Communities

Regarding entry #5 and entry #2, here's the whole story behind the relationship between dodamage.de and NovaVision, the company that created the blips and lenses we wore.


As I said before, dodamage.de started as a photo-sharing webpage. This was pre-Facebook, so instead of a social network, it was an "online community", but the idea was similar. We showed our photos to everyone there and they showed theirs, we commented and shared a forum where we would talk. The funny thing about these specialized communities is how well they reflected real life. Of course we all shared a similar interest, urban photography with an edge (not my words, that's was the page tagline). However, even considering that we were a small community, we had our own factions. We had the luddites, who used old cameras and spent fortunes in chemicals on old fashion analogic cameras; the techies (I was one of these), who bought a new digicam every six months; the eros, that always included naked girls on their photos...


These were microcultures inside of microcultures, so you ended bonding quite a lot with the people that were on your side. I mean, it was like if our country was photography, our town urban photos and our neighborhood the people we shared the most with. It was actually a really strong connection.


And then one of the techies linked in the forums an article about augmented reality he had read and liked. We commented, we discussed about it and some of us, me included, admitted that it was a cool idea. Then, a couple of months later, another of the techies, sends us a message saying that his company is working on something like this and he's looking for a reduced tester's control group. We were hooked straight away.


In case you're wondering, the luddites ended up disappearing (I think they might have became extinct) and the eros moved on to SuicideGirls when they started earning enough to pay a monthly subscription.