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What does it take to be a better neighbor? I'm thinking about what if anything the net can do locally to make you a better neighbor. This is a tricky job for a global internet, because you're trying to build connections and get details about what's going on very close to where you live, and the reach of the net is often best when you're looking for details about something far, far away. The proximate cause for this rumination was a phone call yesterday from a neighbor on my block asking if we had a rice cooker. (We don't - we just use a pot on the stove.) Some little overly-wired piece of me could see a Google map of the neighborhood with little icons showing who within a few minute's walk had added a rice cooker to their "borrow me" inventory, and of course I didn't have that application on any computer other than Saul's pretend computer. There are a lot of Web 2.0 style services that have some amount of local information, though there are many cases where by inspecting the reach of one of these services in a place far from where the developer lives you pretty quickly realize just how thin the data set they are working from. You have overall this odd combination of Web 1.0 (or Web 0.2) local groups of people with really detailed local events and reviews and the like, and Web 2.0 sites with beautiful glossy graphics and data that's so unreliable as to be worthless. If all politics is local, then maybe as things go on, the whole Internet will be local too. You can't just sit in your pod somewhere and plug in and be nowhere and sitting in cyberspace; when you get out of that pod there's a world around you. The net informs that world in so many ways, and there's something there in the thought you might make the neighborhood part of that world a better place. Travel day DTW->SFO I don't have a wireless account for Detroit Metro Airport, and I'm not going to pay $8/day for access. There's some kind of roaming agreement with T-Mobile and SBC though which would probably be the handy thing to do if you were here a lot. Airport employees can buy access for $25/mo. There are "free sites!" you can get to via the airport gateway, but none that I could find that gave free weather reports. I'm glad for my mobile phone. Sunday noon is a good time to get on an airplane - there's nothing like going through short security lines, and people seem friendlier and less rushed than I would ordinariy expect. I was glad I had kept the Orbitz travel notification document in my Blackberry, because the Northwest checkin terminals now prompt you for your confirmation number when you check in. It used to be you could just scan the credit card and go, but now you have to prove you know at least a little bit about the trip. I'll try to get on the plane with a full battery, but I know that most of my productive airport time is spent with a pen and paper and a stack of (prestamped) postcards. Leaving Ann Arbor I will be missing Internet User Experience 2006 at WCC and the IAI Bar Night that Dan Klyn is organizing. |
Last modified: Tuesday, February 21, 2006 at 5:14 AM.
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