As you may know, earlier this month the Insiteability team headed to Brighton for the annual dConstruct Conference. What is ‘dConstruct’? As they put it, it’s “the affordable one day conference for people designing and building the latest generation of social web applications.” (How could we refuse?)

What stood out for me was the opening key-note, by New Yorker Steven Johnson, much of which focused on his 2004 book The Ghost Map.

Johnson took us back to London in 1854 and the city’s most deadly outbreak of cholera. This was a time when convention followed the “miasma theory”, that disease was spread through the sort of foul-smelling air that was common in London at the time.

The heroes of Johnson’s story are the local doctor, John Snow, and Vicar, Henry Whitehead. Snow challenged the thinking of the time by positing that cholera was in fact water-borne. Helped by Whitehead - a man well connected to the community around Soho hit by the outbreak (what Malcolm Gladwell’s Tipping Point referred to as a connector) - Snow was able to map the incidence of cholera and tie it back to a particular water pump.

This mapping of disease to locality was, suggests, Johnson, one of the first occasions where data was effectively “mashed” with a geographic representation of the area affected. Looked at through the prism of Web 2.0 concepts, this looks rather trendy: different technologies and knowledge sources being shared together to give new ways of looking at the world - an emergent property that wouldn’t have been possible left to the individual elements.

If you’ve followed Insiteability’s own work in recent times you’ll know about some of our own innovative mash-ups, particularly those done with faith communities - see here how we’ve built a ‘virtual diocese’ for Westminster. What’s interesting about Steven Johnson’s work is the way his Internet company, Outside.In, now works on solutions to create the “hyper-local” web - a means by which the buzz of Internet traffic (newsfeeds, blogs, web pages) linked to particular localities can be picked up and displayed, emailed or otherwise used to alert registered users.

The key service here is Outside.In’s Radar - as the website puts it, something that gives a “whole new way of seeing the world around you”. Sounds good, and something we’re currently looking into to extend our own services.

How might this help people in the UK, especially our Third Sector clients? Imagine, for a start, you’re a community organiser, perhaps a volunteer worker in a particular neighbourhood, or maybe a social worker or even a priest. You’re keen to have your ear to the ground to know what people are talking about - perhaps at that very moment. Web tools like Radar can bring that to you. The Internet may well be great in making the world a smaller place, but sometimes you want to focus like a laser beam on the pulse of your local community.

Imagine being a local ‘connector’, working the social networks in your community, supported by the hyper-local web; just think of the power that might bring to you. What a wonderful world (wide web)!