Here's a question. What might be the map of "The New Local"? What would be the countries, the states, the cities, the towns, and the neighborhoods of this territory that we see as important? Is it even a reasonable question?
Would we need new technologies to browse such a map? Or are there already websites in place that are tracking this?
6 comments:
What a great question Harold.
We have been conditioned to think ‘geography’ and this new local is not about ‘geography’. The new local is about ‘community of interest’. Geography is not a limiting factor. People can join or leave that community without leaving their seat!
I think we will have to use our imagination in a most creative way to design a map.
I was just thinking ….It is really interesting that I live in a street in Birmingham, England and many people live in our street. Yet I feel I know more about Walter, and Harold many thousands of miles away than I do about my immediate neighbours. That re-defines what local means.
I would be really interested to hear views on this one.
A map of the new local? What i visualize is not a 2 dimensional traditional map but rather a three dimensional matrix that at times is not even continuous but rather jumps entire areas. Yikes! Perhaps I'm starting to get a little too abstract here.
An interesting respresentation might be seen at http://www.kartoo.com/en_index.htm
Enter a search term and see what I mean.
I just came across this search engine recently and its graphic representation is somewhat similar to mind mapping representations. Perhaps a map of the new local would look something like this.
Wow, nice set of new potential topics brought up here.
Trevor and Paul, the geography of interest seems to be what the web has tried to map with their search engines. They don't really map who lives there, or the streets and roads, but I think you've nailed the foundation of the thing.
Physical geography isn't really static either, the earth has changed over time, and sometimes dramatically over very little time from earthquakes or storms, sea coasts change, rivers shift, etc. Once you've lived through a few political map changes too, it becomes clear how dynamic those are as well. Good software could make those changes more evident. We'd need good software to visualize the new local map.
Walter, that kartoo map is pretty cool, it's definitely on to something with attempting to visually map this new territory. I'd love to see something that can do it in 3D. I know of one other visual mapping for a search engine, Grokker, which uses interactive 2D. And of course, there are many search engines that map the internet without providing a visual map.
I've worked on a few visual browsing software projects, it's one of Inxight's areas of expertise, though not explicitly for browsing the web or social networking or the general internet.
Our social network could use a map, it seems to be where the new local really "lives", at least maybe. A service like Technorati which allows you to search for all blogs related to a topic. This map changes rapidly. There are also nice services for mapping your own social network, like LinkedIn, but I just found a whole bunch of online social networking sites at wikipedia.
I think the "geography" thing is a bit of a red herring. Folks need to know where Australia is, what are the states of America, which way is north, how to read a traditional street map and so forth.
More interesting to me is the idea of mapping.
Ultimately, all mapping is doing is trying to represent something pictorially. I think the crux of it might be to understand what the key of the map is. A map of Germany is pretty straightforward: we all know how this type of map works as it has evolved over time. A political map of the country would show how it's voters voted last time round and is a development of the traditional map. We're probably all familiar with process or decision mapping, too.
I'm not so sure about the Kartoo thing. It seemed to be a fairly straightforward web search rendered into pretty graphics: I did a couple of searches and there was still a lot of irrelevant or unrelated content - albeit very prettily represented!
I think the new local is more like trying to map neural networks in that it links both geographically and functionally related neurons.
Maybe the point about the new local is that it's, if not actually unmappable, then it's an evolving organism because it's about projects and community of interests that can arise, flourish and die. However, if you want to be able to stick it "in the atlas" (ie make it searchable) all the while - however brief - it's alive then I guess the key becomes the function and not the proximity, which we're all agreed is becoming increasingly irrelevant.
Just back from two trips in two weeks. One to Washington DC and the other to Atlanta. Leave later this week for Florida and next for New York City. (I'm not even a traveling salesman although one wouldn't know it from my schedule.
Harold the Grokker concept is pretty cool. I was also pretty intrigued with InXight. Great concept!
LinkedIN is cool but check out myspace.com - both of my kids and all of their friends are active. It is truly a social network system that has reached mainstream. People marketing to kids would be well advised to study this phenomenon.
Mark - I actually do think that our social networks in cyberspace are mappable. One can generally record IP addresses and trace routes and could conceiveably create a map of communications. I think I agree with the unmappable view in the sense that such a "map" would not be static. It would be a constantly changing representation - wholely unlike a fixed chart map such as those used in navigation.
Paulh - the money and power question in the new local is currently at Google but it will be reapportioned after the next big evolutionary step!
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