I just had to take a quick break from re-writing the movie Red Dawn (it’s a rush job to shoot it before Patrick Swayze passes away and before everyone has jumped on the Cold War resurgence bandwagon) to talk about my Twitter heroes, the truckers.

Early adoption of GPS was mandatory for truckers given their destination-driven vocation. So they have taken to the location awareness services like Brightkite that we 3G iPhone users are just getting into. The iPhone can pinpoint your exact location and, using Brightkite you can check in at that location.

I will admit to a life-long affinity for truckers. My best friend’s dad was a milk truck driver. Nothing stopped his forward roll. In fact, once he fell asleep at the wheel and drove through an old house built in a median and never even woke up! After I was told that story, I looked up and my eyes brimmed with teary admiration. He had integrated his vocation of perpetual movement into every fibre of his being. His unflappable drive and relaxed determination is something I’ve always strived for.

I was never really a trucker. But I’ve made some attempts.

When I was tiny my dad and I roamed the whole country in a truck. Fifteen years later I did it again with a girlfriend. We were like purposeless truckers, drafting behind them, carrying no cargo except our insatiable curiosity for the road. The truckers had even given us a handle: Blue Bunny (we travelled in a baby-blue VW Rabbit). They’d wave us ahead of slow-moving convoys on downgrades and signal when they detected radar. We ate buffet breakfasts and showered at Flying J’s, and dried our feet on fragile paper bathmats emblazoned with Best Western and Denny’s offers. But, like the real truckers, we scoffed at the hospitality coupons and slept in our Rabbit rig, stretched out over the road even in sleep.

My cousin—a truck driver of the towing set—alerted me to the Britekite/Twitter truckers. They are by far my favorite GPS users. That’s what this stuff is for. If I turn on my GPS it will dully trace a circuit around Toronto with occasional tangents. You might call me paranoid but I don’t leave it on anyways because, besides being boring, it could be interpreted as some sort of rape beacon. Brightkite becomes more of a Rapekite when a woman decides to broadcast her exact location.

“World Class Trashy Ass” TruckingRooster, currently on route to Kennesaw, Georgia is my favourite. LordofSleep is a close second. These guys deploy Web 2.0 like Scoble and Cashmore only wish they could: Truckers combine old and new technologies—trucking material goods and GPS—effortlessly and gracefully, like they’ve been doing for decades. As easy as driving through a house. They don’t have time to blather on about predictions and startups—they’re too busy living it.

Tags: brightkite, iphone gps, road life, truckers, truckstop, Twitter

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Posted on Wednesday, August 20th, 2008 at 1:05 pm. Follow comments through the RSS 2.0 feed. Comment or trackback.