[via B2B Blog]

Google recently released a free 3D digital modeling tool called "SketchupThis was software that Google obtained by acquiring @Last Software.

Sketchup allows people to create 3D models, and then place them in the Google Earth environment via a free plugin(The software download is only available for Windows at this time). [originally posted on Social Synergy Weblog]

This brings back to mind something that I had written about almost a year ago, on the Smartmobs weblog. The posting I had written back then was about Detroit Professor Jeff Rice’s CTheory article on21st Century Graffiti.

Here’s what I wrote back then:

Ctheory.net hosts a paper by Jeff Rice that discusses how Detroit and some of it’s institutions are attempting to re-invent Detroit as a digital city. Detroit’s plan has been to lure technology companies to the decaying downtown of Detroit. It is theorized that these technology companies will then help attract and maintain a "Creative Class" who will spearhead urban/economic renewal.

Rice proposes a wholly different direction. He proposes that the
city itself should become "digitized" by utilizing social software, and
creating an emergent folksonomy of encounter and experience throughout the whole city. Quote from Cthoery:

My argument is that the connections Florida stresses are
not found in a causal or referential relationship among individuals,
capital, the city or other forces, but rather in the new media logic of
assemblage; that is, combination in general. In the assemblage,
reference is not a requirement. The social connectivity planners like
Florida believe will emerge out of urban renewal may be better
actualized through the digital assemblage of tagging. My call is for a
plan of information tagging, where residents, working in digital
spaces, reimagine the city through their own conceptualization and
actualization of tags. In place of tagging the bypass or the stop sign
with graffiti, they tag the city itself as an encountered name or
moment within a digital, interconnected space. On the Web, these
encounters become moments of discursive interaction and combination as
others add to the tags with their own tagging attributes. "The history
of urbanism," Steven Johnson notes, "is also the story of more muted
signs, built by the collective behavior of smaller groups and rarely
detected by outsiders." Tagging brings this behavior to the foreground
so that social connectivity is generated among those within the
recognized urban space and those often deemed "outsiders" (those who
bring new naming conventions to the discussion and to the urban space
itself). If there, in fact, exists a Digital Detroit as this city
claims for itself, than it must be found within the practice of
tagging.

Detroit, like the urban experience in general, has become
non-referential. Its empty spaces, or "ruins" as the Fabulous Ruins of
Detroit website declares, don’t refer to anything anymore. Tagging
allows us to transform that non-referentiality into social experience.
The lesson of Detroit is a lesson for all urban sites. Digital space
becomes social space through assembled meanings, and that assemblage
actualizes the popular logic of social software. Tagging, then, marks a
place where new media logic informs our understanding of space and the
urban, fashioning a sense of the "social" not yet accounted for in
urban studies. Imagine, then, the city as a network of tags. Residents,
who tag themselves simultaneously as writers or non-writers, mark the
city through memory maps, weblogs, del.icio.us tags, and other related
tools in order to reconstruct the city’s sense of urbanity as a digital
experience. The tagging generates a number of assembled taxonomies,
some recognizable, many not. Through the assemblages, we find new
Detroits to engage. We find new Detroits emerging out of our own
discursive constructions. This reworking is social in ways capital
investment has failed to generate. By making these cities cyber — that
is, by putting them on the Web — the tags used to develop these spaces
will inevitably be linked to other similarly named tags for other
cities, for other, not yet imagined, encounters.

Jeff Rice’s ideas show one possible social software application for low or no cost access to 3D modeling software and Geographic Information Systems virtual representations like Google Earth (or virtual worlds like Second Life).

I am personally interested in the possibilities of open design concepts springing up around these new ways of creating