Upcoming presentation at Theorizing the Web Conference

I will be presenting a new part of my work at the upcoming Theorizing the Web conference that will take place on Saturday, April 9th at College Park. If you will be around the area, you are more than welcome to join me (and three other super interesting panelists) to talk about Augmented Reality. Otherwise you can follow the conference with the hashtag #ttt2011

Read my paper abstract after the break

Upcoming Paper Presentation at SSHA Conference in Chicago

Next Saturday, November 20th,  I will be presenting a paper at the Social Science History Association Annual conference in the Palmer House Hilton, Chicago. My paper will be a part of the Queer Notions of Place panel that will take place in room Clark 7 between 8:00am – 10:00am.

The paper I am presenting explores the ways in which local gay communities utilize location based services such as Grindr to form local interactions that exist both in the virtual and the physical spheres.

Feel free to contact me here or on twitter if you are coming. Hope to see you there!

Mid Term Elections Meet Location Based Services

The US mid term elections are already over. Now, when almost all media attention is gone, I think it is a good time to review the role taken by location based services in this round of elections. Since LBSs were only at their very early phase of deployment during the last elections, it is interesting to see the part they played now.

The idea of harnessing social media to increase civil participation is not new. As you may recall, during the 2009 elections Facebook, youtube, twitter and many other platforms played a key part in the process of raising awareness to the importance of voting.

Locaccino – Privacy Oriented Location Based Service

Locaccino is a location-centered social application that was developed in the Mobile Commerce Lab at Carnegie Mellon. The idea behind the application was to allow its users to share their location with friends.

Unlike other services, the technology behind Locaccino allows to easily define the times when the user would like to share her locations together with the possibility to create groups according to location preferences. For example, using these preferences, a user can set permissions to show co-workers her location between 8AM – 5PM.

Checked for STD? there’s a badge for that.

MTV teamed up with Foursquare and launched today a new campaign calling their viewers/users to “check in” at an health clinic for sexually transmitted diseases tests and get a special badge on Foursquare. The idea is to change the way people feel toward this sensitive issue and remove the stigma attached to it.

Stephen Friedman from MTV said he expects that once some people will get the badge, they will show it to their friends and they might too try and get it. ”It only takes a few to get the ball rolling” he said. And by the way Foursquare users play, he might be right.