In case you haven’t heard of it before Geocaching is an activity that is part treasure hunt, part social web. The tagline at geocaching.com is: “The game were you are the search engine.” What I find most interesting about participating in Geocaching is it’s ability to to bring people together in realspace via an application in cyberspace.
In order to find a geocache someone first has to place it, so right out of the gate you get a kind of a social interaction. It takes at a minimum two people to make geocaching work. If it was just two people you wouldn’t really need a website now would you? The process works something like this: place geocache and post it on the web, participants go to the web to find available geocaches, go outside and look for the geocache, come home and post a log about your experience. As it turns out there are a lot of Geocachers. There have been almost 700,000 logs written in the last 7 days by almost 87,000 members. This is an active community.
Not only is the community active in cyberspace it is also active in real-space. There are many geocaching events going on in a given month. These events are an opportunity for geocachers to get together and share experiences and in some cases make exciting new ones. My trip to Ishpatina Ridge was one such event. For that event me and my geocaching buddy Bakers Dozen along with four other people flew to within 4 km of the cache. There were other’s that boated or hiked in. It was a diverse group that is for sure. It was also a ton of fun. We celebrated our hike to Ontario’s Highest point with a glass of wine brought along for the occasion by Zoeker Bill.
Geocaching is an excellent example of how the social web increases real contact between people. The more events you attend the more people you will meet. All of this is enabled and facilitated by a social application in cyberspace.
