Laughing Meme

You’re part of a very small group for whom its reasonable for a San Francisco coffee shop to consider a Brooklyn coffee shop competition.

Rabble, on the rather grumpy reception from the kiosk to my excitement about Cafe Grumpy.

One of the more interesting facets of working out of coffee shops these last few weeks, has been the influx, even up here in Massachusetts, of displaced folks with laptops and cell phones, anxiously checking satellite imagery of their homes in New Orleans, while trying to juggle a semblance of normal life and work.

To the extent that they’ve been successful, it points to an interesting next stage for our techno-nomadic tribe.

Spotted at ERC: one man, with pile of books, 1369 cup (a coffee shop 3 miles, and a world away), and a metronome.

I can’t explain it.

CafeSpot, is a tagging based cafe guide written in Lisp

CafeSpot, a social guide to independent cafes, coffee shops, restaurants and more.

So the obvious question is, how does this project benefit from and share data with other projects like Delocator or WifiMug?

Someone should really get together and coordinate a data interchange format/protocol/consensus.

Earlier I linked to Tonx‘s report on success of Victrola’s wifi free weekends. Dru points to an interesting alternative

go wired on weekends. It would be sort of retro, you know, in keeping with Victrola’s theme. Put an eight port hub in the middle of the coffee table in the back, and make all of those antisocial net junkies (like me) sit next to each other on the couch…

During my sparse visits to UZ I noticed that an unofficial “laptop table” existed, with the Monster kids as its core. It had the interesting effect of setting up a second social scene. No one who has brought their laptop to a coffee shop to work will be a quality participant in the discursive, casual cafe scene, but that doesn’t mean one can’t create another equally vibrant scene built around our shared work. (Useful in particular as most of us are working in fundamentally alienating profession anyway)

One of the great trials of living in Boston is the misconception that Dunkin Donuts serves coffee, and consquently blights the landscape with its pink and orange saturation, salting the earth for a more fertile offering to grow. DD fails at even the most basic requirement, the medicinal one, of delivering sufficient caffeine to stave off headaches, or bring early morning coherence. The coffee simply is too watery and unpalatable to be able to consume sufficient quantities to get one’s dosage.

Last night however, trapped in the wasteland which is North Station/Fleet Center (to meet up with Rob, at Dan’s get together [yes, simple is new the black]), and desperately in need of something, anything, I ventured in, looking, listlessly around, without much hope, and noticed that DD now serves espresso. Now the stomach curdles (literally) at the idea of a DD late, but the espresso, however, was effective. 2-3 sips of inoffensive warm liquid, with a hint of coffee flavor, and a solid 100mg or so of caffeine. Made by a machine of course, but it arrived in this cute little cup, pre-fitted with lid, reminded me of a bubble tea packaging, but without the anime character printed on it.

We take our victories where we can. And I’m going to try not to cry while reading How to Find a Great Coffee House, Part II

The Starbucks Delocator which flashed across Boing Boing today (not to mention hit my inbox mere minutes later, thanks Steve) embodies in itself an interesting tension I’ve been trying to tease out for a while. Would it be too horribly smug to say it’s a tension between Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 and leave it at that? Probably.

What Is It?

In brief it is a website that attempts to offer a national (presumably U.S. national as it asks for zip codes) database of independent coffee shops, in order to support those fine and public places.

Things it gets right (Web 2.0-ish):

• geographic – the physical was missing from the web for so long, that even though it is becoming standard each new website which can tie the virtual experience to real world location presents a little epiphany.
• user built – this is an art project so the mail off a stack of phone books to China and pay to have them typed in route was never an option, but still its clueful to see someone make user contributions front and center.
• its pretty (ok, that might not be Web 2.0-ish)
• its opensource

Things it gets wrong (Web 1.0-sih):

• roach motel – why should I contribute to this database when there is no way to get a dump of the data?
• no maps
• no user editing – a quick scan of my area shows it is not only sparsely populated, but that of the 3 entries I did find I could add additional info to all of them.
• no user profile, no community, no reputations – you can see that I added June Bug, but rather then my name being a link to my profile, its a mailto with my address!
• no permalinks – can’t really expose a database of first class web objects without permalinks
• a splash screen, with a popup window!?!?! I feel like I’m in a timewarp!

