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TECHBITS: Mobile protest

NEW YORK (AP) -- Joshua Kinberg spent a year turning his bicycle into a mobile protest machine ready to take on the Republican National Convention -- and got a master's degree in the process.

Part of the former bike messenger's thesis at Parsons School of Design was bikesagainstbush.com, a Web site that will invite visitors to contribute 150-character-or-less thoughts about President George Bush.

Kinberg, 25, will receive the thoughts as SMS messages on a cell phone mounted on his bike's handelbars. The phone is connected to a chalk printer on the bike that sprays letters that look like the sidewalk version of skywriting.

As rider and moderator, Kinberg will pick the messages that meet his criteria and spray them on the streets during the Aug. 30-Sept. 3 convention. A webcam and GPS on the bike will record each message and its coordinates and relay them back to the Web.

Bikes Against Bush is really one Bike Against Bush, since Kinberg has only one printer-enabled bike. He says his protest is not graffiti, since the chalk is biodegradable.

Although Kinberg says he expects to receive a wide range of messages and each message will be archived on his site, he will not be printing any pro-Bush messages. "It's Bikes Against Bush," he says. "It has a point of view. And it's my bike."

?Ellen Simon, AP Business Writer

[original article]

Posted by thinkum at August 18, 2004 04:43 PM