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Brooklyn people, don't forget to come out for my talk at Book Court in Cobble Hill Thursday night. It'll be fun, and maybe we can even talk a little about outside.in too. Details:
8:00 PM, Thursday Nov. 2
Book Court
165 Court St Brooklyn, NY 11201
Salon is running as their lead story today a long conversation I had last week in San Francisco with the wonderful Scott Rosenberg. It's got the most excellent title: History as written by a "SimCity" freak. And it has an absolutely sublime image of my face superimposed over Victorian London, with vibrio cholerae dropping down on my head like so many Tetris bricks.
There's some overlap with the reviews and other commentary here about the book, but also lots of things I've not gotten to explore before, thanks in large part to Scott's great observations and questions. I get to talk about the conceptual links between Ghost Map and outside.in, which is a whole other topic. And perhaps I can use lines like these to finally persuade Columbia to give me that PhD I never finished:
One of my intellectual interests since I was in college is what happens at the transition points between those paradigms. When I was in grad school, my training was in the 19th-century novel. This is the one book I've written for which I actually have credentials! One reason I was interested in this period was to look at those transition points. We understand paradigms of research; what we don't have is the moment where you're segueing from one to the other. So this is just a great case study in that, where you're right in the middle of a great historical transformation, the birth of a whole new way of living. No one had ever built a city like metropolitan London before. And in the middle of that you have this scientific paradigm that's been dominant, the miasma theory, that's about to crack. And you're there right at the fault line.
Tomorrow's New York Times Book Review has a new piece of mine, running as their back page essay. It's a rumination on the role of the public intellectual in the age of Google that begins with Raymond Williams' classic book, Keywords. Hilariously, the official Times style demands that the "keyword" be spelled as two words, even though the Williams book, and most modern search engine usage, spells it as one. But don't let that stop you from reading it:
But one immense change separates us from the semantic battles of the mid-70’s, a change visible in the term “key word” itself, which is now most commonly used to describe computerized search requests. In Williams’s time, if one was seeking the real-world associations or usage of a given term — to see a specific word in its native habitat, and not the caged environs of Roget’s Thesaurus or the Oxford English Dictionary — the options were limited. Today, however, we type our key word into Google and instantly get an entire field guide to its present usage: in op-ed columns, advertising blurbs, blog posts, MySpace pages, diaries, scholarly publications, wherever.
Whoa. It's been quite a day. Amazing response to outside.in, made slightly complicated by the fact that I've been in three cities, and two time zones since the site went live. I'm trying to synthesize all the feedback, and will post more extensively here shortly, but in the meantime, I forgot to mention that if you like the site, feel free to send us up the charts on Digg by following this link and giving us a thumbs up. Thanks!
So it's an exciting time around here at SBJ headquarters. Last week I launched Ghost Map, and today I'm launching the first major web site I've helped produce since Plastic and FEED. It's called outside.in, and I've been building it in stealth for the past five months, supported originally by my friends Andy Karsch and Mark Bailey, and then collaborating on the idea itself with the wonderful John Geraci, who has designed a number of influential location-based sites. Once John and I had the idea together, we found a brilliant lead developer, Cory Forsyth, who made the whole thing possible... Just recently, we've brought the legendary John Seely Brown in as a founding parter and adviser.
So what is outside.in? In a phrase, it's an attempt to collectively build the geographic Web, neighborhood by neighborhood. I wrote up a mini-essay describing the original inspiration for the site, and explaining some of our core principles, which I've included below. But you can also just go visit the site and explore...
Our Principles:
For the handful of us who have been building outside.in over the past six months, the site is ultimately about a new kind of experience. You sit at a computer and type in a street address, or a neighborhood name, or a zip code -- perhaps for your own home area, perhaps for a place you're visiting or interested in -- and within seconds the screen gives you a glimpse of all the textured, real-world issues and conversations and news unfolding in the location you've entered. Not just restaurant reviews or upcoming concerts, but the broad, bustling range of information flowing through a lively neighborhood: complaints about the local school; rumors of a new bar opening up next week; a crime report for a mugging the night before; a promising open house this weekend. Up to now, only the most connected local experts in any neighborhood could keep up with all these evolving conversations. outside.in is designed to let you see it all in seconds.
We set out to create this experience for one overarching reason: to date, online neighborhood information has been a divided space. On the one hand, there is a great surplus of data out there: the hyperlocal bloggers, review sites like Yelp and Judysbook, city government sites, and traditional media. The problem is: there's no single place that unites all those different voices, that grounds them all in specific locations. With help from you -- suggesting and tagging neighborhood data, and suggesting ways that we can better organize the web geographically -- we think outside.in can help unify the divided space of hyperlocal content. And in doing so, hopefully we can make our neighborhoods even more interesting places than they already are.
To that end, our design has followed a few core principles:
1. The natives know best. Part of our inspiration at outside.in was the amazing rise of hyperlocal bloggers -- sometimes called placebloggers -- writing about their own communities. (Brooklyn, where we all happen to live, may well be the placeblogger capital of the world.) And so we've seeded outside.in with a list of about 500 placebloggers from the top 25 metro areas in the US.
2. The post's location is more important than the blogger's location. People have been creating maps of blogger locations for years now. (The NYC subway blogger map is one of our favorites.) But from our perspective, we're less interested in the location of the blogger than we are the location of what the blogger is writing about. So in our system, each item (a blogger post, or a link submitted by a user) can be associated with its own specific point in space.
