"UpMyStreet Conversations: Mapping Cyber to Space"
So. A bit delayed. Sorry to all concerned. I'll post later about the experience of delivering a paper at Emerging Tech later, when I've had a chance to assimilate the whole experience, but if you're looking for the PowerPoint presentation then here it is: UpMyStreet Conversations: Mapping Cyber to Space (5.7Mb). The paper was cowritten by myself, Stefan Magdalinski and Matt Webb.
"Mad props" to Webb by the way, who somehow managed to keep me sane through the whole thing and forced me to finish writing the thing by suggesting he might cause me physical pain - I'm a bit euphoric so I'm going to say that he's one of my favourite people in the world at the moment. If people notice any hideous typos or mistakes through it, then let me know and I'll amend it straightaway.
Comments
Please stay on-topic, informative and polite. I reserve the right to remove comments for whatever vague capricious reasons seem reasonable at the time.
"If people notice any hideous typos or mistakes through it, then let me know and I'll amend it straightaway."
Looks great. You might want to take out the line about Tim O'Reilly being a CIA employed crack dealer, though.
→ Posted by: Tom Steinberg at April 25, 2003 1:54 AM
If anyone's looking for more information on this stuff or wants to see the imagery that we ran before the presentation, then check out Stef's commentary. Hopefully now he'll be getting some sleep and stop sending diagrams across the Atlantic!
→ Posted by: Tom Coates at April 25, 2003 3:09 AM
Great presentation, Tom! I loved the content and your delivery. I especially liked that you discussed the problems you ran into, possible solutions, and the solutions that you adopted, rather than just the polished final product. Very helpful.
→ Posted by: Michael Morrissey at April 25, 2003 7:28 AM
A good presentation, but had I been there I would have asked about a third axis for grouping - subject. There is no way to group threads by subject. I know there are lots of subject-based messageboards already out there but what if UMS for whatever reason is your main message forum? I suspect it would be useful to help to organise people's thoughts (and to help cross-regional activism, for example) if there were some way of overlaying subject groupings on postings as a filter. What do you say to that? I take it you considered it at some point...
→ Posted by: David Brake at April 25, 2003 9:45 AM
Grouping by subject is something we thought about right at the beginning of the project and I was initially very keen on. We had a very simple model as well - we'd just replicated the board as many times as we wanted and name each one differently. The integration would all be done at the side of the UI. But to put in different subject areas would have resulted in a more sparse data-set and in turn would have resulted in people losing that sensation of locality... In the end - at least to start off with - we figured that wasn't a particularly good idea...
→ Posted by: Tom Coates at April 25, 2003 4:34 PM
Hey Tom, in that good-mannered, free-spirited nature of the web, I'd like to donate two phrases for your, and anyone else's, non-comercial and commercial, or whatever, use. They're rights-unreserved and about as creative and common as you'd like. Beg or steal, I care not.
If Metafilter is discussion based on time (in a way), could we call it a 'timeblog'? And therefore, if upmystreet is discussion based on place, is it therefore a kind of 'placeblog'? If most weblogs are based on time, and therefore a timeblog, could a weblog be based on the reader's place and display different info depending on that? Like how Jason Kottke put that special version of his site up for people accessing it from the conference? Or how the BBC gives you two different home pages depending on where you tell it you're from?
Does that make sense? It's probably been done before. Maybe people can expound upon it now I've typed in this rambling nonsense. Still, I like the pair of names I thought up in my stupor...
→ Posted by: James at April 26, 2003 3:35 AM