WIRED:The solving of a trivial mystery in Portland, Oregon, hints at the potential of low-cost collaboration on the net

EVERYONE IN Portland was talking about it. At 8pm on Sunday, a loud boom echoed around the usually quiet Oregon city. Nobody knew what it was, but soon the rumours were flying.

Some said it was an earthquake precursor (Portland is in Oregon’s most seismically active region and you can see the dormant volcano Mount Hood from downtown). Others thought it was an exploding meteor or a aircraft sonic boom. And that, in a previous time, would have been an end of it.

But Portland is a tech town and has more than its share of social software users. The theories spilled out on to the microblogging platform Twitter, where locals started appending the term “#pdxboom” to their comments to make them easier to find and collect (PDX is the abbreviation for Portland’s international airport).

In their pdxboom comments, people described where they were when it happened, and how loud it was – and, of course, their crazy theories on what was really going on. Someone even created an account for the PDX Boom itself – allowing it to make snarky comments on all the gossip aimed its way.

All the commentary gave local Reid Beels an idea. He threw up a simple web page that let anyone add a “pin” to a Google map of Portland to show where they were when the boom hit.

Visitors could pick the colour of their pin based on how loud the boom sounded, and contribute their own comments. Within an hour, the number of pin marks was in triple figures. Local press picked up on the map and soon Beels had records of over a thousand boom witnesses.

Like crime scenes on a detective’s map, the scattering of reports began to show a pattern. The “ear-witnesses” who flagged the loudest booms were centred around Sellwood Bridge, one of the dozens of bridges that cross Portland’s Willamette river.

Sure enough, when police went to inspect Powers Marine Park just south of the bridge, they found a large, recently fired, pipe bomb. The investigators think the sound of the bomb travelled around the city because of low cloud cover and the focusing effect of the nearby river bank.

The source of the PDX boom is not the most pressing of mysteries, but it’s definitely of a class that the internet is now well-matched to solve.

Everyone who heard the boom in Portland had a piece of the answer, but before now it would have been hard for them to act collectively to pool their knowledge and divine the conclusions. Hard, but not impossible. One could easily imagine a local newspaper or radio station conducting a similar poll and gleaning the same results.

But what’s significant is that they didn’t – and they didn’t have to. Beels is a technologist, but he didn’t have to throw much programming power into crafting a map that anyone could use: Google provided an online general purpose tool for him to adapt.

As it was, the Google Map service wasn’t quite up to the task. After 200 Portlanders had marked their map, it stopped showing older reports. A colleague of Beels, Aaron Parecki, had to write a program to preserve the data. Clearly, Google had never anticipated its map-pinning feature would be used in this way, but Beels and Parecki together had the knowledge to stretch it beyond its simpler goals.

And, of course, it goes without saying that these web services were free for everyone to use.

It’s this opening up of potential toolkits to everyone that makes the internet continue to expand to fill our lives. Mostly, it’s not terribly unique in what it does. It does things that other media – like newspapers, like the radio, like television – already allowed us to do, with a bit of work.

No one though had to ask permission to get to the bottom of the Portland boom. No one had to sign off on the investigative journalist running his plea in the paper; no one had to ask map-makers for the rights to use their charts of the area. No one had to spec out a multi-week project to programme a pin-tacking system or leaflet local neighbourhoods to encourage them to use it.

It was a trivial event, but its solution came from regular people being able to co-ordinate at lower cost and with greater networked resources than have ever had before.

The vast majority of the “problems” these opportunities solve aren’t terrifically important or even matters that we thought were a problem before now. No one cares that you can now talk to fellow Burmese cat-lovers across the world (if that’s what you enjoy). No one cares that you can talk philosophy with other fans of Diogenes without having to sign up for a university course – and no one would have mourned not knowing what that boom was in Portland.

Well, except perhaps for me, still driven a little crazy not knowing what the bright light was that flooded Sale near Manchester when I was a child (although I’m confident these days that it probably was not Doctor Who, after all).

The fact that we can splice and tape together these impromptu mechanisms for uncovering and solving such trivial mysteries is a marvel and, given that we can still be surprised when the internet makes it happen, promises that great things are still in store for us.