Geography is here to stay

Our physical world is three dimensional. In a clever way, we can project and scale our geography to a two dimensional map. The path we travel on these maps is a one dimensional extension of our location which we can simplify to be a zero dimensional point.
Google  launched a map service  recently covering US, Canada and the UK. The interface is nice (with draggable maps and overlay satellite images for most of the US) and you can search for locations of businesses that the Google engine has "geo-scraped" off websites.
The fusion between the internet and geography is forging ahead, Google seems determined to be one of the leaders in the field with acquisitions of Keyhole (raw map data and 3D visualisations from satellite imagery) and Dodgeball (fusing location intelligence and social software).
What would you require from a superior map or location service? Some of the features that spring to mind are:

• World-wide coverage with deep detail
• A personal layer of all locations, routes and areas that are relevant to you
• Access from large screens (for planning trips) and small screens (your PDA or mobile phone) alike
• Synchronisation with GPS units (location data from the GPS unit to the map service, updated map data the other way)
• Real-time satellite images

The second bullet probably holds the most opportunity for innovation and it is the area where we will see an expansion of social software. At the moment, LinkedIn will only store your location as the country if you are outside of the US; there is no suitable location tagging for photos in flickr (are there any cameras on the market with built in GPS? I want one); I have only heard of one manufacturer who integrates GPS receivers with mobile phones.
But new ideas are coming to life, check out GeoURL and Plazes to realise that while we cannot escape geography we can do something to better record where people and things are, where they have been and where they are going.

Comments

[Xo]

There is something profoundly entertaining about turning 3-dimensional items into 2-dimensional items, or less.

Mind this:

http://www.dmap.co.uk/utmworld.htm

Best regards from
Universal Transversal Mercator

[Steve cayzer]

You say:

"there is no suitable location tagging for photos in flickr"

You might want to check out Geobloggers with a useful Firefox script

[Steve cayzer]

You say:

"there is no suitable location tagging for photos in flickr"

You might want to check out Geobloggers with a useful Firefox script

[Tim Lawrenz]

"there is no suitable location tagging for photos in flickr"

you can geo tag photos via plazes. check out http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/plazes/

[Trejkaz]

One of the thoughts I had about a holiday I'm planning for this year or next, is that we want to track our position somehow during the journey.

My thoughts came down to the ideal scenario, where the camera stamps the date, time, latitude and longitude onto every photo.

When we come back from the holiday, we run a script which converts the directory full of photos into a JavaScript with a bunch of Google Maps markers and a line showing where we went throughout the journey. :-)

The only downsides would be that we'd have to take photos fairly regularly to follow the path precisely... and that GPS cameras don't seem to exist. :-(

Without the GPS camera, it comes down to needing to mark where we were for each set of photos, which is laborious. I would rather enjoy the holiday and do all the work before and after it. :-)

[Trejkaz]

Okay, scratch that. There is at least one camera with GPS capabilities, the Ricoh Pro G3.

So we can't complain about GPS cameras not existing anymore, we'll just have to complain that it costs too much for even a camera with GPS. :-)