "In practice this means giving people a specially-equipped mobile phone that allows them to wander around central London and leave virtual notes for other people to read by writing them on the phone and then 'sticking' them to a building. It works because the position of each phone is constantly tracked so when a note is written the place can be noted - when someone else goes to the same place, they can read the note."
just keeps getting worse...
Here, give us your exact location so we know where you are and what your doing at every moment of the day
It's FUN!!!!!
Also if you want to read the NY Times, get a passport, bank, shop, buy things or in fact breath, you will need to give someone complete access at all times to every facet of your live so that you may be served better. Remember it's not data rape if you consent.
May the Maths Be with you!
Let me guess - viewing each note = text message, or at least bunch of GPRS data transfer. And if you think that's free...
1. Make location-based 'text note' service
2. Add stupid people (supply: near infinite)
3. PROFIT!!!!
This could make for some truly kick ass scavenger hunts.
Why do get the idea that this will be bathroom grafitti all over again?
A city could use this to their advtantage, by leaveing electrnoic notes near landmarks with information about the landmark... could boost tourism.
However, the big problem lies in the possibilities for misuse, if accountability is not there. The liabilities that the tapestries information provides might be a privacy concern too, especially when it infringes someone else's privacy.
For this to work, one way is to have some kind of moderation and meta-moderation capability on the quality of the information pasted to the buildings. ;)
Hey, that's my password you are typing
before someone sticks a note like "this resturant sucks", which initiates some slander suit of some sort - ugh.
Owner not home from 8:30AM to 6:30PM, please rob.
Smash my windows!
I'm watching you, pervert!
There's plenty of scope for use and abuse of this. You could tag a person's house as belonging to a paedophile, or claim they are a rapist, all without any sort of screening. Not good.
All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.
My first reaction to this was that it sounded really interesting because I couldn't think of an easy real-world analog. It's not like graffiti, because the notes aren't seen by everybody, you have to look for them. More like guestbooks. But not like guestbooks either, because you have to look for them too or you don't know they are there.
Its really more like Usenet, except you have to physically go to where each newsgroup is instead of them coming to you. And like Usenet, if this type of thing ever became truly public I bet it would be vandalized by spammers and idiots and rendered practically unusable.
So now I can walk around and as well as being bombarded by ads, aggressive beggars (this is London, right), and suchlike traditional annoyances, I can ALSO read all the pathetic, repetitive thoughts of the erstwhile world capital's smug Nathan Barleys. I wonder how long before I get to the first "I am soooo stoned... hehehe" message. Probably about 20 seconds.
Luckily, it'll only take about 20 more seconds before the whole system is taken over by drug dealers and prostitutes!
Silver lining!
PS I am not a bitter, misanthropic loner. I just really think it'll be that annoying.
PPS Ok, I _am_ a bitter, misanthropic loner. You got me
Whence? Hence. Whither? Thither.
wtf? What keeps getting worse? Am I really missing something or are you complaining that a voluntary system for exchanging notes is an exchange of privacy?
This is a simple idea, and a useful, community editable database of geographically linked information for London already exists in The Open Guide to London. And it's licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license which allows commercial usage. So all you'd need to do is implement some way of searching by OS co-ordinates (most nodes in the Guide have this information) which should be pretty trivial, and you're away.
At first glance this looks like a great idea. I had visions of a sort of geographical wiki - a resource for users by users and with the potential to knit communities together with local information. East Enders is fiction - in London most of us barely even speak to our next door neighbours.
I imagined it could help with directions to the nearest tube stop, police station or whatever. Lost tourists would be shepherded to safety. Public-spirited Londoners would post interesting and informative nuggets of local culture.
Fun uses could include placing a string of notes by pubs to mark out a pub crawl or helping commuters hook up with that girl they see each day on the opposite platform and never get a chance to talk to.
Then I snapped out of it.
Without any sort of regulation or structure, this is just going to become a blizzard of virtual flyposting. We already see enough junk posters pasted up around the city. When you can do the equivalent digitally just by walking through a neighbourhood, when you know that the section of the population viewing that content will be a target market (young professionals, gadget-hungry kids) the opportunity to spam will just be way too hard to resist. Any worthwhile content will be buried amongst acres of worthless junk. At least with email you know that (apart from a relatively small number of spammers) most people with your address are people you would want to have your address. Even then, spam is still a huge problem.
When every kid with a mobile can post inane junk and every 'guerilla marketer' can post repeatedly about their latest product, the signal to noise ratio quickly drops to unusable levels. The only advantage is that you don't see it unless you look for it.
This is just the same - you'd probably join just a few channels that interest you and that you trust (whatever that means). You could certainly imagine a hierarchical categorization like usenet groups, with some of those channels being moderated or closed to members only.
Imagine the view through my fantasy driving HUD. Some wanker dangerously overtakes me. Do I swear loudly and upset my kids? No, I simply tag him with a big glowing sticker saying "This guy drives like a c*nt"), perhaps adding to the few he already has. He can't get rid of them, they don't belong to him, they are just tracking the [RFID/GPS/?] transciever in his car. He might not care, but he'll find that next time he gets booked by the cops for speeding they are less lenient, or he's not allowed on the toll-road, or his insurance premiums go up.
Bring it on.
...
by dogs (as in K9)...
walk around, leave "notes" for others to read and read their notes...we think they "mark" territory but nay - they are living "stickies"...