By using the history function from Google Latitude I was able to put together a quick and dirty visualisation of the locations I’d been to but my check-in history added not only the location but also the place that was at each location.

During last week’s Geo-Loco conference in San Francisco, Fred Wilson (no, not the guy from the B-52′s) mentioned that you could feed your Foursquare check-in history into Google Maps and produce another quick and dirty visualisation of not only the places you’d checked into but also where those places were.

Simply login to your Foursquare account and visit your feeds page at http://foursquare.com/feeds/ and copy the RSS check-in history link but don’t click on the link. Open up Google Maps and paste in the link and add ?count=200 to the end of the URL to make Foursquare return a reasonable amount of check-ins. Hey presto, one instant map of your check-ins, which shows me that I’ve been checking in in the Bay Area in the USA, in and around London in the UK and in and around Berlin in Germany. Not that I didn’t know this already but it’s always good to see this visualised on a map.

Of course, Google Maps is a full slippy maps implementation, so I can click, drag and zoom in to see my check-ins from the Geo-Loco conference in San Francisco in the Bay Area, south through Palo Alto to San Jose.

I can also jump across the Atlantic Ocean, straight over the United Kingdom, to Berlin and see Berlin’s Tegel Airport in the west and the Nokia Gate5 office in the Mitte district of the city.

With a little bit of time, effort and GIS know-how I could have probably come up with a slick animated trail of my check-ins but sometimes a quick and dirty way of seeing where I’ve been on a map is all that’s needed.

I’ve been busy. I’ve been very busy. I’ve also been at home for all of two days in the last two weeks and whilst video chatting with my family over Skype is better than a plain old fashioned voice call it’s no substitute for being at home more; but things will settle down into a more manageable routine over the coming weeks. Being busy has meant that I’ve kept my head down and tried to assimilate all the new information with which I’m being bombarded, a fact that’s not gone unnoticed by Chris Osborne … “severe drop off in @vicchi’s bloggage and tweetage levels, means that maybe, just maybe, he is actually doing some work these days“. Quite.

I learnt today that Ovi is Finnish for door, proving for once the adage that you learn something new every day.

At Yahoo! we used to talk about eating our own dog food a lot; thankfully meaning that a company should use the products that it makes rather than that the employees develop a predilection for Pedigree Chum. Although it took me the best part of the first week to notice, Nokia certainly eats its own dog food; apart from the ever present starfish style conferencing phones in meeting rooms, there’s no desk phones at all. None. But everyone has a mobile, and uses them a lot, either over the cellular network or hooked up to the internal VOIP system through the office wifi. Actually everyone seems to have more than one mobile handset, two, three and even four handsets doesn’t seem to be unusual.

In a previous role I seemed to spend a lot of my time talking about why location and all of the many geo facets it encompasses is important. Many was a meeting with a senior exec which started with the depressing question “so .. location … is it really important?“. Nokia gets location; there’s absolutely no doubt about that. The question is now how do we deliver real value and real market share with location … and that’s half the fun and half the challenge.

Some 4 years ago (actually 3 years and 10 months but let’s round up for the sake of convenience) I wasn’t really looking for a new role, but the opportunity arose to come and lead and engineering team for Yahoo! Now, four years later, it’s time to move onto another role, but more of that in a moment.

When I announced that I was leaving Yahoo! Geo I was taken aback at the reaction that it generated. Let’s rephrase that … I was taken aback, shocked, stunned and very deeply chuffed into the bargain. Techcrunch’s MG Siegler wrote about it under the brilliant headline Yahoo’s Director Of Geo Engineering Locates The Exit. Numerous friends, colleagues and geo-acquaintances offered congratulations and asked where next on Twitter, on Facebook, in blog posts and by the more old fashioned method of email. I didn’t expect any of this reaction, but it’s that reaction that, at least in part, prompted this blog post.

By the way, you shouldn’t believe everything you read in the media about working at Yahoo! It’s been an amazing experience and one I would willingly repeat if I had the opportunity to go back and do it all again. Before I joined Yahoo! I thought I had a pretty good handle on how the internet worked and how web applications and APIs worked. I didn’t but I did learn an awfully large amount from people do.

Outside of the company, there’s also a popular misconception that there’s an uneasy cold war going on between Yahoo! and, in the geo space at least, their immediate competitors; Microsoft, Google, Mapquest and so on. True, there’s some major cultural differences between the organisations but there’s also much mutual respect for what each of our geo neighbours gets up to.

