Social Networking for a Cause July 31, 2007
From corporate-sponsored “Cool Apps” to niche spin-offs like
Bakespace, Virb and I’m In Like With You, online communities are still largely about socializing and/or wasting time. Their potential as powerful tools for the greater good—beyond finding out where the party’s at—has been largely untapped, but we managed to find a few. The following are some of the latest and best sites where social networking meets social change.
A virtual soapbox for the online masses, the U.K.-based Friction TV is an online forum for public debate launching in the U.S. next month. Like YouTube for social activists, it features largely uncensored content aiming to exercise freedom of speech and catalyze online debate in a social forum.
Nabuur uses an online platform to efficiently connect experts to people seeking advice from all over the world. From construction workers to math teachers and MBAs, online volunteers from different continents help individuals develop business ideas and finish projects. Projects like building schools and health clinics get a boost from direct assistance via the internet.
Helping to solve environmental and humanitarian problems, HumaniNet is a space to share Geographic Information Systems (GIS) to better map rural locations in need of relief. By sharing GIS developments online, experts and users can implement the latest technologies, which makes getting around uncharted territories to reach people in need a whole lot easier.
Recently graduating out of Beta phase as of a couple weeks ago, Get Miro is open-source software for online video. Like Firefox, Miro is developed by a nonprofit organization and driven by the social mission to make it easy for anyone to subscribe and view free internet video on any topic. A well-designed interface and attractive aesthetic make it one of the better HD players out there today.
H.E.L.P. (Humanitarian Emergency Logistics & Preparedness) is a telemedicine-based online community of physicians and financial donors bringing advanced medical assistance to disaster zones and areas of humanitarian need around the world.
Building on Muhammad Yunus’ Nobel prize-winning efforts at pioneering a new category of banking known as micro-loans, Kiva is a site that connects the world’s poorer populations looking to develop unique business ideas to people with disposable incomes while providing a transparent lending platform. Donate as little as $25 dollars to help start a business or simply buy a goat and get repaid.
Designed to highlight the connection between money and politics as a way to promote reform, MAPLight links campaign contributions and votes. Providing a transparency so that journalists and citizens can hold legislators accountable, customized widgets further enhance functions and research on any issue.
Combining social networking with the environmental movement, the four year-old site Freecycle creates a global gift economy in an nonprofit online community. If you’re looking for a bike, someone might be throwing one out on Freecycle. Reducing unnecessary waste, Freecycle is a “cyber curbside” that connects people and decreases our impact on the environment
James Fallows at electronics market in ShenZhen
Mark Frauenfelder:
James Fallows narrates an Atlantic slideshow with photos from his trip to China, including a visit to a 7-story tall electronics bazaar with “thousands of little tiny vendors” selling every electronic gadget and component you could ever want. Link
To Catch a Web, Part Two
Our second video on
Emil Fiore, New Jersey’s only spiderweb catcher, ventures into the forest to watch a few “catches.” Going a little deeper than Part One (which documented the capture of one web), this episode looks more closely at his process, as well as the spiders and their webs themselves.
Odd fetish toy: Pussy Foot
Mark Frauenfelder:
This the only SFW image of a fetish toy called the Pussy Foot. The photos on the site are not safe for work.
Pussy Foot is the ultimate fantasy sex toy for foot fetishists. This size 6, 100% silicone foot is cast in pure silicone from a real life actual, beautiful female foot. In the sole of this lovely foot is a fully functional and totally f***-able silicone vagina.
A surreal and supremely inane compendium of miscellaneous knowledge, Vol 6
Mark Frauenfelder:
Everybody loves peanuts etched with business card information (except people allergic to nuts) (Via Candy Addict)
Video — MIT’s undulating Hyposurface.
Snarky comments about disgusting-looking retro food and fashion. (Thanks,
Charlie!)
Meth-heads are stealing copper wire from California irrigations systems.
Hilarious and weird video of Adult Treasure expo in Japan (NSFW)
“Protest technology” - White noise projector
Guns on robots
Mark Frauenfelder:
The late underground cartoonist Vaughn Bode, who created a comic book universe about war-fighting machines, would have been interested in this military robot that’s armed with a rifle and has been deployed in Iraq.
SWORDS is designed to take on “high risk combat missions,†according to an Army statement. A specialist controlling the robot could send it into a potentially dangerous situation, such as a narrow street infested with snipers, seek targets and take them out before a foot patrol follows.
Maybe the enemy could also use robots like this and we could just let the robots fight the war on our behalves.
Reader comment:
Pete says:
Sounds fine to me…so long as it doesn’t wind up being like that Star Trek episode in which the wars were simulated in computers, and then the projected casualties were enforced on real people.
Ivan says:
I don’t have any web link to corroborate the story, but you might find it amusing anyway.
In response to robots like the Talon and PackBot used to disarm road-side bombs, insurgents decided robotics couldn’t be that hard. They strapped an artillery-shell bomb to a cart, and powered it with parts from a window-mounted air-conditioner. They aimed it at a bomb-disposal team, let it go, and without any navigation or sensing it promptly crashed into a ditch. As everyone at iRobot knows, making robots is hard!
