My writing style is stiff and boring, and wholly unfit for the business of writing about such a lively subject as municpal solid waste. I need to garbage-juice it up a bit. To this end shall all my powers of cogitation be employed.
OK, I’m making the code for Garbagescout available for sale.
What you get:
I’ll also help you out getting it all set up.
The code is licensed to you under the terms of the GPL. Be sure you understand the terms you’re agreeing to! The only further stipulation is that the site you create can’t be a site for scouting garbage in New York City. I know that’s vague, so I’m relying on your honesty.
The code itself is not the most beautiful stuff in the world, but it’s clear and commented. I basically banged this out in a month, and the code could be improved in several places.
The price is $300 for non-commercial use, which means you can not profit from the use or sale of the code I sell you, except spiritually. It’s $1000 if you’re going to use the code to make money, make it part of a for-profit web site, or try to sell it (hopefully after making some improvements). Again, here I rely on you to be honest. This code will only be useful to you if you are a programmer.
Feel free to contact me with questions. It’s jim eat garbagescout doubt com.
I’ve started writing down some of my experiences and thoughts on developing garbagescout on my personal web site. It’s poorly written (I’m convinced that spending too much time on the computer has destroyed my ability to communicate clearly in English), but might say something of interest.
Looking at the list of web 2.0 companies, I’d put garbagescout in community, but maybe also in search. Garbagescout is a search application, except that it indexes ephemeral, physical objects. Incidentally, the term search used to refer mainly to the act of seeking a physical object, though sometimes it was used in metaphysical discussion.
In the end, I’m happy to end up in “ecommerce”. When you throw stuff away, that’s not the end of its life as a commodity.
The ability to check the value of something using your mobile phone, either by calling a friend or using a SMS-based lookup (perhaps like the one Froogle offers) is wrreaking havoc on once laid-back yard sales, reports the Wall Street Journal [account required].
[W]hat was once a casual affair […] has been replaced by the
frenzy of a free-market economy. Aggressive shoppers are arming themselves with
global-positioning devices to quickly zoom from sale to sale and special
scanners and cellphone services that let them do a quick price check on items
(such as used books and CDs) that have bar codes printed on them.
What’s relevant to garbagescout is the idea of using mobile phones as endpoints of the internet, for retrieving and tranasmitting data.
Also, somehow, and probably because of eBay, used stuff has come to be seen as having a real value, that is one you can actually look up. Its value is still “whatever you can gat for it”, but people have a much better idea of what that is. That’s good, in the sense that it will encourage reuse.
On a personal note, I don’t really care about making money at a stoop sale (that’s what they have around here). I just do it because I don’t want to see stuff go in the landfill. It gives me pleasure to connect people with something they can use, and if I’m not using it I don’t want it.
Thanks to Big Swinging for the link.
I have just learned this term, as well as the term locative art.
GarbageScout uses the geocoder data from the U. S. Census Bureau. It’s good, and free, but there are problems. For instance, how many Bedford Avenues are there in Brooklyn?
I’ve told a few more people about this site. I’m learning from peoples’ responses. A big thing is that something on the web needs to acknowledge that it’s available to the world. Ideas spread quickly between geographic regions. Why should I limit usership to New York? People in Beijing and in Denton, Texas will use it anyay, if they want to.
The typical lover of garbage will be thrifty. There will be an interest in the physical stuff of the world that’s shared with the gadget freak, but not the zest for the latest thing. Rather, garbage lovers seek the value in what others deem worthless or passe.
Therefore, they don’t tend to have camera phones.
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