[iDC] Citizen reports

[Elizabeth Goodman]

On the bluetooth front, you might want to look at Katherine Moriwaki  
and Jonah Brucker-Cohen's work on "circumstantial networks" --  
www.kakirine.com. Also check out Timo Arnall's very useful list of  
"mobile social software" projects. Some of them may be relevant to  
what you're interested in: http://www.elasticspace.com/2004/06/mobile- 
social-software

As Eric said, bluetooth outside of a very short range is impractical,  
but you may want to look at the academic work done on "data  
mules" (evocative name, that) which are digital devices that work  
within delay-tolerant networks (often called DTNs) to relay data  
whenever possible to gradually get the data towards a destination.  
They include wifi nodes, short-range wireless networks (like  
bluetooth). See: http://www.dtnrg.org/wiki/About for examples.

Liz


On Jul 30, 2006, at 7:31 AM, Eric Goldhagen wrote:

>>
>> We've seen the result of this already when in 2004 T-Mobile  
>> blocked TxtMob [1] messages during the Republication National  
>> Convention in the US [2].
>
> I just need to correct something that you seem to imply in this  
> statement.
>
> The fact of the issue is that T-mobile did not "block txtmob" in  
> the sense that no one at t-mobile made an active decision to block  
> messages from txtmob to their customers for political reasons.
>
> Txtmob simply tripped t-mobile's (and nearly every other carrier's)  
> automated spam filters. This problem was solved by re-doing the  
> methodology of how txtmob sends messages in high-volume situations.
>
> This does bring out some issues/flaws in using sms for  
> communications, there is also a lag of up to 15 minutes depending  
> on how overloaded txtmob and the providers are.
>
> I think that your idea of bluetooth networking is interesting but  
> not all that practical given the limitations of broadcast distance  
> in bluetooth.
>
> There have been some interesting discussions over the past few  
> years about using wifi mesh networking to break out a people's  
> internet (for which the technology exists and the costs are not all  
> that insane, 250 base stations could wire all of manhattan into a  
> separate network, which could then be connected to similar networks  
> in other cities, etc...)
>
> --Eric
> -- 
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