Archive for January, 2009

A Downside to Geotagging?

Jan 27, 2009 Live Local

“Geotagging” is a term being used now when photos and things posted online are tagged with their geographical locations.

In an article for this month’s Wired magazine, Mathew Honan writes about his recent experience using GPS tracking and Geotagging. While many people are excited about the availability of Geotagging, especially with the advanced features on the popular Apple iPhone, others are becoming more concerned with the privacy issues this may reveal. Mathew Honan is one of them:

To test whether I was being paranoid, I ran a little experiment. On a sunny Saturday, I spotted a woman in Golden Gate Park taking a photo with a 3G iPhone. Because iPhones embed geodata into photos that users upload to Flickr or Picasa, iPhone shots can be automatically placed on a map. At home I searched the Flickr map, and score—a shot from today. I clicked through to the user’s photostream and determined it was the woman I had seen earlier. After adjusting the settings so that only her shots appeared on the map, I saw a cluster of images in one location. Clicking on them revealed photos of an apartment interior—a bedroom, a kitchen, a filthy living room. Now I know where she lives.

Granted this woman doesn’t have to use a Flickr account, and she doesn’t even need to upload the photos to the Internet, but this does raise some very interesting privacy issues. Are people even aware of the geotagging functions for their accounts? Do they know how to shut them off?

As a website for local communities we tend to look at the amazing possibilities Geotagging will have for localizing the Internet, but the privacy issue is definitely a good concern to have. We hope to eventually incorporate ways of using Geotagging on TownSync, but the most important thing for us will be to allow users control over their own privacy.

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How President Obama’s Stimulus Plan can Help the HyperLocal Internet

Jan 27, 2009 Businesses, Live Local

President Obama presented an $825 billion economic stimulus plan this month, $6 billion of which is proposed to expand high-speed Internet access in rural and undeserved communities. The theory is that spreading Internet access to underprivileged communities will help build jobs and increase innovation and efficiency in the US.

This is very exciting for those of us involved in HyperLocal content as it will only make the possibilities for localizing the Internet even stronger. Areas still using dial-up modems to connect to the Internet will have access to broadband connections. We will begin to see more people from these small areas joining social networks, starting blogs and connecting more openly with others online.

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Build Your Company’s Community Online – Gary Vaynerchuk

Jan 26, 2009 Businesses, Community, Video

Gary Vaynerchuk is an entrepreneur who has mastered the art of building a personal brand. He operates two websites (Wine Library TV, and GaryVaynerchuk.com) and gives many speeches on building a brand and running a successful business. In this talk (video below) Gary discusses how small businesses should build their community of users/clients and why it is important for any business, big or small, to be passionate about doing this. Here are a few key points he touches on:

  • Have a face behind your company
  • Join any community that can reach even a single person
  • Show that you care about your users and clients
  • Have patience, the social-media sphere is just beginning
  • Become a part of your community

When you watch this we hope you will think about the ways TownSync can connect your business to the local community as well as build your brand online.

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How local will a TownSync Community be?

Jan 23, 2009 Live Local, TownSync

The ZipDecoder by Ben Fry

A very interesting site by Ben Fry called “ZipDecoder” breaks the United States down by zip-codes visually. This sparked our interest as we thought it would give our users a better idea of just how local a TownSync Community can be. We suggest you check out the site, and keep in mind that TownSync will have a Community for every one of these zip-codes!

Here is the link

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The Web’s Future is “Town”

Jan 16, 2009 Live Local, TownSync

We recently read an interesting article written in the BBC called “The web’s future is ‘village.” The article goes into detail, and interviews a man from HP named Bernardo Huberman, about how people are connected to thousands of people online but they really only pay attention to a few of them, “… enough people to fill a village.”

In our case, however, it’s a town. The concept of TownSync was based on the idea that people currently aren’t connecting with others online that are close enough to affect them in the real world. Hyperlocal networking is a way to connect people that matter to you. What’s going on in your area? Who’s new to town? What’s the best place to play pool nearby? These are questions we hope TownSync will help answer for those connecting on the site.

Here are few quotes from the article, and here’s the link, enjoy!

Despite the desire to have the world of information at our fingertips and a social networking page that boasts of hundreds of so-called “friends”, the reality is very different.

Researchers at Hewlett Packard have found that, in truth, we really only bother about a handful of friends and generally visit a small number of websites.

“With Facebook many people boast of having 100, 200 friends but in reality only keep up or track a very few of them.”

On this basis Mr Huberman concludes that we are returning to a time where we maintain close contact with a small number of people – enough people to fill a village.

“Things are starting to become intimate again,” he said. “We went through this explosion, this illusion that the world is at my fingertips and I can reach anyone and everybody. But at the end of the day we notice that we actually interact with very few.”

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