Usabilty and Web2.0

Nad did a brilliant guest lecture for our undergraduate HCI class at Lancaster on Monday. His slides and blog about the lecture are at Virtual Chaos. He touched on issues of democracy vs. authority of information, dynamic content vs. accessibility and of course increasing issues of privacy on social networking sites. He also had awesome slides to using loads of Flickr photos under creative commons … community content in action not just words! Of course also touched on Web3.0 and future convergence between emergent community phenomena and structured Semantic Web technologies.

Local images – mixing memories and maps

I just came across a really nice part of the BBC web site for Cardiff called Streets of Cardiff. It allows anyone to upload (moderated, this is the BBC!) stories, pictures, or videos about different areas and these are presented as points on a map. Below is the Roath Park and Penylan page … where I grew up:

Roath Park map @ BBC
[ screen shot ] [ BBC web page ]
Given it is the BBC no google mashup, but a little flash app! But a very nice bit of webbery, community content etc. … pity they don’t have it for everywhere. For years now I have kept thinking it would be really nice to have a coherent location-based portal of everywhere and even got a domain for it! Whilst google maps and related things are getting close to that dream, still it is hard to find things by location … maybe one day …

This also reminded me of some pictures of Roath Park I took a short while back for a keynote I gave a few years ago “Paths and Patches – patterns of geonosy and gnosis“, so I have just added them as a Roath Park flickr set.
… and now I really must get back to work.