Where Tags and Blogmaps

Steven Johnson, founder and CEO of outside.in did the closing keynote for the first day of Where 2.0 yesterday evening. He started by talking about cholera and his book on the subject called The Ghost Map.

From cholera and Doctor John Snow's map that ultimately solved the mystery of the disease, Steven moved on to placeblogging, geotagging, and maps, suggesting that by mapping blog posts, we can learn so much about life and the neighborhoods we live in, which is the mission of outside.in.

Steven touched on some new stuff that is coming like extensible where tags and the ability to automatically capture the posting activities of part time placebloggers like me. The details on all that will be available from outside.in in a couple weeks.

He then went on to show some cool new things like blogmaps that showcase the places a given blogger has written about (but also showcases all the other bloggers who are writing about that place). Here is the blogmap for The Gotham Gal. Using the blogmap (which will soon become a widget) you can navigate across a city from place to place and placeblog to placeblog.

Steven also showcased a very cool time-based blogmap of downtown brooklyn that shows how the blog conversation has changed over time. I'll add a link to that as soon as it goes up on the outside.in site this morning.

I am biased for sure, because Union Square Ventures is an investor in outside.in and I am on the board, but I found the keynote inspiring on many levels. I believe in the social media/citizen journalism revolution and I think that local bloggers can and will replace local newspapers as the dominant form of local media in the next decade. And hopefully the vision that Steven outlined today will help lead the way.

Comments

[Dawn]

What I care about is how place ties together people and their stories, and makes us understand our common humanity better.

That's one reason I'm also concentrating hard on place regarding my own startup, creating a new category of comics called "news cartoons" which are local stories in cartoon for. Newspapers have fired almost all local cartoonists as part of their short-sighted effort to keep their profit margins at 10%.

My company is like a cartoon syndicate for bloggers, and as I say, space is going to be a big part of that.

We want to implement something I call "decking." There would be a cartoon about a certain place, let's say at the entrance to the King Tut Exhibit, and people could take photos of themselves (or even draw their own pictures) in the same place and add their own word balloons (or not).

Then readers could subscribe to a feed that is either the full deck (all pictures associated with this cartoon) or a partial deck (the pictures associated with this particular copy of the cartoon that is on this blog only).

Way back when, I was an cultural anthropology student at CU Boulder and as my Honors Thesis, I mapped the bathroom conversations, the graffiti from different women's bathrooms on campus, that I had been collecting over the 4 years. It was very interesting and enlightening to see how conversations changed over time and how graffiti in the library was different from graffiti in the business school, which was very different from graffiti in the arts department. It was a fun project that got a lot of attention at the time and got me Magna Cum Laude (whatever the hell that means LOL). I was planning to see how graffiti differed (or not) from campus to campus across the U.S., but then I had a baby, etc. etc.

There's not great bathroom graffiti any more. (This was from 1978-1981) Or maybe I'm just never in the right places for it.

Steven please make sure Outside.in can tell me where to find the best bathroom graffiti in my neighborhood. :)

[P-Air]

On the subject of social media/citizen journalism and local newspapers, it seems to me that there's a combination of what you discuss here that could be meshed w/Scott Karp's thoughts on today's blog post at Publishing 2.0 (http://publishing2.com/2007/05/29/should-google-subsidize-journalism/), that could offer a very powerful vision for what tomorrow's local news reporting could be be about.

Different angles on the same issue for sure, but somewhere in between or as a mashup of ideas, this may have legs.

[Dawn]

Newspapers are supposed to be the fourth branch of government. I don't think Google needs that much more power.

Besides, the web company that is most responsible for killing newspapers is Craigslist, not Google. Google, in fact, helps newspapers.

I think people just need to get over the idea that digital media must be free. Most newspapers aren't free and never have been. Why should journalism be a welfare state in a country that can afford the highest quality reporting and with a citizenry that expects top-notch news?

I wanted to sell copies of cartoons (with smartlinks that couldn't be rightclicked and stolen), with the price based on demand. They would never be more than pennies each and can bring more readership to blogs and more eyeballs to blogs' advertising. But "no, no, no must be free, must be free..." When is the last time anybody tested that?

I would like to know WHY it must be free. I was here for the creation of the web, too. I understand its history. But it is a much different place than it was in 1995 when I first logged on. It's no longer primarily occupied by geeks with a cause, but it's still geeks with a cause who are creating the web 2.0 companies and are still assuming that nobody will pay for services and products.

I think that HUGE assumption needs to be tested instead of automatically accepted as fact.

[Dawn]

btw, my company had mobile comics for a time and learned that people would pay if the purchases became a part of the phone service bill, but not if they had to supply a credit card.

It's easy to assume that's because the parents wind up paying and most kids don't have credit cards, but the fact it, it was true for our adult customers, too.

People are still relunctant to whip out their credit cards for online purchases. I think it's now more of a hassle issue than a security issue.

I think a better idea than getting Google so directly involved in producing journalism is to create a Reuters kind of company that employees topnotch reporters and editorial cartoonists, which consumers of news can OPTIONALLY pay directly via monthly debits, but the stories could be used and seen anywhere. In return, the citizen gets public credit for supporting journalism, via some special, verifiable monthly-updated symbol on their blog, social profile pages, etc.

Then they can feel good about supporting journalism, but not have to whip out their credit card here, there and everywhere.

[Stephen L. McKay]

Fred,

Great post for sure!

I always found Santa Cruz to be a sort of, kind of like, leftover hippy version of Terrytown (in Westchester). Have a safe trip home!

To commenter, Dawn,

Go to Chicago. Graffiti is alive and well in the Rush Street/State St./ Division St. area. Most of it these days however is gang related, and more of a destruction of property, than an expression of art. Some good points though.

[Sandra Burchsted]

I'm very interested in the Buzz Map. It might be a way to track the social life of ideas. I'm working on a project called FringeHog Tags the World. FringeHog Tags the World is a collaborative media project designed to build an interactive database of photographs and images that illustrate emerging ideas and trends impacting the future. It's all open source and the content is user-generated. We're in search of a better mapping tool and interface that will enable users to search the photos according to categories, keywords, geographic locations etc. We haven't found a tool to do this.

[Toby Dayton]

I couldn't agree more that blogs will play an increasingly active role in replacing daily newspapers, if not across the board then certainly from a local and hyper-local perspective. My guess is that it will actually happen faster than your ten-year horizon, as sites like outside.in expand their coverage, participation, depth, and readership. An interesting question will be to what extent daily papers collaborate with and support blogs in order to leverage or harness this phenomena for their own benefit. Given the evidence seen to date, my assumption is that they will resist as long as possible and then capitulate long after the opportunity has passed them by.