David Davies' Radio Weblog

It's interesting how something as global as the Internet can tell you who your closest neighbours are.

As I blog away I often think about those who read my blog and who's blogging about the same things. Like minded people on the Internet find ways of seeking each other out and communities form around shared interests. In these global villages geographical remoteness is no barrier to an active life in the online community. The Internet is the great meeting place for like-minded people, so much so that cyber-communites far outnumber physical communities as each of us may play a role in any number of communities of our choosing.

But what of physical communities and the people that live in them? Most of us are surrounded by more people in a 1km radius from our home then we ever interact with on the Internet. Yet do you know how many of them have an online life, have a weblog? You'd never meet the majority of these people let alone ever find out what interests them yet just down the street from you could be a kindred spirit.

So now there's GeoURL. GeoURL has been around for a few months and word of it seems to have spread by clicking on those little green icons in people's weblogs. Here's mine . I really like GeoURL. It's bridging the gap between the virtual and the physical. It's an Internet technology that tells you who's living next door. Through it I've encountered a number of bloggers who I'd have never met, at least never met online. But GeoURL is just the first step. Once you've located someone near to you and identified that you have a shared interest, maybe you should meet up? Talking face to face is still something enjoyable for most people. Enter meetup.com. Through meetup.com I can find out all the people local to me, find our shared interests then, well, meet up. Easy.

In the UK at least we can go one step further with the Internet-as-mediator. UpMyStreet.com describes itself as "The real-life guide to your neighbourhood". There's something ironic about an Internet service acting as mediator to people who live next to each other but it's an interesting service nonetheless and their 'conversations' feature allows you to chat online with people in your neighbourhood, or at least up your street.

So where is all this taking us? After years of massive growth of the Internet it's reassuring to see services start up that are starting to put people back in touch with their local community. The fact that these services exist at all must surely give us hope that at least for now, there's nothing like a face to face conversation once in a while.

I took the belief-o-matic test and apparently I'm a secular humanist. Well thank God for that!