Annotating the Planet and Google Maps by Ron Lichty

'We're turning the world into a wiki -- if it's wrong, go log in and correct it yourself.'

Must-read: Future Salon's blog coverage of "Annotating the Planet and Google Maps", a talk at the Accelerating Change conference in Palo Alto Sept. 17 by Jon Udell, lead analyst at InfoWorld, and author of O'Reilly's 1999 book on Groupware, one of the forerunner terms to today's social software.

His own synopsis: "We are turning the physical world into a Wiki, and real landscapes are becoming virtual surfaces for collaborative annotation."

Future Salon's reviewer's synopsis of Jon's talk: "With services such as Google Maps, the physical world becomes a canvas. Jon gives varied examples of Gmaps applications and muses about the location-aware future and how memory is tied intimately to place. He contrasts Amazon's A9 use of professional photographers to provide images of city and town block views with where the future is going: the do-it-yourself creation, annotating, tagging collective. 'We're turning the world into a wiki -- if it's wrong, go log in and correct it yourself.'"

Take the link on the Future Salon blog page to go see the "Google Map of Keene, NH", where Jon has created a brief tour of his hometown, starting with the tree where squirrels built a tree nest out of flags, a feature he's told friends about but never before been able to show anyone. "The physical world becomes a canvas."

For a second set of observations on hacking Google Maps and the implications of annotating the planet, check out Jon's own weblog, where he concludes, "But if the Web has degraded our experience in some ways, it has utterly transformed it in others. Nowadays we're not just using the Web, we're colonizing it."

A lesson in grassroots help, post Katrina by Ron Lichty

How can community and collaboration software help in the aftermath of a disaster?

How do organizations use community and collaboration tools to be more effective?

(What should FEMA be doing? What should it have done?)

In her Mom's Rule post on her Full Circle Online Interaction blog, Nancy White recounts how one woman in Santa Cruz, Grace, reads the CraigsList SOS for help to the shelters from a Mississippi volunteer, super mom Victoria, and offers to be the dispatcher -- via blog, naturally. Read it at Hurricane Katrina Direct Relief!.

Make you think at all about the Howard Dean campaign and what they accomplished, from the grassroots of technology?

While you’re looking at the site, click “Start Here”, or see if there’s something they need that you’ve got.

Back to Full Circle Online Interaction, Nancy's focus since Katrina struck has been community building and communication online. Lots there.

communities of practice by Ron Lichty

While knowledge is often thought to be the property of individuals, a great deal of knowledge is both produced and held collectively. Such knowledge is readily generated when people work together in 'communities of practice'.
—Brown & Duguld CMR, 1998, quoted by Michael Sullivan, IBM, speaking 4/2002 on the topic of Knowledge Management and Knowledge Communities

Create your own music station by Ron Lichty

Intriguing new music service...

Imagine. You're in the mood for "Imagine". Or "My Sweet Lord". Or "Box of Rain". Or Enya or REM.

And what you really want is your own channel and your own personal DJ to queue up an entire afternoon (or week or month) of music just like it.

That's what Pandora does.

They've had dozens of music-savvy listeners coding up tens of thousands of songs for their scores of characteristics in what they've called the Music Genome Project. And they're pretty darned good at matching the mood and essence of what you had in mind. (And if they miss, you can dis their selections.)

Podcast & Blogging user group talks by Ron Lichty

SDForum is starting a new Search SIG, and its first topic is an overview of the audio search market and an in-depth look at podcasting startups, directiories, and tools:

Audio Search : Selling Picks & Shovels at the Podcast Gold Rush
Date of Event : Wednesday, September 14 2005
7:00 PM - 9:15 PM
Sunnyvale


BayCHI, the Computer Human Interface group, will at its next meeting present two speakers on podcasting:

Podcasting: Media Evolution or Revolution? --Doug Kaye, IT Conversations
Podcast Solutions and Podcast Problems --Dan Klass, The Bitterest Pill
Date of Event : Tuesday, September 13
7:00-9:30 pm
Palo Alto


The East Bay IT Group's Blogging & RSS SIG will, in its upcoming meeting, explain measures to go beyond just counting blog hits, and truly understanding blogs' impacts:

Measuring the Blogosphere
Date of Event : Tuesday, September 06, 2005
6:30-9 PM
Emeryville


MIT/Stanford Venture Lab (VLAB) is having the president and CEO of Feedster talk about how his company is building a business around providing vertical search for listings, news, and blogs:

Feedster: Vertical Search - Show Me The Money!
Date of Event : Tuesday, September 20, 2005
6:00 PM Networking, 7:00 PM Presentation
Palo Alto


The SF chapter of the American Marketing Association is hosting a panel of blogging executives who will share their thoughts and ideas on the evolution of online journalism:

Blogging: Leveraging Blogs for Marketing, an Evolution of Journalism
Date of Event : Thursday, September 15, 2005
5:30pm - 7:30pm
San Francisco