Deep, man

Clint, Chicago, Illinois — Fri, 08 Jun 2007 13:40:02 GMT

The resoultion of the Chicago photograph is amazing. It covers a stretch of ground maybe four miles wide, and yet you can read the road signs on Lakeshore Drive. You can see individual leaves in the trees along the lake path. You can even see people standing by the dolphin pool in the windows of the Shedd Aquarium. What'd this guy do ... steal the camera from a spy satellite? I want one.

Deep, man

Charlie Allen, Wilmington, DE — Fri, 08 Jun 2007 14:31:42 GMT

Yes, SpaceTime is cool, but just think about what's going to happen to your broadband connection when _everybody_ is using it. Can you say "1200 baud"? Nature abhors a vacuum, and developers abhor wasted CPU cycles :-)

Deep, man

Will Femia — Fri, 08 Jun 2007 15:24:25 GMT

Clint, I Googled gigapixel camera and came up with a few good results. It looks like you can't really buy a camera like that, you either build it or you salvage something like a spy camera and modify it.

Charlie, it puts a strain on the computer itself but the bandwidth use isn't too bad because it appears to take a picture of the pages in order to render them in 3D. Then again, if you use the search function it opens every search result on the page automatically, so you're basically mulitplying every Web search result by 10, so yeah, that could be a problem. :)

Deep, man

Fri, 08 Jun 2007 15:30:27 GMT

I am a local in the Baristanet area. I read it every morning. The local papers only come out once a week and seem to be generally skewed toward certain local political views. However I think the success of it is greatly dependent on the fact that Montclair and Glenridge, which make up most of the baristanet user population, are overall pretty wealthy and very interested in what's going on in their community as far as how it will affect their realestate investment (homes or businesses). In other words if you pay $30 - $50,000 in taxes for a $500,000 to $1,000,0000 home, you want to know what's being built where, what roads are being fixed, what businesses will be coming to your neighborhood, etc. because it all affects your home value. Not sure in communities where they are less hyper concerned with that stuff the blogs would work as well. Bloomfield's blogs are outdated and not used. We use Baristanet and we're covered far less than the other two towns.

Deep, man

Will Femia — Fri, 08 Jun 2007 17:09:57 GMT

A, that's a great point and I often wonder something similar with regard to the New York City blogs I read and whether those models apply to other communities. But while the topics of interest might vary, every community has something that the people stand around at the end of their driveways and talk about after supper - or in the supermarket parking lot - or in the bleachers at the little league game. From the business perspective, a less affluent community in which everyone buys everything from the same Wal-Mart probably means much less ad revenue opportunity, but for now I'm choosing to believe that actual content and community interest isn't an obstacle.

Having mentioned all those places where people talk, the real threat to online participation, and you touch on it a little, is if people actually go outside and talk to each other and participate in ... well, real community. As long as people are too busy to participate in their own lives there will be a market for sites that let them read about it online. (I reserve the right to change my mind about this when someone raises the point that the web can actually help facilitate real community with meet-ups and other social tools.)