3. Neighborhoods are more important that maps. We love the neo-geo movement as much as anyone, and continue to marvel at the amazing work being done with Google map mash-ups. But maps can often overwhelm with too much specificity. Most of the time when you're thinking about local issues, you don't actually need specific geo-coordinates or street addresses. You just want to know roughly what's happening around you. That's why we've made the navigational unit for outside.in the neighborhood. And if the neighborhood is too specific, you can always zoom out on the navigational map and see a broader view.
4. Geo-tags are only the beginning. Neighborhood content needs to be location-aware for it to be useful, but that can't be the whole story. It's just as important to know when something is happening, as it is to know where it's happening. So we've creating a simple tagging architecture for all our posts: what/where/when. This lets you create powerful filters for viewing all of outside.in's data: you can see recent crime reports within two miles of your neighborhood, real estate openings in your zip code coming up this weekend, poetry readings city-wide.
5. Local news often has a long-shelf life. One thing both blogs and traditional newspapers share is that they are organized around time, with the latest news given priority. But a lot of neighborhood information is news that stays news: a parent's comment about the science program at a local school is just as relevant six months after it was posted; a guide to gay-friendly bars could be useful for years. That's why outside.in is designed not just as a "latest headlines" service; it's also an evolving neighborhood encyclopedia, capturing all the things that have been said about specific places. Click on the tag for, say, Atlantic Yards (a controversial development here in Brooklyn) and you can track the whole history of the debate over the project, not just the latest buzz.
Those are our principles. No doubt there are ways that the site could be improved to better live up to them, and no doubt there are other principles out there we should be following as well. So take some time, explore your outside.in neighborhood -- and let us know what you discover.
Steven Johnson
Hey San Franciscans, come out to see me talk today: either at Stacy's at 12:30, or at the Books, Inc in the Marina tonight at 7:30. It'll be fun, I promise!
And Los Angelenos, don't forget to come to the Hammer Museum tomorrow night for a thrilling cholera talk with Ralph Frerichs... Details for all events in the post below...
Wonderful rave review for Ghost Map in the Wall Street Journal's weekend edition:
This is a marvelous little book, based to a large extent on the essays delivered to an academic colloquium, just as was Dava Sobel's "Longitude" (1996). Yet "The Ghost Map" is a far more ambitious and compelling work. What Mr. Johnson shows us is that the crucial test of a mega-city is whether it can digest its own waste. That whole vagabond London crew of scavengers, bone-pickers and rag-gatherers were not just pitiable victims of the System. In providing their unofficial janitorial services, as Mayhew perceived so well, they were "engaged on one of the most important of social operations" and deserved respect as well as sympathy. Victorian Londoners depended on them as utterly as they (and we) depend on the incessant operation of zillions of microbes.
So here you, the proud author of a new book, on the very day it is officially published, and you pick up a copy of the NY Times -- and the lead story in the Arts Section is:
A Crowded Autumn Book Season Presents a Pileup of Name Authors. At no time in recent memory has there been such a traffic jam of big-name authors unleashing top-drawer books.
Oh well. Wish me luck!
I'm hitting the road today for a quickish book tour for The Ghost Map. If you're in SF, LA, or NYC, try to come out and see me -- should be a fun little show. Here are the details:
Monday, October 23
12:30 PM
Formal Reading and Signing
STACEY'S BOOKSTORE
581 Market Street
SanFrancisco, CA 94105
Monday, October 23
7:30 PM
Formal Reading and Signing
BOOKS INC in the Marina
2251 Chestnut Street
SanFrancisco CA 94123
Tuesday, October 24
7:00 PM
Lecture
Discussion with Dr. Ralph Frerichs on catastrophe and THE GHOST MAP
UCLA Hammer Museum
Westwood Village
10899 Wilshire Blvd.
Los Angeles CA 90024
Thursday, November 2
8:00 PM
Reading, Signing, Q&A
Book Court
165 Court St
Brooklyn, NY 11201
Wednesday, November 8
7:00 PM EST
Reading, Signing, Q&A
COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY BOOKSTORE
Barnes & Noble
2920 Lerner Hall
New York, NY 10027
Very nice review in today's USA Today. I thought this bit was hilarious:
Ghost Map details Snow's efforts to prove his theory that cholera was a water-borne illness. Johnson, author of the provocative Everything Bad Is Good For You, which laid a defense for video games and reality TV based on cognitive science, obviously sees a soul mate in Snow, who had to fight the scientific community's belief that all disease was attributable to "miasma," or a putrefaction of the air.
I'm sure, if Snow were alive today, he'd be writing pamphlets defending Fear Factor and GTA III: San Andreas.
The Ghost Map
The latest: the story of a terrifying outbreak of cholera in 1854 London 1854 that ended up changing the world. An idea book wrapped around a page-turner. I like to think of it as a sequel to Emergence if Emergence had been a disease thriller. You can see a trailer for the book here.
Everything Bad Is Good for You: How Today's Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter
The title says it all. This one sparked a slightly insane international conversation about the state of pop culture -- and particularly games. There were more than a few dissenters, but the response was more positive than I had expected. And it got me on The Daily Show, which made it all worthwhile.
Mind Wide Open : Your Brain and the Neuroscience of Everyday Life
My first best-seller, and the only book I've written in which I appear as a recurring character, subjecting myself to a battery of humiliating brain scans. The last chapter on Freud and the neuroscientific model of the mind is one of my personal favorites.
Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software
The story of bottom-up intelligence, from slime mold to Slashdot. Probably the most critically well-received all my books, and the one that has influenced the most eclectic mix of fields: political campaigns, web business models, urban planning, the war on terror.
Interface Culture : How New Technology Transforms the Way We Create and Communicate
My first. The book I wrote instead of finishing my dissertation. Still in print almost a decade later, and still relevant, I think. But I haven't read it in a while, so who knows what's in there!
