brewery33

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.

Where is the conversation?

First and foremost, a shout to my fellow blogging gang homey, @slickdiaz, who shouted out the brewery33 voice over on his turf. He fights the good fight of intellectualism while staying fresh with brevity. If I am giving props to one of the Stockton peeps then I can’t leave out the one and only @podcaststockton. Matt puts an actual voice to the plight of “most miserable” City in the United States and shows you that you can’t believe everything you read (especially anything here). If you are interested in either one of these guys I have placed some links over on the right hand side of the blog for you enlighten your Stockton mind. .

And now the news………..

Amongst all of the hubbub surrounding the latest uprising of the 6 people in Stockton that use social media, I have tried to find clarity within the questions of new media tactics implemented by our public sector. Of course, me being the geek that I am, I would love to see them make use of this brand new and shiny technology that currently is the object of my desire, besides my wife and daughter naturally. Just look at the success that I have realized within the space, I can now “talk” to 6 other techno-weenies just like myself and we can go on and on about the latest client application’s strengths and weaknesses.

I hope that my sarcasm present in the above text has jumped off the page and punched you out. I have been told to successfully use sarcasm in text form is the mark of a master. Since I am only a hack blogger, I must make you aware of my futile attempts at using the advanced literary tool.

I think that it is in the best interest of the establishment to at least attempt to create a conversation regarding the new media issue. That is all this whole thing we call the social web, or web 2.0, or new media, is, a conversation. We have evolved from the static web of the ‘90’s to the interactive web of today. Our browsing habits are changing as information is aggregated. Gone are the days of copy and pasting links to yourself in emails to read it later, now we can bookmark. Remember when you used to have check in on a site every day to see if your favorite portal posted any new nugget of information that you could then ravenously consume? Yep that is gone too with the advent of RSS.

The means of communication are in the midst of an awkward growth spurt that is akin the adolescent male battle with puberty. The change is discomfited. We are uneasy. We don’t understand why we are growing hair in strange spots. OK, except for that last descriptor, the similarities are uncanny. But think of this, the State of California thinks that the pubescent changes that your body experiences are so confusing that curriculum has been conceived to educate our grammar and middle school brood. So why do we shy away from the use or implementation of the uncomfortable yet inevitable change in transmission of information.

The implementation of this new dimension of discourse that is available to our communities can only heighten the awareness of our issues. This use of the shiny new technological toy can only be useful upon educating ourselves about the capabilities and limitations of the medium. In order to educate a community of people regarding the power of new conversation, is to do just that converse. Along with that conversation we should do a little experimentation.

I don’t claim to have the answer to the quandary, but I will say that I have at least recognized that there is opportunity to be realized. Another thing, if I decided that my way was right, wouldn’t that be the antithesis of my concern? I invite the critics. I want to hear the concerns surrounding this nary talked about issue.

So I invite all the Stockton Tweeps to blog, tweet, hell if you want to get out from in front that 22” widescreen monitor and talk to some actual people then have at it. Stockton has the potential to lead a informational revolution, as we are one of the most diverse cities in the good old US of A. What if we had an actual intelligent conversation regarding the use of new media?

Excuse the curt ending to this post, as my mind was just blown.

Stay searchable in 2009 

Think of Twitter as a loud room where a bunch of self centered people are incessantly updating us about the trials and tribulations of their otherwise boring lives. As we have all read, the Twitter community has the doors wide open and people are filling the room at a break neck pace. With more people filing into the already acoustically challenged space, the conversation becomes muffled and borders on becoming insignificant.

The caveat of Twitter is that it is a conversation, and lots of good information is passed from one person to the next. However there remains a “dead zone”, if you will, of potentially interesting figures espousing useful information nuggets that you will never see because of your non-existent standing relationship, aka “follow”. Or on the other hand, you might be attending an event that you would like to separate the conversation of the attendees from the lifestyle tweeters.

This conundrum has plagued the Twitter faithful. The only real solution to this problem has been to include a hash tag in your tweet (example: #brewery33isthebest). Now this is a fairly solid answer to the quandary of filtering the conversation. The catch however is the education of the people that will be joining your conversation. The guys at Techcrunch were successful in this venture by instructing their potential conversation team members to tweet a #TC50 at the end of their tweet to be included in the stream. This sounds easy, but trust me, getting people to comply with a rule en mass is no small feat.

What this hash tag will do is make the conversation a searchable item. I know that you are saying, “I can search any term from the Twitter servers and come up with relevant results”. While you may be able to return some relevant results, you will also find that you will return some not so relevant results as well.

For instance, if I want to know what is going on with the Stockton Restaurant week, I could go ahead and type in the search bar, Stockton Restaurant Week. Now my results are going to search those three key terms in any order within the tweets that are present on the Twitter server. I could place quotation marks around the search term, but then too, I leave out the people that choose to just talk about their lunch at Centrale (one of the participating restaurants) while neglecting to mention anything about Stockton Restaurant Week.

Now enter the hash tag, #SRW09. Short and sweet, so as to not steal much of your all too important tweet. This hash tag, properly implemented by the managing authority (listen up Stockton CVB) will filter the conversation to the people that are only talking about Stockton Restaurant Week. . Then once implemented our all powerful managing authority of the event, that we are pumped enough about to care about the conversation that will be taking place by its patrons, will place a little piece of code on their site to display the conversation. Not only will this be useful to the nerds like me that are actually interested in what people are saying on a digital medium full of narcissism sprinkled with information, but this will also be a valuable chunk of information to pass along to the participating restaurants.

As we move forward in this social media landscape these tools will become commonplace, but as we are in the infancy of this movement, we must blaze the trail. Rome was not built in a day, and we cannot expect this first attempt from a community that is not so quick to embrace tech, to go over with flying colors. A success would be if we flew like an injured duck. At least we flew. Techcrunch probably will be more successful than most at accomplishing a successful Twitter conversation filter, as their community does not know much else outside of a keyboard and monitor with a handheld device thrown in for good measure. Trust me, I know, because well, I could possibly be a member of their audience. This does not mean that we should throw our hands in the air and give up on the notion. Give it a try, the good old college try.

No one said blazing trails was easy, just ask Captain Weber. He had to convince people to settle in Stockton, while his middle name was Maria.