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[bryant]

The blogosphere is all excited about moblogging, which I guess is the neologism for mobile blogging. I am too, actually. Mobile blogging is cool.

But I had another thought, which I think was triggered while I was driving around with my brother looking at all the pretty 802.11b networks the other day. What about a non-mobile collaborative blog? What if I stuck a wireless access point somewhere in Harvard Square, and set up a weblog for people using the access point, and only let people post to it if they were coming from the access point's IP?

That'd be pretty keen. It'd be an ad-hoc collaboration, but it would be tied together by a given community. I'd love to see all the variations on how people perceived the Square (or wherever this was located). You'd probably want to set up a web proxy, so that you could display a little info about the weblog to anyone using it. Otherwise people would never figure out that they could post. It'd be neat if you could do a sidebar with some information on the people using it, but I can't think of anything that wouldn't be somewhat invasive of privacy. "Last Ten Mobile Google Searches?" Maybe, maybe.

They say you can't solve social problems with software, but I believe that you can shape social interactions with technology.

Comments

[gconnor.livejournal.com]

I've often wondered how people control access to a network while also putting up a nice interface for people who try to use it without being authorized, something like "Hi, welcome to XYZ net, you are seeing this page instead of the URL you were trying to reach. Please sign in to enable full access (and optionally leave a note in our guest book)"

Perhaps you could have a DHCP server that points to a dummy nameserver, and gives out wrong answers to any query (like a wildcard for . zone? is that even possible) and then once you sign in it remembers your MAC address and you get different dhcp info? Or could it all be done at the proxy level?