I've been rambling on about Freeschools again. Here's me yesterday explaining how to turn any community into a school by the simple application of a few post-its and a bit of enthusiasm...
Thanks to the ever-sociable David Wilcox for the video, and for his excellent accompanying blog post. And why not join the Sociability Freeschool on our new experimental freeschools site? Let me know what you think of it, and what you could teach me.
The School of Everything went international yesterday. We launched in New York at the NY Tech Meetup, which is terribly glamorous of course, but the exciting bit for me was the process back at Everything HQ of getting our new international locations system working. We've implemented the open gazetteer source Geonames as our locations database, so rather than using the very UK-specific "postcode" lookup we're now handling everything based on names of localities. You enter your location, such as "Clapham" or "Felixstowe", we look it up in Geonames and assign you a location on the map. If Geonames picks the wrong Clapham, we've added a neat disambiguation tool so you can choose which Clapham is right for you.
The data is easy to change in the Geonames database (via their site), which means if your location isn't listed currently, you can add it. We're hoping that over time we can encourage lots of web projects to standardise on Geonames, so that in time we can refine it to be a really comprehensive, open geolocations system for everyone to share.
Take a look at www.schoolofeverything.com now, create a teacher profile, have a play with it and let me know what you think. And if you've got friends around the world who have something to teach, tell them about us!
I've been playing with Platial this week to see if it can give me the functionality I've been wanting for the past year, for geographic bookmarking. I've been playing around with this concept of "Placebook" for some months now, which would be a Facebook app to allow me to bookmark places I want to remember (via my mobile), tag them with metadata like "quiet drink" and "business meeting", share them with only my Facebook friends (or keep them entirely private), and recall them on my mobile when I'm wandering around trying to remember "where that great little bar was that thingy took me to that time when we had the fish. You know?" I'm very happy to say that Platial looks pretty neat and doesn't get bogged down in shackling my places to "official information" such as Google local or UGC venue data - which means I can actually call things "My house" and "The tree where I had my first kiss" and so on. Great news for all you psychogeographers (or "neogeographers") out there. It's also a good interface and seems sufficiently playful, despite some slight clunkiness with the categories and geo-location stuff. (I haven't yet checked what they're using for location data, but I'm really hoping it's the lovely Geonames.)
The bad news though is that, like all these sites, they insist on sharing. I've been saying for a while now that there are some commodities that don't follow the usual rules of the social web, specifically all those which are limited in quantity, such as physical space, or trendspotting. I've been rather ponderously calling this the esoteric web, which simply means any information which needs to be kept secret from the many and shared amongst the few. Put simply, if you tell everyone about your favourite restaurant, the next week you can't get a table. And I definitely don't want to tell everyone else where I live, or where I had my first kiss. Social sites like Trusted Places tend to be full of places we like, but rarely places we love.
So please, dear Platial, here's what I want for Christmas:
Come on, you know it makes sense. Please don't make me have to build it myself, I've got too much to do already.
I write books and speak at conferences about how the future could be better, and start projects to make it happen. Interested in mental health, democracy, education, business leadership and the future of work. Also hats.
Support my work to promote better ways of living and working, by donating to the Mindapples charity or supporting my own work below.
