Molecularist

Shawn posts some interesting stuff on his Rabble service as it relates to location information. I think what he is learning is crucially relevant to what people ‘theorize’ about services that have a location component.

A few highlights from his post:
– An easy connection he made with someone, simply because of the intersection of being a Rabble user and being in the same town.
– How folks view a location as an excuse to connect (co-location) rather than a topic of conversation (location information). I like how he said it – ‘proximity browsing’.

Follow the link below.

Link: InterCasting Corp: Rabble Archives.

You might find this interesting: We have noticed that users of Rabble 1.0 don’t so much care about specific location. General location and proximity matter, but not specific location. Rabble enables a user to specify their location at different levels down to the Place level, so you could say “I am in San Diego” or “I am in La Jolla” or “I am at Harry’s Bar and Grill.” Then you can also define your proximity, which works like a physical search radius. Most Rabblers define their location at the city or neighborhood level. We thought there would be a user case where people would want to create Places and then blog about them, sort of like a user-generated city guide, but this has not happened. People don’t do it because there is really no reason to. Places simply aren’t strong enough nuclei around which to create any kind of community, conversation or even interest, as it would appear. Rabblers are very interested, however, to know who is around them, and we see a sort of proximity browsing a lot.

Scott posted a sweet note from a WINKsite user in Gambia (link below). His co-conspirator, David Harper, had shared it with me earlier and I had asked if they could find out more about this user. I think it would be an enlightening story.

Scott, David, and I have spoken before about the simple power of something like WINKsite in a place like Africa or India. Indeed, whenever I go to check out active mobile chat rooms on WINKsite, the most active one is in Mumbai (afternoon in Europe is evening in Mumbai). I am pretty sure that the mobile versions of Google and Yahoo are also big in India or Africa relative to their PC Browser based services.

Hmmm, that’s a lot of Africa posts for me in the past week or so.

Follow the link below to the message.

Link: Scott Rafer’s Mobile Chair � Blog Archive � A Thank You Note from The Gambia.

Making money is super, and there’s many ways to do it. However, very few put you on the receiving end of thank you notes from The Gambia, per capita GDP $1900.

Ajit points to a good BBC article on the changes in communications in Nigeria in the past 25 years.

The same theme keeps popping up – the mobile phone is transforming the developing world. And, as Ajit says, it’s about communications. Fuse the mobile with the Internet and watch how creative people, without PCs and fixed-line phones, can be.

And to think that the next billion phones will mostly be like folks like these Nigerians.

Link: Open Gardens: How mobile phones are transforming societies.

The interesting bit is – I observed the same phenomenon with Cable TV more than twelve years ago when I last lived in India. Once people get connected, their aspirations rise, they become more informed, corrupt politicians can’t cheat them, governments can’t censor information easily

This is just the beginning ..

Darla recently wrote about a content aggregator (Wireless Watch, hereafter referred to as ‘that aggregator’) who was not only violating her copyrights, but possibly of many other fine writers. The copyright for Darla’s content is attribution (via the Creative Commons license she publishes under). But what about the others?

Yet, reading the list of sites that are being used as sources (Yours Truly, sadly, isn’t on the list) I realized that these are pretty much the best mobile writers out there.

So, thank you Darla, for bringing to our attention ‘that aggregator’ and notifying others that they should make sure ‘that aggregator’ complies with their copyrights.

But, also, thank you for publishing this list of great mobile writers.

Load up those feed readers.*

Link: Darla Mack: Pimp My Blog – Do You Have The Right To Republish?.

So, I guess what I’m saying is… who the hell as the right to republish my stuff?  Have control over my feedsm get revenue from my hard work and then control the amount of revenue that I get from them?

*But DO NOT use ‘that naughty aggregator’ until they straighten out the pesky copyright issues and give credit where credit is due

David finally managed to get special dispensation to avoid Google’s all-embracing transcoding mechanism. I am amazed that Google even had such an automated exceptions system in place.

Link: Different Things � Blog Archive � How to Free Yourself From Google’s Mobile Transcoding Services in 5 Days or More..

The other day I wrote about Google’s mobile transcoding services and the reasons for our issues with it in a post titled, “An Open Letter to Google: “Page adapted for mobile phone?” Please stop now, you are crippling sites, not adapting pages.”

The lack of clarity as to how the transcoding services worked and how you could opt-out was frustrating. In our case, Google’s transcoding service was doing more harm then good. Naturally we “Googled” Google and eventually found a mobile FAQ that stated: