Smart Mobs highlights City Poems, a living biography of the city of Leeds in Yorkshire, England.
It comes alive as readers move through the city with their mobile phones. As they travel around Leeds readers will find themselves moving through a network of Poem Points attached to landmark sites. Poem Point sites will range from football grounds to art galleries and from parks and bars to local community centres, corner shops and busy bus stops.
Each Poem Point will have its own keyword, and by sending this keyword as a text message readers will receive a free short SMS text message poem to their mobile phone. The poem will be site specific and relevant to the nature of each Poem Point, so readers might receive a football poem near the football stadium, a nature poem in Roundhay Park or even a grief poem at the cemetery.
Why not Map Oral History? Put 999 markers all over the city, each with a number (1-999) and a phone number or url. Dial up and punch in the sign # to get a 90 second recording.
- GPS-driven narrative has been deployed by the Tate Museum in London, delivering multimedia content related to specific paintings or sculptures as patrons tour the galleries.
- New York Songlines provides historical walking tours of Manhattan streets. If you have a PDA or cellphone, you can find out about the history of the buildings around you as you walk the streets.
- Children in the UK are given PDAs to track down and record plants and wildlife. Same thing in New York, where people are recording flora and fawna with PDAs.
- Geocoding the Wiki provides a way to collaboratively manage place names and descriptions and provide geography specific information services.
- Annotatespace.com is a walking tour of a bohemian neighborhood in New York.
- Mapping Oral History could be fun and cheaper than making signs.
- Portland Walking Tours, Portland Green Maps, Oregon Trip Check, metro guides and 360 degree tours might be created and packaged with advertising.
- A Wireless Walking Tour could “push” audio/video files to your handheld as you walk through the Zoo, the historic district or ride in a Streetcar or your car and listen to Oregon Historical Markers.
- LocaleServer includes packaged applications for organizations to rapidly build location-based digital tours with hotspot management, user tracking and analysis.
Solar-powered, tiny servers could replace historic markers because they’re cheaper. Load 256Megs of site-specific audio/visual content and manage via cellular. Dell’s Axim Pocket PC will come with WiFi (802.11g) and cellular (GSM or CDMA) built-in. It’s now possible to run Linux on the Axim.
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