This afternoon at the Walled Garden conference, the Digital Methods Initiative and I made a funky little website.

The concept WALLED GARDEN addresses issues of identity, mobile communities and networks by focussing on the tendency towards online gated and closed communities. How does this affect the (in)accessibility of information and knowledge?

Basically the question we (DMI) asked is “given web2.0 sites as walled gardens, how many of it’s content is accessible from outside that specific walled garden (platform)”. We found this service usernamecheck.com, which checks if a given username is taken on a whole set of sites.

We extended this service, in the light of the Walled Garden conference, by querying usernames for their existence in all these services. For each service where the username is taken or active, we’ll query google for the name in the service and give back a ranked list of web2.0 services ‘leaking’ information about you.

You can try it yourself at leakygarden.net.

It would be really nice to do a followup by getting a representative sample of usernames from each of these services and querying them all in a search engine for ‘leaky content’. This touches questions of which sites feed whom, which sites allow only content to come in but not to get out, etc.

In this respect others of the DMI team started tracing and visualizing data flows of information between these walled garderns - which information goes in, and which information goes out. You will be able to find their results here soon.