For example, how can it be possible that I, as a Cuban citizen, cannot buy a car or rent a hotel room? Or that living in Cuba I cannot visit certain of our beautiful keys and beaches… or how to understand that I am harassed as I enter the lobby of a certain hotel just because I am a Cuban citizen.
Thousands of times I have wondered to myself: why? They say it is because of the embargo… I cannot be rent a room in the Hotel because of the embargo, I cannot buy the car because of the embargo, I cannot travel abroad because of the embargo, I cannot have a cellular phone because of the embargo, I cannot have Internet at home because of the embargo.
But the difference is that if you are a foreigner in Cuba, if you want a car, the embargo offers it to you, thus also the embargo offers beaches, the keys and the hotels to you. It is an implicit contradiction of the “idea of the embargo”. that only is understood by some ¨illuminated civil servants¨…
Seb, Jane and I are re-designing our culture portal network’s web presence. Based on the Mojito Manifesto we developed in Cuba, we would like a lightweight portal to connect us all. A flat structure which everyone is easily to join in. An interchangeable reputation / credit system, where current virtual currencies of web 2.0 applications is welcome to circulate. Everyone is a specialist, and we need a connected pipes system to address that kind of open richness.
Wordpress.com is the already mature tool we use to build the original portal. On the left side of the front page, I dreamed of an interactive scene of community people’s activities. Just like Plazes.com’s online badge, Map Widget, combining map and human activities is really an impressive way to share your activities on the earth with like-minded friends.
But certain presentation tools are all bounded to one important question: how to input information/data in such connected, ubiquitous way? How to run a web service with continuous information supply and satisfy audiences from all directions? If we again take geospatial web application as example, Plazes.com use your wifi / LAN connection to calibrate your place (plaze), and publish (announce) your location whenever the network connection is changed. In such a VIP secretary fashion, your Plazer tells the world and the online web widget gets continuously published / announced information. If you are not that serious about your personal privacy and location information, the certain combination is a good collaboration to produce a not-costly service.
So far there’s only person-centered map widget: there is no community-based location tracker to present where a group of people are located. And since we are distributed in essence, it is more interesting to read what we are doing than knowing where we are. If I want to represent many people’s continuous activities across the globe, right now I could resort to RSS feed first. Twittervision is the first of its kind of streaming geoinfo google map application. But is there any kind of personal twittervision? (I couldn’t login twittervision with my twitter ID…) I don’t know. So I picked up Jaiku.com’s online personal widget and channel widget.
I think this is the first step to visualize community’s participants and their actions. Some specialities to distinguish one from another, like face-roll, favoricon and located-ness, could let us to know each other more in a kind of “cumulative way”. This is what Clive Thompson called “the social sixth sense”(WIRED.com)
Valid XHTML
