US cities in Web 2.0 battle against graffiti
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Flickr style GPS scrawl mashup metatags the taggers American cities have begun to wage war against graffiti artists using the latest consumer tech: namely, integrated digital photography and GPS platforms feeding into a central database run as an online service.â¦
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NEW YORK -- For months, a minor mystery has beguiled the hipsters of this city: Who is splashing paint on New York's highest-profile graffiti?
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Is Microsoft-served ads slowing down Web sites? Plus, what is Ask erasing, and what are the others keeping? And a 'Knight Rider' comeback and more.
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The Web 2.0 application Doppir lets users track their travel and buddies at once.
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The strip of icons promoting social news sites at the bottom of blog posts seems fairly innocuous. But some think this slim slice of real estate is where the web's next great war for eyeballs will be waged. By Michael Calore.
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(InfoWorld) - While drivers are accustomed to using traffic reports to assess road conditions, pedestrians who navigate cities are typically left without aid to determine the best route. But researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology using wikis and the Semantic Web look to change the way people map and navigate their cities. The Wiki City project, run by MIT's SENSEable City Laboratory, aims to apply wiki technology to the mapmaking process. The project's ultimate product will permit anyone to upload content to a map and utilize Semantic Web principles to cross search multiple layers of information. Wiki City Rome, an early incarnation of the project's user-generated maps, used GPS and cell phone data to produce a real-time map during an all-night festival held in the city on Sept. 8. A Web site featuring a satellite image of Rome displayed event locations and the position of buses and pedestrian traffic in real time. Buses equipped with GPS devices fed their locations to the project every minute, while cell phone data was constantly received to show how crowds were moving around the city. An image of the map was also projected in one of Rome's main squares. "If people know about the state of their environment in real time (as opposed to a static map), they can make better informed decisions about how to move about in the city which in term increases efficiency," Kristian Kloeckl, one of Wiki City Rome's team leaders, wrote in an e-mail interview. Wiki City Rome served as an initial step in the Wiki City project. Future projects involve introducing the wiki city concept to other cities that have partnered with the SENSEable City Laboratory. The list currently includes only European cities because their public transportation networks and outdoor spaces correspond with the project's aim of studying how people react and move about in public spaces, Kloeckl said. But the project is applicable to non-European cities, he said. He mentioned that a Boston-area furniture company is interested in placing displays in their products that would show a wiki city map. Wiki City reseachers ultimately want to introduce full wiki concepts to the project and allow any person or business to upload information to a map, Kloeckl said. The wiki method of permitting anyone to add any information lends itself to fraudsters. One possible resolution involves introducing a ranking system similar to the one eBayÂ uses with sellers. "Users supply the rankings. The system is completely independent. People gradually acquire reliability. This approach would be the most coherent for this type of structure," Kloeckl said in a telephone interview. Wiki City wants to combine different levels of data that, when searched, provide an answer incorporating each level of data. In Kloeckl's vision of a person using a full-featured wiki city map, a runner would use the map to search for a jogging course based on a city's traffic and air quality as well as the runner's health. "Now making these layers intersect in a meaningful way should give you a proposal of a jogging path that corresponds to your combined query," Kloeckl wrote. Kloeckl also provided another example in which a person would use a map to locate a store with a specific bottle of wine and plot a course from the store to a friend's home. Some challenges remain before a real-time map helps people navigate their cities. While obvious devices to display a wiki city map include cell phones, PDAs, and smartphones, Kloeckl also wants more utilitarian structures, such as bus stops, to offer access to the maps. "Everyone is familiar with a bus stop," he said. "So it's using the data with objects people are familiar with." User interface issues also require additional thought, Kloeckl said. While users need to access the information with ease, uploading that data to the wiki also requires a simple method, Kloeckl said. He noted that the upload system must require little time and effort since some of the content will come from people who are moving around a city. Finally, the data layers need to be arranged in such a way that a search produces pertinent results. Solving this problem involves further developments in the Semantic Web, an evolving component of the Web being developed by the Worldwide Web Consortium. The Semantic Web aims to take data and apply standards that allow computers to play a greater role in locating, finding, and presenting information. This will permit computers to understand the standards and produce more contextual search results. "We need information that is time and place relevant so it can be queried on a semantic structure," Kloeckl said. "We need a way to structure data so that it can be cross-queried." Pedestrians may eventually turn to interactive maps to avoid the masses or catch a bus, at the same time that their movements become part of the map's display.
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The digital roadside advertisements are springing up around the US, raising safety concerns.
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Cities in the US are using a global positioning software system in their efforts to control graffiti.
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The Web 2.0-social networking phenomenon's seemingly irresistible force field has ensnared yet another niche: travel.
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Three years after 9/11, Manhattan looks shiny and clean. But what has become of its icons: its money, its people and, of course, Rudy? An update on a mending metropolis
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The other week I joined MeetUp.com, the online event, local and &#8220;meeting up&#8221; social networking site, in an effort to meet other bloggers, search marketers, web developers and restaurant snobs in the Tampa area.  I moved to Tampa, Florida last month and SEJ contributor Rhea Drysdale suggested MeetUp as a local networking tool.  So, I [...]
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A vast online network is being used to promote social and environmental responsibility.
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Notorious prisoners' artwork, notes and even nail clippings are hot items online. But a new law might put a stop to it
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This is interesting .  43Things has tags as well!  A lot of people are using the Flickr dynamic and bold font treemap view which I'm not sure is good or bad. I've never been fully happy with this view but a lot of people seem to like it (so what do I know!)
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A new online feature of Google Maps called Street View is stirring up a debate over privacy concerns on the Web.
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By Jon Van, Chicago Tribune  Jun. 16--Chicago should undertake a communitywide campaign to become the nation's most advanced digital city, a mayor's advisory committee report urged Friday.
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SAN FRANCISCO  - Technology is proving crucial as Southern California residents fight raging wildfires. They're using text messages, video, blogs, Google maps and databases to describe the chaos, find missing people and share strategies.