Introducing... UpMyStreet Conversations...

Posted November 6, 2002 5:29 PM.

So I can finally tell the world what I've been working on for the last few months - and in fact, more to the point, I can finally try and get some of you people to try it out.

UpMyStreet Conversations is a new kind of online community site for the UK. In some ways it's almost anti-web. Where the web has "traditionally" been about uniting people on the basis of shared interests no matter where they live in the world, this site takes as its first assumption that people who live nea one another already have at least one shared interest - their local environment... But this interest is increasingly not catered for - people in cities are talking less and less to one another. In fact most of us barely communicate with our neighbours at all. And the vasy majority of the social spaces that we all used to share have been dismantled or evaporated. So how can we expect communities self-organise? And how are they expected to join together politically? How can they protest about problems where they live?

So this is the cool bit - it works on a really simple principle that scales and adapts really well to changes in posting. And while it's geographically based, it's not based on legislative or government boundaries. And a lack of population density doesn't mean you'll be sitting in an empty board with no one to talk to, either, because the posts you see reflects your local population density...

Well anyway... I'm not going to go into too much detail at the moment, because it should be pretty self-explanatory and i want to see how people engage with it... Let me know what you think...