Connect Globally...Groove Locally

The Global Community

It most likely does not need to be said, but deviantART is a global art community. Inclusive of people from all geographic locations that this complex series of tubes known as the Internet can reach and filled with people from all walks of life from those locations. deviantART is populated by artistic styles that span the map from the traditional painter to the manga artist, poet, graphic designer and beyond.

So now that we have spread this far as an all inclusive virtual artist community, what is the next step?


Global Connectivity

With a geolocation software available for a small fee, it is not too difficult to locate the general region where someone is living based off of their IP address. Your IP address is transmitted by your computer every time you access anything on the Internet from your computer. It’s very similar to telephone area codes and country codes. When you know a phone number you could probably run a google search and figure out that 001 is the international country code for the United States. While the following digits, 323, are the national code for one portion of Los Angeles. The rest of the 7 digits in a US phone number don’t reveal any more specific information about your location. And IP addresses with geolocation software work much the same way.

In short, exact addresses are not revealed just a rough idea of what city or region of a particular country a person lives in.


So we’ve been thinking…

What if we used this information for something much cooler than that? A set of features within deviantART where you could connect with the living community of deviants who are in your general area. Localized art events, deviant meets, and Browse art work by location? Connect globally, groove locally.


So What Is All This Talk About?

So you’re probably aware by now that we’re planning some features in this arena. Before this type of feature is made available to the community you will be prompted about participating in this type of functionality, and for new users there will be an opt-in box during the sign up process.

As it pertains to the existing deviantART staff, we already have access to this type of technology and we do intend to continue using it to help (privately) target deviantART Events and information to you that is geo-specific. For now, we’ll be doing this in the form of Hot Topics targeted to you when a geo-event is in your area.

As we head in this general direction we will absolutely be protecting your privacy and taking all the necessary precautions to “not be evil.” This won’t result in the creation of <a href=en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skynet>Sky Net, we assure you  

We just wanted to make you aware so you weren’t freaked out by our awesome targeting abilities!

Art began in the physical world, then evolved into the digital world in recent history, so now what better thing to do than bring it full circle!