People Nearby

I added the magic META markup to get myself into GeoURL today and now that they’ve harvested my co-ordinates I’ve been amusing myself by cruising through the list of sites geographically near mine. It makes for interesting reading.
Surprisingly there aren’t any sites at all in Bath. But there are certainly plenty in and around Bristol, of which more than a few seem to be from web designers or web developers. In fact the closest person to me (at least currently) is Simon Willison whose CSS tutorials I bookmarked in my “Stuff To Read” folder earlier this week.
I found cruising through these sites, occasionally tripping over common points of reference (commonly read blogs, thoughts on FOAF and semweb hackery, song lyrics, etc) a fascinating but also very curious experience, highlighting how the web can both draw people together whilst simultaneously pushing them apart; how we have issues and interests in common, but share them within a limited medium; how we can have heated debates and fascinating discussions through and with online personas, without realising that we’re interacting with a person we pass on the street every day.
No new insights. It just got me thinking. Or maybe I’m just in a funny mood because Ethan got me out of bed at 5.50am this morning.
Anyway two of the most interesting things I came across were courtesy of Jon Hadley who linked to these scale drawings of sky scrapers (nice pics) and St. Vincent’s Rock a “story of myths and legends in modern Bristol” (nicely drawn comic).
The latter was part of Bristol’s now failed bid to be Capital of Culture. Shame.