While the O'Reilly conferences are all quite amazing in their ability to bring youthful cutting edge aspirations into the public sphere, none of them can quite match, for me, the intensity and inspirational overload of Where 2.0. We have been back for nearly a week, and I thought I'd better push my notes and brief thoughts out before they are lost to the nitty gritty of working on Platial itself.
Nat kicked of the show with comments about a changing geo-industry landscape, about an ongoing inversion of the basic notion that map data is a top down, hierarchical, authoritative thing. The conference is set up as a preview of a world to come, as a vision of the rapidly approaching future, a place to see how new thinkers are taking the data, improving it, enriching it, tagging it, and finding a way to profitably resell it back to the (distributors? market?).
This post is mostly going to be about the general tone and memetic echos that struck me along the way.
- There was a proliferation of talk around GeoRSS and the ideas of shared, standardized data.
- There was a sustained focus on UI, look and feel & the obvious benefit of getting that ooh, ahh effect (the new google earth & sketchup).
- Mobile map apps are still "getting started" & the frustration with the providers' stagnation remains very high.
- There was a healthy dose of renegade 'tude floating around that kept the small indie developer spirit alive with witty rebukes in the back channel, hallways and lunch tables.
- Talk about sensor collected data kept trying to poke it's head above the rising tide of socially shared data, but never really got much traction, i suspect a lot more on this topic in the coming year.
- There was continued talk about the glut of data that socially shared data will inevitably produce, and the looming need to bring in professionals who can groom, sort and manage these messes. Watch the horizon for Anti-Data-Glut Consultants.
- Also in the Data-Glut realm, there was chatter about meta-data, but more rigidly standardized forms of metadata, auto generated meta data.
- Another shadow from Etech, "Identity" played a large part in this conference, but perhaps less about in the Transaction Space, and more in the Social Interaction Space
- Privacy of course comes up a lot. This is such a rich, full and generally confused topic that I think I'll have to defer it to a whole category of posts. But basically, people wanted assurance that they would be able to have their home addresses removed from these map apps if they wished. The sentiment is felt, the logic around it is harder to grasp.
- Map spam. Think of Sketchup Google Earth billboards being stuck everywhere.
- APIs are hot!
- Geowankers
While not at Where 2.0, one of our fellow geo-travellers timed the beta release of his new travel based mapping app, blogabond during what might as well be deemed, World Geo Week.
Just click the "grab" button in the Place detail that appears under the map. After you've grabbed a system place, an edit button will appear in the tool list and you will become the place's original geographer. You now own that Place. You can edit the title and description, just like you can for any of your other Places.
Grabbing a Place that belongs to another Platial member puts that Place into your Places page, but does not give you full editing permissions.
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