February 25, 2003

Location Notation

I have been thinking a lot recently about location notation for moblogging. I would like to be able to leave public and private notes to people that are tied to locations. i.e. as I wait on the platform of Shibuya station to catch the train home in each evening I'd like to be able to browse people's annotations of nearby restaurants and drinking spots, see random works of art and photographs that people have left "on the platform". I want to read the public profiles of those who are at the station and maybe initiate a chat with them. I have been thinking about how easy would it be to create a parallel world annotation world. Right now phones aren't really capable of navigating a graphical world so initially it would be text. This has a big similarity to the old adventure games: 
You are now in Shibuya Station:
Nearby is:
1: Hachiko
2: Yamanote Line Platform
3: Toyoko Line Platform

3

You are now in the Toyoko Line Platform in Shibuya Station:
Nearby is:
1: The Toyoko Line Train
People:
2: Stuart
3: Toyoko Line Platform - Pictures
Later: Thousands off people are thinking about this right now c.f. Location-Aware Thumb Ratings Posted by stuartcw at February 25, 2003 10:10 AM
Comments

Stuart, I think you'll enjoy this:

http://www.popsci.com/popsci/computers/article/0,12543,190327,00.html

Posted by: sean@cheesebikini.com at February 28, 2003 03:52 PM

See also Jo Walsh's mudlondon, has a similar look at least:

http://space.frot.org/mudlondon.html

She'll be speaking at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology conference in April, and has recently expressed interest in collaborating with the blogosphere headmap projects (http://blogosphere.headmap.com).

One blogosphere project that is in its infancy is working towards a location visualizer that shows connected users in realtime, and their annotated location sets (with temporal encodings also).

Posted by: dav at February 28, 2003 04:11 PM

AnnotatedEarth is trying to do something like you're talking about. We're actually working on a version for the Motorola i88s, which should allow more people to access info about annotations around them.

Posted by: ward99 at August 21, 2003 12:27 AM