Whence Social Media on World Streets

If anyone knows where this whole business of balancing what just might be highly useful linking with the constraints imposed by a seriously time-challenged 24 hour day, I hope they will let the editor of this journal know. True there is a great deal that is out there, and every bit of it is in constant kaleidoscopic evolution. My first temptation is to stick to what I know works, and give the rest a pass. But another part of my brain tells me that this could be a big mistake.
Were we in fact winning the sustainability wars, this might not be an issue. But the sad truth is that we are losing big time, so every tool , every possible advantage that might help us do a bit better is something that we simply have to explore. In this posting, you will find a succinct resume of where World Streets stands today in our attempt to understand, harness and put to useful work a carefully culled selection of social media tools. Your comments and suggestions on this would be, as always, more than welcome. Off we go:

See, shape and interact with World Streets from different angles via . . .

• Facebook – http://www.facebook.com/worldstreets


• Twitter – http://twitter.com/#!/worldstreets


• Scribd - http://www.scribd.com/fekbritton


• LinkedIn – http://tinyurl.com/ws-L-In


• YouTube - http://tinyurl.com/YT-WorldStreets-1


• Picasa – http://tinyurl.com/ws-picasa

If you are social media competent, or curious, you may want to take a few minutes to click through this collection, each of which is intended to extend the reach of our collaborative work. Again, comments . . .

And in addition to the above we have set up no less than seventeen, at last count, Facebook Focus Groups, each of which intends to provide a contact and shared space for people specifically interested in following the topic

Facebook Focus Groups (You will need to be logged in to access)

1. Global South - Click here


2. New Mobility Kids Network - Click here


3. World Streets Media Exchange - Click here


4. World City Bike Forum - Click here


5. World Streets Sentinels - Click here


6. World Carshare Consortium - Click here


7. India Streets - Click here


8. Nova Mobilidade - Click here


9. Journal of World Transport Policy and Practice - Click here


10. New Mobility Café - Click here


11. World Rideshare - Click here


12. World xTransit - Click here


13. World Telemobility - Click here


14. Nuova Mobilità - Click here


15. Gatnet: Gender & transport – Click here


16. World Rural Transport - Click here


17. Africa Streets – Click here

And while those entries and pu tin a certain order here and bear numbers that reflect the relative development of that partial group, until now, that is not intended to reflect their relative importance. It is just that the ones down lower on the list have not as yet been subject to an active group development effort. This kind of thing communications up when we are constrained by the inevitable limits of a 24 hour day.

Please comment, join, guide, improve, and help us put to work these good ideas and approaches.

All about languages

World Streets is all about language (see top menu item on this), and as it turns out Social Networking is a language of many sorts. We might think about this:

Here is in closing is a representation of some Sumerian text ripped off from a page on the web. A language which apparently did the trick for its users something like 4 and a half millenia ago.



And here a rendering of social networking symbols from 2011.



Nobody around here ever said that sustainable mobility was going to be easy.

The editor

PS. James Fellow recently wrote an article in The Atlantic April 2011, http://www.theatlantic.com/james-fallows/: "Learning to love the (shallow, divisive, unreliable) new media", in which he closes with a few quotes I think make sense in our case here. To whit:

- It is hard to imagine the possibly of the new media landscape, or the further problems it will create.

- "All these possibilities are fantasies until someone actually builds them," Jeff Jarvis said. "We don't know what we are building. But from a position of optimism and respect for the public, we have to intent tools and see what they become."

- At no stage in the evolution of our press could anyone be sure which approaches would support life and which would flicker out.

- But perhaps this apparently late stage is actually an early stage, in the collective drive and willingness to devise new ways of explaining the world and in the individual ability to investigate, weigh and interpret the ever richer supply of information available to us. . . My understanding of technological and political history makes me think it is still early. Also, there is no point in thinking anything else.

I could not have said it better myself. ;-)

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