social media

Flickr via Ed Yourdon

At the same time urban biking is becoming more prominent, so too are bicycle thefts.

But as The Wall Street Journal reports, bike theft victims are using social media Web sites and bike blogs to reclaim their wheels.

Take 29-year-old Toronto resident Heather McKibbon. After her bike was stolen back in May, she posted about the theft on Facebook:

Just hours later, a friend replied with a link to a bike for sale that looked like her own $1,300 Cannondale touring bike on eBay's Kijiji, an online classified-ads site. Ms. McKibbon recognized her bike and, posing as an interested buyer, arranged to meet the seller at a local subway station. She brought the police along as well, resulting in a small-scale sting operation.

Police arrested the man and returned the Cannondale to Ms. McKibbon, who claimed it with photos of herself on the bike, as well as its serial number. "It was a little overwhelming to realize that nobody in Toronto gets their stolen bike back, and here I was about to get my stolen bike back," she says.

Then there are Web sites like StolenBicycleRegistry.com, where people can list their stolen bikes for free. The city of Boston recently launched a similar Web site, StolenBikesBoston.com, which sends out stolen bike alerts to police, bike shops and hospital and school security officials via Twitter and Facebook.

New York doesn't have any such Web site, but the city's recently-passed bike access bill, which reduces the threat of theft by requiring building owners to provide bike storage indoors, gets a shout out in the article:

Dorsey, at left.

I have an item in this week's Observer about Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey.

It focuses on his visit to New York last week to meet with various V.C.s and tech C.E.O.s and engineers (and Mayor Bloomberg) to get a feel for whether he wants base the new company he's launching here instead of on the West Coast. He also told us that a personal relocation to the city is in the works.

A little down the line, as Mr. Dorsey irons out the plans for his new venture, he'll be contributing some blog posts to NYFi. But in the meantime, here's a transcript of some of the conversation we had last Thursday, August 13, at The Standard Hotel. In it, he shares his thoughts about the ways city governments and agencies can use Twitter most effectively.

The interview starts after the jump:

It takes a lot of hard work and smarts to pass the LSATs and the bar exam, and, we think it's safe to say, to be a lawyer in general.

But that doesn't necessarily mean that your everyday attorney has great Web skills. In fact, as City Room reports, some of them have pretty poor ones. Which is why the New York State Bar Association held a seminar in Midtown yesterday to teach out-of-work lawyers how to use social networking Web sites:

Many of the lawyers had little experience with Web sites like Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn, but all listened attentively and took notes during the one-hour lecture. Some were embarrassed to admit that they did not know much about Twitter and Facebook except from what they had read in the news. Others said they had used social networking sites but did not know how to take advantage of them to find work.

The seminar was a big help to at least one laid-off New York lawyer, Yakov Kozlenko, who's been looking for a new gig ever since he lost his job at the firm Baker Botts back in December:

He left the seminar feeling he had learned new tools to maximize his use of online networking. While he has had several job interviews after using LinkedIn, he said he was hesitant to use Facebook and Twitter for his job search, believing it to be too casual.

Last week we started paying attention to a newish social media site called Groupable, a free online community that connects grassroots organizations and groups with potential corporate and local sponsors.

The site, which is based in New York, was launched in a private alpha testing phase last summer and opened to the public in beta back in January.

"We saw that it was very difficult for small groups who can't afford to hire a full-time sales person to be able to connect wih sponsors," said Gerrit Hall, 28, of Park Slope, who created the site with Groupable's C.E.O., Nate Brochin, 45, of Millburn, N.J.

The methodology behind Groupable seems simple enough (even if the way it’s explained on the site is a bit hard to follow): group or sponsor registers; group searches for and connects with sponsor, or vice versa, based on common goals and interests; sponsorship is made.

So far, an array of New York City groups have registered, ranging from civic non-profits, to arts organizations, to underwater photographers. Even the New York Tech Meetup is on there, although it seems like its profile has been inactive since it was created back in August of last year. At least one political candidate is using the service, Mark Winston Griffith, who is running in the 36th District (Crown Heights/Bed Stuy) City Council race.

