With thanks to fellow Canadian Behan on s/v Totem for highlighting this in her EXCLELLENT blog* “Sailing with Totem” I wanted to recommend that you check out this fascinating use of social media and technology that enables everyone and anyone, yes YOU TOO, to very easily make a significant contribution to the world at large. Behan cites a great example of how this has been most recently used in the wake of the devastation from Typhoon Haiyan.
* NOTE: Behan’s “Sailing with Totem” blog is well worth following as she chronicles her adventures out sailing the world as a family of 5
The meta model is the use of crowdsourcing (enlisting the services of a large number of people, either paid or unpaid, typically via the Internet) to tag or add metadata info about a post or photo, to huge numbers of social media posts such as tweets and pictures so that a large scale map and synthesis of data, in this case for emergency response and disaster relief, can be put together in almost real time and at a truly global scale.
MicroMapping, MicroTasking and “Micromappers” is one of the best examples and there is a good overview and explanation of “MicroMappers: Microtasking for Disaster Response” on iRevolution.net so I’ll let you read that to get more of the details.
Over on CrowdCrafting.org you can sign up for one example of a “clicker” called “TweetClicker” which helps to identify tweets that are relevant to disaster relief.
I realise that these examples are obviously very relevant to my life, literally and figuratively as I am out here sailing the world, but I also find the whole notion of “clickers” to be very fascinating for the immense variety of purposes they can serve. I would urge all of you to check out some of the links and examples above and see where YOUR imagination goes with other examples and context for putting these kinds of applications to work?!
IMHO it is well worth following MicroMapping, MicroTasking and “clickers” and learning about them the best way of all, experientially by using them yourself, to better understand and utilize this truly practical and profound use of technology and social media.
For those who seem to harbour such disdain for the likes of FaceBook, Twitter and other social media, perhaps these examples will serve to show that there are also some extremely positive uses for this technology and these social trents. Once again it all comes down to us and our choices. For me, techologies greatest promise and use is in how it enables all of us to be ever more human and humanitarian.
Check it out and see what YOU think?