I think Warchalking is a potentially powerful idea, but who provides the access? Do they know or approve of the people connecting to their network? This idea has spread like wildfire over the net in the last few days (yes, Brad and Mike, it would qualify as a meme). Warchalking is on websites all over, but this link is from The Shifted Librarian:
Matt Jones Births WiFi Markers.
“Okay so here is the first draft of a warchalking symbol card. Having not very much experience of war-walking or war-driving, I’m really looking to others for suggestion as what would be useful to represent in the warchalking symbology. Hopefully we can get the card to V1.0 pretty quickly and start chalking up the city!
I’m going to talk to some folk tommorrow and try and get the discussion going at “PRIVATE REVERIES, PUBLIC SPACES” and hopefully, DIS2002.
You can download:
A PDF of the card to print out and use [31k] An EPS of the card to download and improve [800k]“
“Ben gets the inaugural warchalking pic – he’s chalked up his kynance mews access point, and damn – it looks good even though I say so myself…
[click the picture for a bigger version, 74k]He’s also written a little piece over at his O’Reilly blog, which explains why warchalking your town or city is a good idea much better than I ever could.”
This meme is really rolling right now, but I think it has staying power if enough folks hop on board, especially libraries. If your library is providing public WiFi access, put up a rune! If you’re not and you’re at a public library, look at this phenomenon and realize how you could contribute to it, the benefits to the public, and the benefits for you!
You can also read the comments about this over at Slashdot.