But does it actually work?

Got a genius idea for a product? How about a tofu press? An iPhone holster to perch on bike handlebars? A fashionable sling for broken limbs called an “Ouch Pouch?” Ben Kaufman, a 22-year-old entrepreneur and college dropout, wants you to dish out $99 and put it in his hands, or shall we say, Web site, along with an entire community of nitpickers to mold your product from scratch to store shelf.

On June 2, Mr. Kaufman launched the Web site of his new company, quirky, a “social product development company.” On the site, users can sign up for free and get involved in every step of the product-building process—from choosing a design to giving it a snappy name, even figuring out a marketing strategy.

“We don’t make any decisions internally without consulting the community,” Mr. Kaufman told the Observer from his brick-walled office on Avenue B during a sunny afternoon before the launch of his site. Mr. Kaufman has a round, baby face with flushed cheeks, and was dressed in a black T-shirt and Converse sneakers. He talks fast.

Mr. Kaufman explained that users with their own product ideas can submit a rough proposal for $99. Other users of the site vote up or down ideas and designs based on different criteria (from its “cool” factor to its “timely” entrance into the market). A winner is picked every week and Mr. Kaufman and his team draw up prototype dratfs in 3-D images, consult with their contacts in manufacturing shops, and figure out a price for the product. Meanwhile, the community of quirky users choose everything else, down to the color and packaging for the product before it hits the shelves—er—online store.

If a product doesn't get past the initial voting process, users who submitted the proposal don't get their $99 back, but can keep all of the crowd-sourcing data that the quirky community provided.

>>READ THE REST OF THE STORY ON OBSERVER.COM

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New York state's official transportation and travel service, 511NY, recently debuted Twitter feeds for New York–area subway lines and highways that alert commuters to traffic conditions and emergencies.

There are 12 traffic accounts for regions all over the state, including the New York City area (a recent tweet: "Accident on FDR Drive North at 79th St (Manhattan) left lane closed"). There are also accounts for nine subway lines, categorized by color (a recent 4-5-6 line alert: "Due to Track fire at Atlantic Ave Sta, Southbnd # 2, 3, 4 & 5 Lines local service only...").

Todd Westhuis, project director for 511 and the state's department of transportation, told The Observer that Port Authority PATH feeds might soon be on the way, too.

There have been unofficial M.T.A. subway Twitter feeds, but these are the state's first official accounts alerting commuters to emergency advisories. Currently, the M.T.A. has four official Twitter accounts, MetroCardDiane, MetroCardMatt, NYCTChantal, and MetroCardLisa, which were created in April so MetroCard employees could promote events and deals.

socialgreat.com

New York City's digerati and mobile geeks have been augmenting their goings-about-town with Foursquare, the iPhone app released earlier this year that creator Dennis Crowley recently described to NYFi's John Fischer as "Twitter for your social life."

Now, as The Business Insider reports, Google's Jon Steinberg has taken it a step further with his new Web site, SocialGreat, which uses Foursquare's programming interface to "anonymously track (and map) the most popular NYC venues."

But wait, back up! Tell us again what this Foursquare stuff is all about?

Here's how Mr. Fischer described it in his recent profile of Mr. Crowley:

To try to explain Foursquare concisely is to pack a lot of description into few words. The program essentially turns a user’s social life into a video game using their cell phone’s GPS chip. Users “check in” when they visit a bar, restaurant, gym, supermarket, or pretty much any destination they might encounter in a city, and earn points for doing so. Visit a location more than anyone else playing and you become its “mayor,” a contested title that is lost just as easily as it is awarded. Different activities also unlock themed “badges,” virtual distinctions like “Local: You’ve been at the same place 3x in one week!” or “Photogenic: You found three places with a photobooth!” Were that not enough, the app also notifies your friends of your whereabouts, and lets users add comments and tips to places they visit. Anything from “nice views at dusk” at a park, to “I threw up here last night” at a bar.

