Digital #MediaArt(s) Numérique(s)

Open-source effort bring Internet to Facebook users. You post link to our wall, we reply with JPG photo album of webpage.

Last week I heard about the launch of Internet.org, and then about the new $12 Facebook-only Sprint plans, and realized that we're quickly moving towards a world in which we'll have people on Facebook, who do not have the Internet. (You may need to read the last half of that sentence again.)

An idea entered my mind, and I wasn't sure whether to laugh or cry, but I built it - JPG Internet.

This is not a startup, it's a Facebook Page where you can post a link on the wall*, and servers will grab a screenshot of the website, upload it to Facebook, and reply with a link to the JPG, so you can view the Internet on Facebook. If it is a long webpage, it will cut the image into pieces and upload it as a correctly ordered photo album.

In February 2012, the Department of Homeland Security was forced to release a document previously requested - and denied - via the Freedom of Information Act containing a list of hundreds of keywords regularly queried for the purpose of monitoring suspicious activity on social networking sites. Subsequent news headlines about this disclosure warned that the list contained "hundreds of words you shouldn't use online if you don't want to end up on an FBI watch list".

In response to this call for "sensible", precautionary self-/censorship, I am proposing to build my own Department of Homeland Security website that monitors and archives the use of these targeted 374 keywords on popular social networking sites. The information collected will be made available to the public through homelandsecurityhearts.us as both a 24 hour live stream (phase 1) and in archival form (phase 2). The latter option will include print-on-demand services, allowing users to compile data into periodic volumes for any combination of keywords they wish to access.

My goal is to build a system that is scalable, using a combination of public and private channels (i.e. using both public API keys and data brokers) for gathering information. I will focus on developing the programming infrastructure to handle mining one of these networks at a time. At a later stage, I hope to expand processing capabilities to both increase the volume of information mined and to include a wider cross-section of relevant social media sites (phase 3). I am currently working on phases 1 and 2, which will focus exclusively on Twitter.

Join the global discussion on sustainability with hashtag #RIO20 and watch the conversation evolve at cnn-ecosphere.com ( Google Chrome recommended )

A real-time view of the global discussion on sustainability around the Rio+20 Earth Summit.The plants in the ECOSPHERE grow from your tweets tagged with #RIO20.

Use your twitter login to plant a thought - and watch the international conversation grow.