It’s something I’ve been going on about for a long time, but as an exercise in explaining it quickly I entered it as a proposal in MySociety’s Call for Proposals 2009. Here’s what I wrote:
Describe your idea:
A new delicious tagging plugin that also harnesses the power of location services — so that it bookmarks where people find things interesting.
It could use triple tags to simply add a geo-attention “point†to each item bookmarked.
This tagging could then be used by anyone to see where bookmarks were interesting.
What problem does it solve?:
All attempts to collate and distribute local information are stymied by the fact that placing most information “on a map†is complex (council decisions, govt dept decisions affect discreet boundaried areas, news either has a “spot†and fade in influence or something more esoteric). People don’t do it, or the tech isn’t there for them to.
Coming at it from the other angle would give a sort of heatmap of influence which could prove useful for all sorts of projects — particularly those interested in local news and democracy.
Does that sound worthwhile? Please comment on the MySociety page.
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