Solidarity at LIFT09 - Juliana Rotich

Juliana Rotich just spoke here at LIFT Conference on "Globalism, Mobiles and The Cloud". She touched on several points that are interesting from a mobile for development and also a social placemarking perspective.

Global Voices and Ushahidi, two projects she is working on, are giving a platform and a voice to people reporting from countries and on incidents (crises, natural disasters, diseases) that are not usually covered by mainstream media.

Could Tagcrumbs, the start-up I'm working on add somthing here? I believe that it could bring people together by telling hopeful stories, conveying shared cultural contexts, annotating shared spaces and bring personal information from rural areas on a map. We are not there yet (adding a Tagcrumb via SMS is not possible for example) but taking into consideration the adoption rate of the mobile web in emerging regions ("80% of BBC's mobile site's traffic comes from Africa") we might get there.

The image is by mrtnk.

LIFT09: Discovering Geneva with Tagcrumbs GeoRSS

Just arrived here in Geneva a couple of hours ago (too late for the pre-pre conference drinks) and found my way to the kind Couchsurfing hosts who'll accommodate us during our stay until Saturday.

Over on Tagcrumbs we'll be tagging places in Geneva that we discover during our stay here and we invite you to do the same. It will be interesting to see where LIFT participants hang out and what they discover. The official tag is "lift09".

Here are the places discovered so far:

Tagcrumbs - Social Placemarking is online

It's done, Tagcrumbs is now officially online. What is Tagcrumbs? ... well, it's a service that helps you to remember places, share them with friends and discover great new locations online.

It's a bit like a collaborative address book for places.

The last months have been intense but also instructive and fun. Thinking back I've actually worked on this project in 5 different countries. During my time in Mexico, travelling through Belize and Guatemala in the summer, and then, back in Europe, in Germany and now in France... what a trip!

It's great to see it online now, and the feedback is also starting to pour in already. I'm very much looking forward to seeing all the great places and stories on Tagcrumbs soon. Travelling, sharing stories and helping people to discover new things is what I really love.

To get started you can check out our tour or jump directly to my placemarks if you want to see an example.

Tagcrumbs.com - Public Launch

View more presentations from tagcrumbs. (tags: geoweb placemarking)

For more info check out our blog or our about page.