User-Generated Content
For some time I’ve been giving thought to user-generated content on the Internet. In particular, I’ve been interested in audio and video content. A recent post by Dion Hinchcliffe drove me to put a bit more structure around my ideas and put pen to paper, figuratively speaking.
GeoGlue Available
The first, albeit very rudimentary, version of GeoGlue is now available online. As described in previous posts, this release is really nothing more than a soundseeing mashup with Google maps. The functionality is very basic, allowing the user to browse for soundseeing tours graphically using maps and a menu system or to search for tours using a combination of keywords. All tours are provided via MP3 streaming audio, either from the site that created the tour or from GeoGlue.com directly.
e-Government Mashups
Phil Windley’s recent post on e-Government mashups is a great introduction to the topic of citizen-facing Web services. As refreshing as it is to see that progressives in Rhode Island and the District of Columbia are exposing government data to their citizens and opening themselves to the law of unintended consequences, this only scratches the surface of what is possible. As I’m sure Phil knows as a former state CIO, fully open citizen self-service is likely to only go so far. As cool as it is to mashup public highway, crime, and public entity data on a map for the world to see, enabling truly effective government is going to be, to a greater extent, dependent upon empowering government knowledge workers. Imagine if, as an example, a knowledge worker was able to pull together information from their state’s welfare, criminal justice, and revenue (i.e. tax) systems and mash these up in a way that enabled them to uncover hidden relationships between this data and serve the state’s citizens more effectively.