The Alert Retrieval Cache

Back in late 2004 and early 2005, the Alert Retrieval Cache got some press. As the story goes, I put out a few emails to the Digital Divide Network List and a few others and it netted me Dan Lane. Dan was the man who made the whole idea work way before Twitter was a speck on the horizon. And really, it uses the same concept.

SMS text messages to email/website/RSS. Dan had been doing similar things for some time, and when I explained what we were trying to do, Dan had it up and running within... hours. Neither one of us expected the BBC interview (that was the third party who doesn't speak to me, at least, since the whole thing - a fellow contributor at WorldChanging.com at the time).

So the ARC was born. Sort of. And, that's where it floundered. We couldn't get anyone to use the damned thing - and Dan was much more conservative than I, calling it a proof of concept.

The idea evolved over time. Everyone sort of went their own way, but I kept pressing on making people aware of the idea. In some instances since 2005, civic society has set up instances of the ARC under different guises and names - but the concept was missing something that I have advocated for quite some time:

It must exist before the disaster.