Emergency & electronic presence

In the wake of the attack yesterday in Mumbai, a couple of thoughts picked across the twitterverse pointed me to a note referring to the use of Twitter in emergency conditions (via @timoreilly); people in India are active users of Twitter, Flickr and YouTube - the short note states the use of immediate/real time/near real time application and services during/just after the Mumbai attacks: learn from use of Web 2.0 in Mumbai. It delivers a realtime information of what’s happening. It is not only a ping that let the beloved know that one is fine (electronic presence) but it is also a raw information source for rescue team. Unfortunatelly, it could lead also bad intentionned people to monitor the same pubic channels.

How about a special kind of 999 where you could send any crucial information to authorities? Many information visualisation have been developped so far that could help authorities stay on top the instant huge flux such use could create.

Via my domain name provider: the .tel new TLD is a new extension for domain name. You can’t use it to link to a website - it means http://mywebsite.tel is not a web address, it is not WWW based. Instead, the DNS (Domain Name Server) is used to store you contact information and the whois is updated in real time. It means it is a container to host your information and one can imagine storing his/her own geolocation information as well as a new contact telephone, or a new snail mail address, or anything else using custom. The interest is the real time aspect of the thing. It gives you (or your device) a URL - somewhere on the internet where someone can ping you and see your status: online, offline, busy, … alive. (see also: Ambient post on Capacity)

It is clearly some of the first manifestion of the coming internet of things as previously described and explored by many peoples - see more reference on the wikipedia page: Internet of Things.

* ping: it is a reference to a UNIX command, a basic network command, that checks your machine can reach another network node from your local host. If your machine is connected to a network, any machine on the network can ping it in order to make sure your machine is part of the network.

** TLD Top Level Domain: this is the usually three leters that ends the URL of a website; most common are .com, .net and .org. Telnic is in charge of the administration of .tel domain name; they have a .tel FAQ

*** Twitter an instant messaging service. It is based on the notion of microblogging - blogging using text-only messages limited to 140 characters. It allows the very fast diffusion and replication of memes across networks of people.