Hi, I'm John Geraci

  • I've spent the past six years making everyday life in cities better with the use of web technologies.

    Most recently, I started DIYcity, a site that invites people to personally reinvent the spaces around them using common web applications.

    I also co-founded and am Head of Product for Outside.in, a hyperlocal news site that lets people experience the news right around them in real time.

    I studied at NYU's Interactive Telecommunications Program, where my work examined ways of applying the web to local communities and spaces for people's benefit. (See some of these projects below.)

    You can follow my blog twitter feed here.


  • Some of the things I've done in the past:

    Neighbornode  May, 2004
    Neighbornode was a network of neighborhood bulletin boards operating on wireless routers in people's homes. The bulletin boards allowed all of the neighbors on a single street to communicate with one another. Additionally, each bulletin board was connected virtually to other boards in the area, so that messages could be passed from block to block. The project was started in the East Village of NYC and quickly grew to include nodes all over the U.S. and as far away as Spain and the UK.  
    Neighbornode was part of my graduate studies at ITP.

    New York Times: Where Good Wi-Fi Makes Good Neighbors 
    Popular Science: Free Neighborhood Wi-Fi

    Grafedia  January, 2005
    The idea of Grafedia was to extend the definition of the web to include physical surfaces, by allowing people to 'link' hand-written text anywhere to online media. In so doing, any wall or surface could essentially become a hyperlinked web page, and the distinction between web and non-web would disappear. Grafedia popped up in cities all over the world before I ended the project in 2006. 
    Grafedia was part of my graduate studies.

    Wired: It's Not Graffiti, It's Grafedia 
    New York Times: The Web Behind the Scrawl 
    Christian Science Monitor: The Web is all around us - even on the walls 

    Foundcity  April, 2005
    The premise of Foundcity was 'del.icio.us applied to physical space', and the project was the first to apply the web notion of tagging (then a new practice called 'folksonomies') to the physical world via online maps. The site was an attempt to take the "web is everywhere" notion of Grafedia and make it more applicable to people's everyday lives. 
    Foundcity was my graduate thesis project.

    Douglas Rushkoff: Phone App Writers - The Next Generation 

    You can write me at geraci@subfuzz.com.