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Net Sticky Notes All Over London

Posted by timothy on from the all-over-everywhere-would-be-good dept.

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."

6 of 201 comments (clear)

  1. And the mobile phone operator GETS RICH by Jarnis · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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!!!!

  2. Idea by laserbeak · · Score: 5, Insightful

    A city could use this to their advtantage, by leaveing electrnoic notes near landmarks with information about the landmark... could boost tourism.

  3. Public authoring good, but misuse concerns looms by toesate · · Score: 5, Insightful
    The idea of public authoring sounds good, just think about wikipedia.org.

    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
  4. only a matter of time by voudras · · Score: 5, Insightful

    before someone sticks a note like "this resturant sucks", which initiates some slander suit of some sort - ugh.

  5. More Insidious Uses by BlackHawk-666 · · Score: 5, Insightful
    How about revenge stuff like:

    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.
  6. Sort of like Usenet overlaid on the world by serutan · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.