Chris Brogan – Annotating the World Around Us! 4.7.09
I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again.. Chris Brogan is prolific. He works very hard to help build the social media landscape, but always makes time for individuals, the community and most importantly to give back to others in an organized way that shows that power of this medium (check out his monthly efforts for charitable causes – impressive!). In addition to producing a well-read, well-written blog, Chris is President of New Marketing Labs, a social media agency. With the love and support of his family, Chris crosses the continent helping business and marketers understand these new tools and make good use of them. Did I mention that he is a heck of a nice guy as well?
Chris’s fantasy mobile application imagines a world where there is “meta-data” in the air around us! We are not that far off! Mobile networks could allow organizations (companies, schools, non-profits) to “annotate” locations and allow users to access that information via GPS based services. And of course, users could control it all via settings for when, where and which type of “data offering” they would like. What do you think? Would you “opt-in” for this kind of information?
Actually this is nothing new. It has been done for LBS games in Europe on a number of occassions. One of them is like a geocacheing game, where instead of leaving physical items, people leave a comment that you can hear when you find the right location. It might be something personal or it might be a snippet of local history.
I recently ran the Location Innovation Awards in New Zealand http://www.locationinnovation.co.nz and am working on the competition for 2010 at the moment. I have been talking to a number of people including universities about using LBS in this way for educational purposes, i.e. elearning. Imagine going anywhere, it could be the beach where you get information about the rock pools, fish and other life, or perhaps again getting histporical information.
In Scandinavia they have had a solution in the Oland Archipelago where you can hold your mobile out in front of you and see an image of what the scene in front of you would have looked like hundreds of years ago and listen to a spoken history in your own language.
I blog about LBS frequently on the blog above and at http://geosmart.wordpress.com