So now you can see how SocialGreat is building on that:

This morning, we stumbled upon what appears to be the first New York-centric news aggregation Web site that leaves homepage curation up to readers.

Taking a cue from social news sites like Digg and Reddit, NYC.is lets users share city-specific links and vote them up or down to determine how much promotion they get. As of this posting, some popular front-page topics included a New York Post article about absent City Council members, a Grist.org item about hawks on the Upper West Side, and a New York Times story—uploaded, we might add, by Jennifer 8. Lee! —about a Mexican restaurant in Corona, Queens. 

“I like the dynamism and the eclecticism. The fact that you get an interesting mix of local content,” said Ms. Lee, speaking strictly as a user of the site. “You get the funky, quirky item about a flood of people dressed like vampires in Brooklyn along with very serious items about things like housing and transportation policy. It would be fascinating to see if the model can be replicated.”

NYC.is was created by Susannah Vila, a 24-year-old political science grad student at Columbia who did stints at The Nation and CBS News after graduating from N.Y.U. in 2007. She launched the site in a private Beta testing phase back in March, and brought it public at the beginning of the summer with some PR help from her friend Simon Owens, a 25-year-old D.C.-based social-media consultant and blogger.

“There are thousands of bloggers and independent reporters writing in and about NYC, but no hub to connect them all,” said Ms. Vila of the impetus behind NYC.is, in an e-mail. “I think my site is the only one connecting all the different small scale bloggers, reporters, or anyone at all who wants to write about his or her community, giving him/her a place to promote their work and network with each other.”

Of course NYC.is has entered what seems like an increasingly saturated hyperlocal news market.

If you’re familiar with Wikipedia, you probably know that it’s a free online encyclopedia that anyone can edit. 

But perhaps you've given less thought to the complex and evolving set of rules and best practices, upheld by a core community of a few hundred "Wikipedians," that's behind the Web site's seemingly anarchic user-generated content and editing.

Here in New York, our city government recently started to open up, so we may have something to learn from these Wiki-gurus--that's why the timing of this weekend's first ever Wiki Conference at New York University seems particularly apt.

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A couple of months ago, New York Times health writer and “Well” blogger Tara Parker-Pope realized that she wasn’t being very, well, healthy.

“I kind of woke up one day and thought, ‘The biggest problem with the Well blog right now is the Well blogger is not taking care of herself,’” she told The Observer in an interview. Ms. Parker-Pope admitted she had abandoned the gym—at a time when she was trying to include more fitness coverage on the blog.

So Ms. Parker-Pope, who left The Wall Street Journal in 2007 to write about consumer health for The Times, signed up for the ING New York City Marathon. She has until Nov. 1 to train. “If I made it part of my blog, I would actually do it,” she told The Observer. “I thought it was the ultimate multitask.”

To help keep her, and her readers, on task, The New York Times’ interactive news technologies team created Run Well, a Web-based application that allows users to compare marathon training programs, customize their running regime, track their mileage and access other relevant content from the Well blog and NYTimes.com. It’s a kind of home page for Times readers in marathon training.

Online tools from Runner’s World, Active.com and Nike have similar programs, but The Times’ application is specifically for first-time marathon runners and beefed up with specialized editorial content.

“The main feeling is that we cover the marathon really well in the fall when it’s happening, and the build-up to the marathon, but our readers who are participating in the marathon start thinking about it in March or April or May,” said Ms. Parker-Pope. So Run Well extends her coverage. But it’s also a decidedly service-based application—a somewhat new venture for The Times’ interactive department.

Launched quietly during the first week in June, Run Well was built in two and a half weeks by two interactive engineers Ben Koski and Alan McLean, who both decided to sign up for their first marathon by the time they were done coding the application.

>>READ THE REST ON OBSERVER.COM