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The City is my new favorite search engine

I just got done (well I have about 40 more pages to go) with the futuristic sci-fi novel by Vernor Vinge Rainbows End. I was prompted to read this novel when I posted my intrigue regarding the augmented reality feature of the Yelp iPhone application, by my buddy Greg Bahr. I don’t usually read the sci-fi genre of books, but I was pleasantly surprised with the tight plot structure and swift pace that the book adhered to. Why am I telling you this? Well, throughout this book the future people access a wealth of information that is intelligently disseminated. In other words the producers of content were able coordinate their submissions to the virtual “fire hose” of information.

This brings me to the current little fire that was sparked with the mention of government and social media. Apparently there is interest, at least with the little group my Tweetdeck so lovingly refers to Stockton Tweeple. Think of the possibilities of aggregating information on a civic level in a uniform fashion. It is this very thing that the get-rich-quick community has been trying to with their busted ass search engines that scour the internet, producing lackluster results. Think if we could get all of, or even most of, the content producers within a community to buy into a best practices standard for a community.

Our band of brothers here in Stockton is on the trail that we think leads to the dissemination of the civically relevant content. We are lucky enough to have a City that is willing to listen (scroll to the comments). Now rather than wait for the City to roll out a brand new hunk of junk website that doesn’t work symbiotically with the content providers within our community, we must form an alliance to ensure the usability we crave. I like the idea of a City portal that I am able to go and view the logically tagged events. Now this will not happen all on one side or the other. It will be an effort of the team nature. And with that effort no person will have the ability to be taken advantage of, we hope.

Rather than reinvent the wheel, let’s take a look at a governmental institution that through teamwork has successfully organized a seemingly unrelated mountain of information. A public library. To the untrained eye the library seems like a menagerie of books stacked to the ceiling with no true order. However, as I have done in the name of expediency, if you ask a library attendant to find a book, they proceed to use the best practice standard that has been implemented, and find the book with ease and efficiency. Now this is not to say that the untrained individual that is in search of the book would have never found the book, but it does say that with order, the retrieval of the information is both beneficial to the producer and the consumer. The producer is better served to accommodate the request of the consumer with ease and the consumer receives the information requested in a matter of time that would not have been possible without a logical best practice standard.

The best practice standard has evolved over time to accommodate the advent of more efficient technology, within the library. So much that a library patron has access to the library inventory through the web in these “high tech” times. This is beneficial to the consumer in the interest of making efficient usage of your time, aka no wasted trips. We could even spin this for the greeniacs, but I won’t digress.

All this talk of libraries, has me feeling guilty that the places that I loved so much as a child, I never go to. But that is another post. In the metaphorical story of the library its books, an answer starts to materialize. What if the City website was the library? The books, well the books are the mountains of civically relevant information available on websites that are in the “library”. And if you aren’t all the way stupid, you will have figured out that you play the same role in both scenarios, the patron, or consumer.

Think of it, a symbiotic open working platform that subscribes to a best practice standard. Not only would the political, governmental mumbo jumbo, be present and filed away, but the events, social interaction, community pulse. All of this information could be searchable through the “new and improved” City portal that has worked diligently with the interested public to offer such a service. The information could even be aggregated in cool little widgets that could be offered as iPhone applications or desktop client application displaying the day’s most popular, or what people are talking about in the form of meta information that is entered when a link is submitted to the City portal.

As the provider of the content that wishes to attract a crowd to the City of Stockton you are not left out of the loop, you will merely supply the civically relevant information submit a link through a secure and literally spam free form, attach tags and viola you are now Stockton Certifiably Relevant.

The open portion of the platform would allow all the users of the portal to also attach tags to each respective event based upon their likes. Such as I search art show, find Snap Jackson’s latest photo gallery being displayed at the Tidewater Cafe, I might tag this as badass, or must see. Now not only does the event carry the best practice standard metadata (ie tags), but it also carries my personalized tags that my friends and I use to describe events. This is how the engine would evolve would be by the monitoring of the most used tags and popular links. The pulse of the City could be realized resulting in a vibrant well informed group of citizens.
In the name of, I don’t want to steal any more of your precious time, we will leave this thought to ferment in the minds of the believers.

Keep the conversation going, keep innovating and always stay fresh.

This is only the beginning.