eponymousX

My buddy Harry Garland is quite excited by the release of a Digg API, announced last night at Mezzanie during the Digg 1 Million Users party. He is determined to win the grand prize of a $10,000 package of some nice gear. He’s a very good actionscript developer, so he just might win it, but his excitement got us talking about some new ideas. Once Harry has some concrete plans I’ll talk about that, but for now I want to follow one of the concepts we thought up.

Distributed Discussions
When the collective “we” have a conversation, in blogs and their comments, in chats and forums, in social networks, etc. oftentimes those conversation threads have 3 unique characteristics.

1. YOU
2. THEM
3. TOPIC

While the TOPIC holds the conversation together, YOU and THEM are participating at various levels of engaged activity, emotional intelligence and location. What is also interesting is that TOPIC can also hold a location value.

Geo-tagged Topic-of-conversation
Let’s say that YOU are interacting with THEM about TOPIC (vacation in tropics) and the conversation starts to focus on the Surfing in Fiji. Are YOU and THEM in Fiji? Maybe, maybe not, but the TOPIC is, in a sense, in Fiji. In that manner the TOPIC can be tagged to a specific Geo-location.

So, pondering that if the TOPIC can be Geo-tagged, and the conversation is driven by YOU and THEM, who are also in Geo specific locations, then what kind of data interactions could be developed which would tie the location of the TOPIC to the location of the participants.

Mashing up the two
I recently met Mick Liubinskas and Marty (Martin) Wells from Tangler, where they are aggregating distributed discussions and creating a new kind of social network with real-time chat and multimedia. So the thought occurred that perhaps if the conversation TOPIC was Geo-tagged and exposed to conversation participants, some of THEM might even be near the TOPIC. If the logic then follows, THEM might actually be local experts, and therefore be in a position to provide more value to a given TOPIC.

While services like TwitterVision add some of the Geo-tag concept to the above, the discussion is still disaggregated from the rest of the story, namely the same TOPIC in other conversation streams at other locations in the markup wilderness.

Question
Is there value in identifying the local expert on a specific TOPIC within the micro-crowds in which YOU and THEM dwell? Isn’t this a way to expand the concept of social networking? Perhaps even bridge the gap between online and offline activities?

YOU might actually be able to participate with THEM in a real life meat gathering. Beer and all.

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