Rich. With all due respect to the impression my comments made on you - I never said, “Tons of racist content started appearing…” or “groups used their service to forward their sometimes racist agendas.”

My comments in regards to managing mobile communities was that once we started connecting the desktop world to the mobile world (and improving mobile SEO) - some mobile communities due to the increased exposure they received started experiencing the same types of interaction/reception they sometimes recieve from troublemakers on the desktop world or in real life. The example I gave were where we received reports that some “facist-types” were causing trouble in one of the mobile gay communities. It was not tons, but does occassionally happen - which is a shame - other then blocking IPs, etc. we are also providing tools so community managers can choose to limit their audience to “members’ only.

You’re right that this is an interesting problem - re: trying to figure out what our role is. I think this issue is something every social networking/community service deals with but many times sweeps under the rug. We would rather confront these issues head on, openly and get the right solutions in place.

It’s unfortunate that the second session this was leading up to “People First. A Mobile Bill of Rights.” was cancelled due to time issues. It was during that session I was hoping to build upon my community session and discuss what rights and protection people need from off-portal services.

David- Thanks for the clarification. I’m certainly glad these incidents weren’t as frequent as I thought. It was great of you to comment on your talk and I’ve updated the main post to point people here.

I’m also sorry the Bill of Rights talk was canceled. I think the first session served its purpose drawing people into the problem, but it would have been great to hear some input from the community to help brainstorm ways that off-portal communities can thrive without censorship, but still offer protection and a feeling of welcomeness.

Even in a more casual sense, I know that joining online communities is often difficult - they take on very different personalities, making it hard for new members to get into the fold. Regardless of protection, community moderators have the challenge of growing the community by keeping the atmosphere hospitable.

Rich,
Very interesting coverage of the mobile camp, extremely useful insight. It’s wonderful to see that “Physical Hyperlinks” as you call them, or otherwise simply mobile codes have been presented at this event. Certainly it seems interest is picking up in all kinds of applications: commercial, social etc. Its also interesting to see how codes did well in Japan, where a lot of the everyday transactions are immediately accessible and aren’t human-prone through just scanning a code.
It is worth mentioning two things:
One, is much more flexible then taking a serial number into a table on a server. Although it can be done, this approach is very limiting, I think. A much more rewarding user experience is if scanning the code would show immediate, local feedback on the phone, before taking further action. This way, in addition to remote web links or SMS applications, the user could take local actions such as add a contact to their address book without having to connect to the web, . Thinking of all the services available on the phone you would realized how much you can really do on the phone locally in addition to those actions you can take on the web.
Second, since ConnexTo can enable those actions, its really not just “Physical Hyperlinks” solution, it could be any action you could think of.

Last, an interesting read on codes, Scott Shaffer has written a good follow up piece, which you can read . I recommend reading to the end

Thanks Amir. Actually you’re right - it would be great for codes to execute some immediate feedback.

Depending on the physical size of the code and the amount of error correction you want built in, you can hold up to 7,089 characters of numeric data. That’s not a lot to program local action, but RFID can store up to 4kb, or so I hear - so there might be a chance there.

Hey Rich,
Good point, I missed the RFID bit: RFID is a slightly different way of doing something similar; with the exception that RFID is not always obviously visible to the user. That might be a good thing, or bad, depending on the context.

One key difference between RFID and mobile codes is that RFIDs radiate their information: Think of a magazine you read, if you wanted to add a “Physical Hyperlink” made of RFID to one or more ads, that would never work because you would have several different RFID tags transmitting…with printed codes you know exactly what you scan.

I messed up my last post (sorry), the link to ConnexTo is http://www.connexto.com.

[…] I went to the first Mobile Camp NY last spring and it was a great event. I’m expecting it to only get better. Check out Mobile Camp NYC 2 November 10th. There will be a lot of physical hyperlinking presence at this one, which was a hot topic at the first meeting. […]

[…] digital signage products as well as a Bebo sponsored presentation on upcoming mobile social apps. MobileTee had some great notes on previous one in […]