The goal of Hub2 is to introduce a deliberative process into community meetings that currently does not exist. Who do this by integrating Second Life into the existing community process. We believe that the affordances of the tool and the specifics of the practice we built around it, we are adding the following:

[…]

Categories: placeofmedia · boston · citygovernment · SecondLife · hub2 · gene_koo · civic_engagement · net-locality · mixed_reality · mediated urbanism · cities

The City of Birmingham, UK is working on a significant transformation in image. As it is described on the Digital Birmingham site, the city seeks to transform its industrial past into a digital future. The initiative seeks to tie together all the digital efforts in the city into one portal. Wi-fi initiatives, […]

Categories: placeofmedia · citygovernment · SecondLife · city · mediated urbanism · cities

For the last several weeks, Hub2 has been working on a project in the Allston neighborhood of Boston. With full support from the Boston Redevelopment Authority (BRA) and funding from Harvard’s Allston Development Group, we have begun work on the community input process around Library Park. Our mission is to augment the […]

Categories: placeofmedia · boston · citygovernment · SecondLife · hub2 · gene_koo · civic_engagement · mixed_reality

It has been some time since I posted to my blog. This is primarily because I found myself quite busy working on my new book, whose title has changed to “Location Matters,” with some snappy subtitle to bring it all home. What follows is a section from chapter two that describes the concept […]

Categories: placeofmedia · citygovernment · civic_engagement · net-locality · mediated urbanism · mobility · cities

I just got back from the O’Reilly Where 2.0 conference in Burlingame, CA this morning. As someone who attends mostly academic conferences, it was both refreshing and disturbing to spend two days with this group. Refreshing because the group was composed mostly of developers, interested in figuring out how to transform the emerging […]

Categories: placeofmedia · net-locality · mediated urbanism · mobility · cities · web 2.0 · geography

For the last several months, I’ve primarily been working on revising my book manuscript. And I finally feel as though the introduction is reflective of the text. I’m posting the first few pages here to solicit thoughts or commentary.

On the corner of 34th Street and Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, there are dozens of […]

Categories: placeofmedia · mediated urbanism · cities · geography

So I’m down in DC this weekend, not for the cherry blossom festival (although the cherry blossoms are quite nice), but for a board meeting of the Urban Communications Foundation (UCF). We’re meeting today primarily to discuss the nature of the “communicative city.” The question is: what does it mean for a city […]

Categories: placeofmedia · citygovernment · civic_engagement · Community_Informatics · cities · place

This recent article in Wired lays out the fascinating phenomenon of the information industry. It describes the massive new server farms cropping up in Oregon to house the petabytes of information for Google (and others) to keep up with the task of copying the rapidly expanding Internet. The article points out that […]

Categories: placeofmedia · network · cities · geography

Over the last few days, I’ve refined my thoughts on the concept of network locality. Up until this time, I’ve been thinking about how geographical space functions within the connectivity enabled by digital networks. But as I pursued this idea, I began to realize that starting from geography was not the most productive […]

Categories: placeofmedia · net-locality · mediated urbanism · mobility · place · geography

This IBM commercial seems to poke fun at the whole virtual world phenomenon. Interesting, considering IBM is one of the largest corporate investors in Second Life. Perhaps it’s tongue and cheek, perhaps its ironic - in any case, it’s worth contemplating as a reflection of a cultural moment, where the press, the youth […]

Categories: placeofmedia · mixed_reality · second life · virtual economies