The city.vi is a large pool of internet sites for accessing all the local information in 68000 cities in the world. The concept has been developed by City Media Foundation based in Lausanne, Switzerland.

The concept is to make the accessibility of local information easier and more intuitively. The websites have names which comprise of the name of the city followed by the TDL ".vi". Hence all cities will have a unique URL as "cityname.vi". For example, the website of cities like Paris, New York, London, and Moscow will be paris.vi, newyork.vi, London.vi, Moscow.vi. In the same manner, rest of 68000 cities around the will have their unique URLs.

Until now accessibility of local information is through search engines. The information are scattered all around the internet in pockets. Search engines, even with good and comprehensive results, are unable to club all relevant information specific to geography together. Hence, we have to spend time searching and then trying out various results to look for what we want. More often than not, we get the result but after spending considerable time looking at the wrong sites.

With the model of city.vi, the relevant news, events and places of touristic interests are put together on one page in the form of video information. With increase of internet traffic, video is emerging as the most prominent means of data transfer over internet. The video traffic is accounting for 51% of web traffic now. Until 2005 it accounted for 6% only. There is a huge shift in the way users are accessing information and also the types of information.

"World Wide Web is in decline, as simpler, sleeker services — is less about the searching and more about the getting" writes Chris Anderson in his editorial article "Web is dead. Long live internet" (Wired dated 17th August).

Site Operation

1. Citizens put forward videos to do with the town, city or region covered by the site.

2. The site administrators responsible for that video category (culture, news, events) are informed by email when new videos are put forward.

3. They decide if the videos can appear on the site.

These three steps simplify and optimize municipal and regional on-line communication by bringing in the widest possible participation. The first cities to be promoted to users of the 68,000 sites will be the ones that have the most videos of quality, therefore benefiting from high international coverage.

The major added value of these sites is their collaborative nature.

Citizens and users can put forward videos on local culture, future events or current affairs. This facility also embodies a newly observed trend called "Citizens’ Information Pooling" which via the City.vi network is being used for municipal communication, from now on making it possible to express the full range of their diversity.

Very simply, all sorts of information can be presented on the sites due to the increasing ease with which videos can be recorded as digital video recorders and new mobile phones become used more and more widely.

We all know how much youngsters like these new technologies and how easy they find them to use. More inclined to communicate than previous generations, the youth of today are a real potential resource which towns and cities need to communicate with creativity and energy. They find more and more that producing videos is a fundamental way to express them.

In next one week City Media Foundation will be contacting 1 million people online to participate in the bloggers conference online. All participants will be welcomed to join the project as Administrator of their respective cities. An Administrator will be responsible to help grow the local site cityname.vi. He will have all administrator access as well as resources from the ad revenue generation to increase the site popularity.

The conference will start from 1st December. The organization of the conference is being shown on the Facebook and Twitter page.

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Cityvi/126749070688359

http://www.twitter.com/#!/city_vi