This just showed up in my inbox from the Shiftspace blog:

Having wandered for years in an owner-centric Cyberspace, where do we turn for online public spaces? ShiftSpace (.org) seeks to provide a new town-square built above the existing privatized hyper-mall of information that is the World Wide Web. We are building an open-source meta-layer above the web and we would enjoy your company.

ShiftSpace is an open source platform that seeks to expand the creative possibilities currently provided through the web. ShiftSpace provides new tools for artists, designers, architects, activists, developers, students, researchers, and hobbyists to create new online contexts built on top of the web.

The web is often described using spatial metaphors; from “home page� to “information architecture�, it seems natural to explain the virtual with physical terminology. One illuminating metaphor is to regard the web we know today as an extensive hypertext subway system. New stations (webpages), and the local subway lines that interconnect them (hyperlinks), are being built continuously, causing the system to grow exponentially. While the underground landscape grows increasingly crowded, each station is constrained by rigid boundaries and offers a limited number of choices for traveling to new locations.

We believe the web should be extended to encourage information mobility. We believe there is room for new information neighborhoods to be built above the web’s subway system. We believe we should start building these neighborhoods above-ground.

Virtual locations in ShiftSpace will be built as a second layer on top of a webpage (a street level above a subway station). These top-level neighborhoods will offer a rich topography, overlapping each other and spanning the web to create virtual cities built on top of any website. These ‘Spaces’ are composed of modular applications, each adding a specific capability. One space might allow for text annotation and discussion, while another could accommodate a collaborative collage work, with a third providing links that support or refute the underlying webpage’s core argument. ShiftSpace accompanies each webpage, unobtrusively hidden until invoked by the user with the keyboard shortcut shift + space. In that sense ShiftSpace is the stairway to the lively street above the station, should you choose to take it.