And just to be clear, I’m not attacking Delocator for this, my own minimal attempt at cataloging and promoting independent coffee shops falls down on most of of these points as well. Just talking them through.

A Short Story About Roach Motels

So why would you possibly want to provide a dump of your entire database? Re-use and re-mixing. Projects like delocator, openguides, addyourown, et al. are one facet of how we’re starting to annotate our spaces around us. Projects like mappr are another. THe more we can get the data out of it’s silos, the more we can combine it to interesting effect. (and if we can just get it all into RDF we can sit back and let Jo do the rest)

But a simpler story is, when do you want info like Delocator (or any of these) provide? When you’re out. Not when you’re sitting at home in front of the computer. Opening up your data means you can get someone to help you with a mobility solution, be that a cell phone based interface, an iPod compatible database, or a clever PDF to print out and stick in your pocket.

Two Way Data Interchange

What we really need is a data format for this stuff. I personally I know the website, address, phone number, etc of about 100 independent coffee shops not listed on the Delocator page. (call me obsessed) And I have most of that information stored digitally. If I had a way to send them an XML file of that information we’d both be happier. Similarly I’d be happy to contribute to addyourown, chefmoz, and openguides, and would love to be pulling out the data from those sites to enrich my own listings. But not if I have to re-type it!

State of the Art

I did a brief survey of available formats last Summer, and didn’t come up with anything compelling. The ChefMoz format looked like it might be a decent starting point, I no longer remember what I found so problematic about it. Anyone else interested?

update: a bit more on Delocator

From 3 locations to 7 in a couple of hours is pretty good growth, I’m impressed. And I wouldn’t have thought to add City Feed, which is one of my all time favorite places. (just decided what I’m doing for lunch!) But how do we define non-corporate? In Boston this is particuarily hard where almost everything is part of a mini-chain. I’ll grant you Emack and Bolio’s with its 7 locations in Boston probably makes the cut, but how about ERC, with its 20 locations in 6 states?

I’m going through an interesting life/work phase (dear god, let it be a phase), where I seem to be able to spend all day on the phone/email and still not talk with half the people I’m supposed to talk with. Exhausting, how do power communicators, though professionally highly connected nodes, do it?

But today, “Today!”, he says, “We write code!” (having just finished off a coder’s breakfast of a bagel, lots of egg and cheese [coding has high protein requirements], and a pot of coffee)

Today’s thought: It’s all spinning wheels and self doubt until the first pot of coffee.

Some days the whole Ajax/Web 2.0 thingy feels like just so much buzz and hype from us geek set who never managed to learn Flash, and other days you’re smacked in the face by the power of it all.

For example Lattice’s Hacking Google Maps for Caffeine and Wireless, inserts custom data into the Google Maps data stream to produce zoom-able, pan-able maps of Vancouver, Seattle, and Boston enriched with information about the locations of wireless coffee shops. We’ve only begun to explore the surface of what sort of metadata you can insert into the stream, and what other services you could build on top it, but the potential is just a little mind blowing. (actually to hell with the potential, I find the current incarnation a little mind blowing as well)

Go for it, take a virtual caffeine tour of Vancouver, marvel at the Capitol Hill wireless coffee shop scene which is rightfully the 8th wonder of the world, zoom way way out to survey our Boston options

One of the big question marks is Google’s support for this, as they could break it with an eyeblink. (as they did with simple XML output from Google Maps) Lattice has an interesting point on that:

Now, considering that all requests to Google are being performed by the users’ browser, and I’m just injecting some JavaScript, it smells a lot like AutoLink

I’m not sure how well that argument would fly at corporate head quarters, but I would suggest that there is run for a serious long wake play, and they should ponder long and hard before moving.