Foursquare is a somewhat popular mobile based application that allows you to “check-in” to locations and provides information about where you are to your friends (or to your larger social networks if you choose) and depending on how often you check-in at any one particular location you can earn points and even real-life rewards from certain businesses.

Right now businesses are taking advantage of this information as a way of luring new customers and rewarding loyal customers. One Facebook friend posted:

Attentive businesses will use this information to their advantage in this way. I think that’s great. There is a problem though – many people are very leery of using a location based application that gives away their position so freely. In fact one enterprising organization – Please Rob Me - is using its cynicism about location based tech to invite would be criminals to watch for when you are away from home.

So what would I look for in a next generation of something like Foursquare? Well, why not put the ownness on businesses to accurately map their location using GPS co-ordinates. By doing this you, as an individual, could sign up for this type of service and just by having your phone enabled the application could pick up on what business you were patronizing. By using an anonymous id businesses could instead push rewards to you instead of waiting for you to announce yourself. Keeping with the anonymous id the application could inform other users of how many people are currently at any given location. This doesn’t mean you would have to make everyone anonymous; like how the applications work now you could allow people to share more of their personal location information if they choose too. The key however is that the anonymity option would still allow businesses and users to connect without a direct, transparent relationship.

I believe these tweaks would greatly open up the use of location based applications to a broader user base. What do you think?

Here are the slides from my presentation/conversation hybrid that I hosted last weekend at the Digital Media in a Social World OSU event. All in all the event was good and I believe that my session went fairly well. Unfortunately I don’t believe I did as good of a job engaging the room as I’d hoped for but that is the risk you take when you try something new.

The topic was basically about making your offline presence (particularly as an organization) much more responsive and flexible to the needs of your supporters and community – the way it is with your online presence. Here are the slides:

{Re-posted from ElephantsOnBicycles.com}

Growing up I watched a lot of Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood (watch here) and I’ve always had a love for the show and the man behind that show, Fred Rogers. The thing about this show and the man himself is that he wasn’t interested in teaching people what actions specifically are “wrong” and what actions specifically are “right” – he instead nurtured an understanding of how our actions affect others and how our feelings have an effect on our own self.

I’ve been thinking a lot about anger lately, about how quick we as a culture are to get angry and point fingers and choose sides; I’ve been witness to where that leads – we all are. Crisis after crisis because we aren’t satisfied to let cooler heads prevail.

Well, today in my RSS feed I found this nugget courtesy of Coudal Partners: it is Fred Rogers testifying before Congress about PBS funding. Listen not just to the words he has chosen but to the calmness of his delivery. He doesn’t need to get his ire up because his words reflect the deeper honesty of his being.

I’m grateful for the chance to continue to learn from Mr. Rogers, no matter what age I am. If you haven’t seen the video take the 6 minutes to watch it and really let the ideas settle into your mind.