The geofun is of course also serious business (but apprearently not good business, see below): cyber-chatter is out of favour, will it be replaced by geo-babble, as Guardian writes.
Location awareness is often considered in terms of mobility, and there are some interesting examples of mobility-based services. There is an international workshop about mobility in government in Stockholm these days, and I look forward to hearing what comes up there (I won’t go there myself, but will publish whatever comes up since it’s a GOL-IN-activity).
But location aware devices are going to affect ‘stationary’ communities too. Street Servers, an outline of an open source networked neigbourhood, is about interfaces to real spaces and local communities. The idea is to move away from the idea of intelligent buildings and towards the idea of social interfaces to local spaces. GeoURL made us bloggers put geographical information on our blogs (see sidebar), and I’m sure there’s much more to come in that direction.
It gives new hope for localised discussions, which is a hard business. UK-based UpMyStreet – The real-life guide to your neighbourhood, which is up for sale (also Register, Guardian). I have, not being based in the UK, never actually used UpMyStreet, but am sympathetic to the concept.
I’m going to add a few ‘geoblogs’ (headmap, webmapper.net – what the map can be, and GISploration) to my blogroll.
3 Comments.
UpMyStreet.co.uk for sale
Gotzeblogged alerted me to the fact that UpMyStreet.co.uk is for sale: UpMyStreet needs a buyer Creator and CTO Stefan Magdalinski says: “Buy my baby, please”
UpMyStreet.co.uk for sale
I’m already a declared fan of location-aware services, and UpMyStreet is another great example (although not particularly mobile (yet)) of a service that gives (UK only) users information about e.g. their nearest supermarkets, nearest doctor etc based …
Location-aware technology certainly looks like it could get really interesting in the near future. One of the big hurtles is getting small devices that have GPS-like systems in them plus internet connections. Cell phones are potentially the perfect device for this (they can have both AND work inside, something that satellite-bases GPS doesn’t have).
We’ve been working on (http://www.annotatedearth.com) PC and PocketPC GPS-based software, which works, but isn’t practical for a lot of people (the lack of universal WiFi limits the usefulness of the technology, or at least the technology we’re working on).