Cory W says:
According to the Washington Post, Soldiers tend to get very attached to their robots.
Sean says:
Interesting and slightly creepy that SWORD was the name of the *fictional* autonomous weapon system that runs amok (in classic robot-rebellion fashion) in the Peter Weller movie “Screamers,” based on Phillip Dick’s “Second Variety.” Life imitates art in a particularly ominous way.
Central Illustration Agency
The CIA looks like a great source of inspiration (or procrastination). No, not that CIA. The Central Illustration Agency.
Vending Machine Safety
Vending machines are ubiquitous in big, crowded Japanese cities. Wouldn’t it be great if they did more than dispense cold bottles of green tea and hot cans of coffee? Like, what if they could also protect people? In Osaka, they can.
Security company
Network Security Japan (NSJ) has created a network in the city’s hipster hub Amerika-mura (American Village), an area packed with cafes, clothing stores, clubs and bars. The network integrates antennas placed on vending machines with portable panic buttons.
Here’s how it works: if a woman is being followed or harassed, she presses her panic button, which are even outfitted with a web cam. Called a “robot locator,” the panic button sends notification to the NSJ command center. Via antenna, the company is able to pinpoint the location, and an NSJ guard in a mini-car or on a bicycle comes directly to that specific video machine.
Since NSJ patrols the area, the service conceivably should be more responsive and faster than calling the cops. And it only costs ¥300 ($2.52) a month to join. That’s the same price as two bottles of lactic beverage Calpis Water from a vending machine. Cheap!
by Brian Ashcraft
Archie becomes tool for the RIAA
Mark Frauenfelder:
Abhishek says:
Seems the RIAA has got to Archie too! The very first story in Archie #577 (September 2007) is a cautionary tale for kiddies called “Record Breaker” wherein all those leechers (and wannabe leecher kids) out there are taught that they’re the ones responsible for driving their favorite artists into penury and worse perhaps.
Seems no-one informed them about Prince’s business model and how he’s been doing a pretty good job of it, or is this story RIAA’s response to the new avenues for revenue that Prince is trying to tap into - avenues, in fact, that don’t involve suing and pissing off the hitherto loyal fans?
Official story description can be found here.
A page from the story where The Archies realise that file sharing has ‘ruined’ them [is shown above].
All I can say is, I’ve never seen an organization so hell-bent on its own destruction and I doubt we ever will again. Of course, we *do* have Hollywood, Major League Baseball…
(I’ll bet it was this dirty rat what stole Archie’s song).
Previously on Boing Boing:
• Letters to Archie Club newsletter, circa 1979
• Creationist Archie comic
• Little Archie anthology due any day
• Scans of Spire Christian Comics
William Gibson’s Spook Country
Cory Doctorow:
In his new novel Spook Country, William Gibson take science fiction to an amazing, unseen world: the recent past. Following on from his 2003 novel, Pattern Recognition, Spook Country tells the story of a cadre of spies, artists, and losers who collide in the roiling turmoil of twenty-first century, destabilized geopolitics.
The cast of characters in this book is gigantic and deeply weird. There’s Hollis Henry, a faded pop star who finds herself covering the “locative art scene” for a magazine that may or may not exist — and that may or may not be associated with Hubertus Bigend, the powerful and lunatic branding exec from Pattern Recognition. Hollis injects the novel with introspection about fame, micro-fame, fleeting fame, and art.
There’s Tito, a kind of Cuban ninja, trained by the KGB and raised by a family of heroic spooks, now come to America and gone to ground. He is the excuse for a series of marvellous and meticulously researched spycraft sequences that have the technical fascination of the best technothrillers.
There’s Brown, a savage wet-work off-the-books American spook (who may or may not still work for the US government), and his hostage, a junkie translator who is cuffed and kicked into listening in on the Russo-Cuban connection. Brown acts as a kind of meditation on the nature of deep secrecy, the unknowable world of the black-ops spook who can never be sure who he’s working for and whether he’s gone off the reservation.
Then there’s the “locative art” kids, “VR” hackers who create 3D virtual sculptures that can only be seen while wearing goggles and standing in just the right place. These kids are Gibson’s not to his bastard child, “cyberspace,” the word he coined in 1982, which has been pimped out by every dot-bomb con-man and gormless policy wonk in the world at this point.
These characters inhabit the exciting, futuristic world of 2006. And it is a futuristic place, our recent past, a place so weird and light-speed that we don’t even notice it. Not until a master storyteller and keen observer like William Gibson comes along to show us what we’re all living in.
Above all else, this is an exciting and vivid adventure novel, a book that you can’t put down (I ended up sitting in a parking lot for an hour, unable to tear myself away from the last 70 pages). That is Gibson’s special talent, the thing that makes him — and science fiction — such a powerful force for change in the world. Gibson has an agenda, a lot of keen observations, a philosophy, but they’re wrapped up in a delightful coating of adventure and excitement.
It’s a hard combination to beat — a book that makes you smarter and sets your pulse racing while it fires your imagination. It’s been four long years since we had a new Gibson novel, but it was worth the wait. This may be my favorite Gibson book of all time.
See also:
William Gibson explains why science fiction is about the present
William Gibson on writing in the age of Google