Everybody shut up for a second: The internet is being used to solve the world’s problems.  Let’s zoom in on that ridiculous statement to Slate.com, which recently asked its readers to propose inventive solutions to the world’s public transportation woes.  Notice that this question, which I have paraphrased and then re-phrased not as a question but as an invitation, does not target a specific public transportation mode, city, geography, state, nation, or planet.  Each of these specifications come with their own unique set of woes that a community of readers might solve with collective wit, imagination and inspiration.  My problems as a subway rider on the Boston T might differ from the complaints made by a Metro rider in DC, which would alter dramatically from the issues raised by an Earth-ferrying intra-orbital zeppelin passenger, etc.  There is a reason Slate.com generalized this topic – Slate.com lives in the cloud and clouds can’t be fenced or they won’t be fenced, or they are never fenced no matter if you try to fence them or not.  They float here and there in an ethereal fog that sharpens colors and outlines temporarily before fading away.  Slate.com is not a community.  It does not represent a locality.  It represents ideas that are written by people with editors on topics that shift like the cloud, with the cloud and in the cloud itself.  This cloud can’t be chained to a location – it can’t be tied with any specificity because it will rust or whither or it will die or you will stop going to it because your visits give it power and when it stops moving, you stop caring.  Anyway – I’m over-writing.

Slate.com can’t ask you about the T or the Metro because it doesn’t know who you are.  And if it knew who you are, then it would know where you are.  That knowledge is the thing that makes a cloud-based publication a community.  That knowledge is the thing that can be harnessed to solicit information of value from a community that is not interested solely in prize money but rather in the value that is collected by the community itself.  Because the community shares a problem that needs to be solved.

So Slate.com which may or may not succeed in solving the world’s transportation woes made me realize recently the difference between an online publication with user-accounts and comments sections and blogs and the same thing that is also an online community.  I posted a solution to transportation woes and if you were to be so kind, I ask you to please vote in favor of my smart buses solution.