BlockChalk is an anonymous message board for your neighborhood. The company's founders want to enable neighbors to interact with each other while protecting everybody's privacy. At it's core, BlockChalk feels a bit like an anonymous, location-based Twitter clone. BlockChalk just released its native iPhone ( iTunes link ) today and also offers an app for the Palm Pre and Pixi. Android users can access the service through a mobile website. Sponsor Anonymity Makes for an Easy Setup Given that BlockChalk is completely anonymous, you don't have to sign up for the service or jump through any hoops before you can get started. Simply start up the app, allow the service to access your location data and you can see what others around you are saying. BlockChalk works worldwide and has active users in over 90 countries. Features BlockChalk keeps its feature set light and to the point. Besides posting your own messages, you can browse replies to your own posts and respond to messages publicly and in private. On the iPhone, BlockChalk also supports push notifications. By default, BlockChalk doesn't reveal a user's exact location. You can, however, force the service to do so by typing [here] in a post. One of the company's co-founders, Stephen Hood, used to run the product team at del.icio.us and some of the same design aesthetics shows in BlockChalk. The design is simple, to the point and doesn't get in the way of the product's features. Anonymity: Good, Bad or Just the Best Way to Get People to Share? While using BlockChalk is a lot of fun, there is also something strange about the anonymity of the service. On the one hand, it will surely encourage those users who would otherwise be afraid to reveal their location to use the service. On the other hand, however, this could easily encourage vandalism. BlockChalk offers a profanity filter and the ability to 'bury' posts, but only time - or an attack by 4chan - will tell if this will be enough to discourage disruption. Discuss

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BlockChalk: An Anonymous Message Board for Your Neighborhood

Facebook's getting its own movie , Ashton Kutcher is the social web's unpaid spokesman and now NBC is launching a show dedicated to mobile apps. What's the world coming to? Call me old fashioned, but where I come from, a geek is a geek and a mainstream actor with an iPhone is still just a mainstream actor with an iPhone. The Oprahtization of technology is at least a bit demeaning, from my point of view. Sure, this trend brings exposure to our heroic exploits, but it's often done through stereotypes about geeks and an air of naïveté about how technology really works. What do you think? Am I being a curmudgeon? Is all this mainstream-tech integration really a good thing? Sponsor Granted, we all have to discover technology at some point. None of us were born nerds. But there's a certain je ne sais quoi that is unique to geeks: a melange of smarts, social pickiness, a willingness to be different, insatiable curiosity, a desire to learn and create new and amazing things, and frequently, a very necessary shell to protect oneself from the rejections of the larger world around us. As a people accustomed to being ostracized for speaking in terms too technical, having a bizarre sense of humor or caring more about bandwidth than baseball, we have generally existed far outside the cool kids' club. Not to frame my entire argument in a high school analogy, but we have mostly been useful for one thing: Doing other people's homework. When they - the non-technical of this world - want an application, device, website or feature, we built it and teach them how to use it. This has been the geek's role for eons: Doing the jocks' dirty work and then skipping prom. Can you imagine Einstein hobnobbing with Marlene Deitrich? Or a young Steve Jobs on an early '80s red carpet with a young Harrison Ford? Yet we are seeing more and more crossover between mainstream media and our little world of technology to the point that you can't tell the tech from the tinsel. Perhaps it's just disconcerting to see those two worlds meshing for the first time. Perhaps all my angst is simply discomfort. Yet when I see and hear innovators and geeks referred to as ugly, graceless basement-dwellers, even in jest, by mainstream talking heads, it still gets to me. But what gets to me more is the new set of faux geeks - folks who know just enough about tech to send a misspelled Twitter update from their mobiles but who thrive on the attention and revenue they gain from this scene. They wouldn't know an API from a IP; the red carpet is more likely their natural habitat; yet they incessantly appear in blog posts, pictures and videos until the real geeks don't even remember how they got there. It happens on a small scale (every tech scene has its skill-free new media douchebag), and it's starting to happen on a larger scale, as well (why is Olivia Munn a geek, again?). Call me bitter, call me jealous, call me cynical - but let me know what you think, too. Some of our friends on Twitter told us they didn't like mainstream media's encroachment onto geek territory, but others who responded to our query see this exposure as a good thing, and we want to hear this point of view, as well. After all, I was excited the first time I heard Twitter mentioned in a news report, too. Give us your opinions in the comments, and don't hold back! We love a good, long-winded discourse at ReadWriteWeb. Note: Lest you throw stones at the writer for not being geeky enough herself, she was building LANs and playing the first version of King's Quest when you were still in diapers. Discuss

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Open Thread: Mainstream Media Discovers Geekery, Is This a Good Thing?

