During the O'Reilly EmergingTechnology conference it finally clicked with me the significance of geospatial annotations. A friend said it best when we were standing around talking at the end of the con.
"Virtual reality was doomed to failure from the beginning, we already live in a perfect copy of the world. What people want is virtual annotations of the real world. What's close to me? What other stories have been told about where I am? Are any of my friends here?"
This rang true to me, especially remembering back to SteveMann's closing keynote at Usenix 1998 (I think it was '98, the NewOrleans one). He talked about how his glasses had camera's in them, the feed went from the glasses to his wearable computer, over a wireless link to his base computer where it was processed and then sent back over the wireless link to his computer where it was processed and displayed "heads up" style on his glasses. He also dissed virtual reality and instead called what he was doing mediated reality. 1
See also: MappingSoftware, MapSoftwareDevel, WikiAsPim, IntelTalk
Applications
Annotea - W3C Experiement as part of the SemanticWeb. Possibly a powerful way of creating an RDF CitySearch? Wiki for content, annotations for user contributions? More reading required.
Blog Mapper - http://www.blogmapper.com/
- Maps blog entries to locations and locations to blog entries.
Buddy Space - http://buddyspace.sourceforge.net/
- A Jabber instant messaging client that is "map aware". I don't think it's capable of knowing where it is though.
GeoURL - http://www.geourl.org/
- A location to URL mapping system. By telling it where you are it will tell you which web pages near to you.
GpsDrive - http://gpsdrive.kraftvoll.at/
- A GPS and mapping navigation system. It comes with a program called friendsd which will tell you if any friends are online at the same time.
GPSter - http://www.gpster.net/
- A waypoint sharing application, all done via your browser.
1 At least I think that's right. If anyone's memory is better then mine please fix that up.