Coffee shops are cool.

In Italy they hang out on cafe patios for hours throwing down beautiful shots of espresso and talking speedily about presumably exciting things. In Seattle there’s so much coffee shop in the air you’re practically caffeinated before you step foot inside one. And in Belfast, they offer an excellently warm escape from rain and a productive hideout for student and freelance types. And so the list goes on, where in many of those places, they share commonalities within their unique coffee shop cultures. It’s about some sort of community or exchange of ideas.

I love it, which is probably why a good chunk of my creative work is done at coffee shops. Energy, inspiration, change of scenery – they have it all.

I read an article recently (Coffeehouse Commons) that was talking about how coffee shops used to be the physical center of activity – creativity, politics, idea generation, collaboration, you name it – and how in light of laptops this isn’t as much the case. We tend to go and when we work, we do so within the confines of our technology. It’s kind of like the whole internet has become a less personal coffee shop – a vastly unending exchange of ideas and stories.

But what if we took that global conversation and we brought it back to the community coffee shop? The article itself is essentially suggesting an app that would track the creation of online content within a specific space. Further than ‘checking in’, it would also invite people to join in.

Using the “Coffeehouse Commons”™ web or mobile interface, journalists and bloggers can check in to submit links to their content, while readers and commenters also log in to provide URLs for their in-house activity. The app’s home page provides a constantly updated timeline of activity across all coffee shops, but by checking into a particular coffee shop, users can explore the range of information and ideas that were produced, discussed, and consumed within that space. (from ‘Coffeehouse Commons’)

If things are inevitably going towards the technological, why not use that to recreate the feeling of old-school coffee shop culture. Think about it; how cool would it be to write a blog or pose a question or spark an idea at a specific coffee shop while incubating that global conversation within that particular local scale.

Not to mention the perk of fresh coffee at your fingertips…

I like this idea. A lot.