Favrd , the now-retired (creator-destroyed) aggregation site for Twitter "favorites," began as the irreverent offshoot of a community of influential designers and developers -- people like Merlin Mann ( @hotdogsladies ), John Gruber ( @gruber ), Jeffrey Zeldman ( @zeldman ), and Dean Cameron Allen ( @textism ), the site's creator. You don't need to know the lofty origins of Favrd, though; if anything, they're antithetical to the point. Favrd ran on a "no-webcock algorithm." ("Webcock" was Dean's term for shamelessly self-promoting "new media gurus.") Sponsor This guest post was written by Kim Gaskins, a writer for Latitude Research . In an interview earlier this year, web developer Rafael Torres ( @rafitorres ) remarked: "A common concern for all of [the creators] was the idea that the social web had been invaded by a certain class of individuals who were apparently only concerned with marketing themselves and their brands through fake social interactions." How Many Stars in the Sky? Infinite: and That's Too Many. Simply put, I think what happened to Favrd was that a new crop of users appeared who didn't know how to value the currency , and thus they inadvertently devalued it. They were arbitrarily plastering their stars around town to promote themselves, like "take-out menus hung on the doors of other restaurants." Dan Wineman ( @dwineman ), "The Favrd Situation" In this way, currency (devalued) only serves to commodify valuable content. Remiel ( @remiel ) makes some generative suggestions here to "inject scarcity back into the equation." What if Favstar instituted a new metric... ? "The result, ideally, is... a truly useful list of vetted Twitter content, reliably worth reading. In short: a great, alternative Twitter filter." "I hate when clever, elegant things leave the web." Jeffrey Zeldman to Dean Cameron Allen, commenting on "The Stars Look Down" Favrd: The Black Sheep of Bottom-Up PosterCommunities Cohesive communities like Favrd, grown organically without a pointed goal -- especially the communities grown around liberality of mind and well-placed puns -- have some people asking, " yes, but what's the point? " Therein lies the point. "I've met lots of people, collaborated creatively with a few and even had one stay on my couch during his trip across the country. All wonderful experiences." Jon Dascola , commenting on Zeldman's "The Stars Look Down" So What's Beside the Point? Professionally speaking, Avery Edison ( @aedison ) is an upcoming UK-based comedy writer who has her roots in the feedback and support of the Favrd community. You Look Nice Today ( @hotdogsladies , @lonelysandwich , and @scottsimpson ) is a free podcast "prepared by and for 'adults'" that now performs in 3space as well, for money . Interview with Nick Douglas ( @nick ), author of Twitter Wit: Brilliance in 140 Characters or Less : For Goodness' Sake... SmallCanBeBig is a charitable non-profit that harnesses the power of small, direct donations for families in need. Mark Nikolewski ( @mnik ) is lead designer and art director for the organization; from his personal experience in the community, he can trace back thousands of dollars in direct donations to SmallCanBeBig from Favrd members. He estimates that the community supplies about 20% of the organization's ( @smallcanbebig 's) retweets, without accounting for any secondary networking effects. Mike Monteiro ( @mike_FTW ) has been one of SmallCanBeBig's most outspoken supporters, incenting donations via Twitter in Favrd fashion: "SmallCanBeBig: Tell you what: you donate $50 and I will tweet a PERSONAL INSULT which you can RT to show your friends how cool you are." (Visit SmallCanBeBig.org directly to donate sans personal insult.) Josh Hopkins ( @thedayhascome ) began tweeting about the medical condition of his daughter (born January 2009) as a part of the Favrd community, which rose up with overwhelming support while Lucy underwent serious operations and prolonged hospital stays. ( Josh and his family will be participating in the March for Babies in 2010 to raise money on behalf of Lucy's name. If individuals would like to donate money to The March of Dimes, on behalf of Team Lucy Kate who is walking in the Indianapolis event, more information is available here .) "Keep starring the heavens, kids. #thankyoutextism" (via @pagecrusher ) A more comprehensive directory of projects from the Favrd community is available here . Discuss

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On Favrd, Twitter & Community: Why You Should Be Able to Count the Stars

Volvo IT has a policy against using its network to post racist and other defamatory information against individuals. But it is considerably less visible and not nearly as thorough as other corporate policies for posting information to the Internet, on blogs and social networks. The Volvo IT policy is an Adobe PDF file that details pretty clearly what is deemed inappropriate. Sponsor Earlier this week, Wikipedia banned editing from machines inside the Volvo IT Department for racist remarks left on the pages of two well-known Pakistani Cricket players. From Volvo IT's policy: "It is not allowed to use e-mail for sending or any other way of transmission for sending or receiving any information which is racist, obscene, offensive, threatening; or which includes harm to minors, hoaxes, malicious code, unwanted advertising, material intended to disturb other's equipment, or which is sent in a way that includes breach of any person's rights, copyright, privacy or other rights. It is not allowed to impersonate other users, to distribute pornographic material, to upload, download or distribute child pornography or illegal software. It is not allowed to send or facilitate unsolicited commercial email or bulk emails or to mail bomb, i.e. to intentionally try to impede another person's use of e-mail services." Besides this, Volvo IT and the Volvo Group have not developed a detailed policy on best practices for using the Internet. There is no visible information for how employees use the Internet, best practices for blogging and how to conduct oneself on social networks. There is actually little on both sites to show any use of social technologies for its purposes. In contrast, we looked at policies from larg organizations that do have policies. We believe more detailed policies provide the opportunity to better educate employees and can prevent incidents like what happened at Volvo IT. Here are some policies that we found worth highlighting. Interestingly, microblogging has not filtered into these policies in much of any way. Cisco Systems Cisco is considered one of the most advanced users of social technologies. It is increasingly focused on enterprise collaboration technologies. Its policy on posting to the Internet is clearly written by the legal team. And it covers the bases. "Your Internet posting should reflect your personal point of view, not necessarily the point of view of Cisco. Because you are legally responsible for your postings, you may be subject to liability if your posts are found defamatory, harassing, or in violation of any other applicable law. You may also be liable if you make postings which include confidential or copyrighted information (music, videos, text, etc.) belonging to third parties. All of the above mentioned postings are prohibited under this policy. When posting your point of view, you should neither claim nor imply you are speaking on Cisco's behalf, unless you are authorized in writing by your manager to do so." IBM IMB provides a thorough guide to posting, embracing the concept of posting online but also being cognoscente that an employee's personal and professional life are now so intertwined. To help matters, IBM created a video for employees about practices to follow.

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The Volvo IT Rants and The Importance of a Corporate Internet Policy