So how were the last 4 years? They went something like this …

The Highs

• The people
• The launch of Yahoo! GeoPlanet at Where 2.0 in 2008
• Live blogging furiously at the back of the main hall at Where 2.0 in 2009 as Tyler Bell launched Yahoo! Placemaker.
• Speaking on Ubiquitous Location, The New Frontier And Hyperlocal Nirvana at Where 2.0 in 2010.
• Co-founding and organising WhereCamp EU, bringing the WhereCamp unconference to London in 2010.
• Did I mention the people?
• Appearing on the once mighty ValleyWag as the result of a tweet about a wifi point called ‘valleywag’ at a Yahoo! All Hands meeting at the Sunnyvale based Yahoo! mothership.

The Lows

• People leaving the company as a result of the Microsoft bid; the unsuccessful Microsoft bid, something that never actually happened.
• Reorganisations and new VPs; far too many of them. Six reorganisations in the space of twelve months and six VPs in the space of four years is too many by my reckoning and meant you spent more time rewriting your strategy than you do actually delivering and shipping product.
• Teams that ship successful products in spite of the company not because of the company
• Appearing on the once mighty ValleyWag as the result of a tweet about a wifi point called ‘valleywag’ at a Yahoo! All Hands meeting at the Sunnyvale based Yahoo! mothership.

I might have already mentioned the people at Yahoo! I met and worked with. Now would be a suitable point to mention them by name …

The Geo Technologies team, past and present: Bob Upham, Martin Barnes, Walter Andrag, Mike Dickson, Holger Dürer, Bob Craig, Roman Kirillov, Eddie Babcock, Samira Swarnkar, Rob Halliday, Rob Tyler, Chris Gent, Steve May, Ali Abtoy, Andrei Bychay, Chiho Kitahara

The YDN team: Sophie Davies-Patrick, Chris Heilmann, Anil Patel, Havi Hoffman & Stacy Millman

The Yahoo! alumni: Tyler Bell and Mark Law (ex Geo), Aaron Cope (ex Flickr), Tom Coates and Seth Fitzsimmonds (ex Brickhouse, Fire Eagle and Geo)

But now the Yahoo! years are behind me and after taking this week off to rest and do family stuff over the course of the UK Half Term school break I’ll be ready to join my new team and start to get to grips with my new role as Director of Ovi Places with Nokia.

Although it would be very tempting to think that my move to Nokia is in some way a result of the recently announced partnership between Yahoo! and Nokia that’s not the case. Nokia and I started the long conversation which ended with this blog post at the beginning on 2009; it took a while to get to this place.

So whilst I’m going to Nokia, I’ll continue to use my core set of Yahoo! products, tools and APIs … YQL, Placemaker, GeoPlanet, WOEIDs, YUI, Flickr and Delicious. Not because I used to work for Yahoo! but because they’re superb products.

Here’s looking forward to the rest of 2010; it could be geotastic.

“Eddies,” said Ford, “in the space-time continuum.” ”Ah,” nodded Arthur, “is he? Is he?”
“What?” said Ford. ”Er, who,” said Arthur, “is Eddy, then, exactly, then?”
…
Why,” he said, “is there a sofa in that field?”
“I told you!” shouted Ford, leaping to his feet. “Eddies in the space-time continuum!”
“And this is his sofa, is it?” asked Arthur, struggling to his feet and, he hoped, though not very optimistically, to his senses.

Jump onto Eddy’s sofa for a moment and fast forward to a possible 2015.

After the location wars of 2010, the problems of mutually incompatible geographic identifiers have been solved with the formation of the Global Places Register. Founded by a fledgling startup on the outskirts of Bangalore, the GPR offered an open and free way for individuals and corporations to add their town, their business, their POI. All places added became part of the Global Places Translator, allowing Yahoo’s WOEIDs to be transformed into OpenStreetMap Ways, into long/lat centroids, into GeoNames ids or even, for the nostalgic, Eastings and Northings.

… the rest of the article is on the OpenGeoData blog.

Most of the time … but not all of the time.

The hey presto bit of the process seems at first glance to be relatively trivial but isn’t. Just ask anyone who’s had to implement a system that handles place names. Actually, the hey presto part is actually two discreet processes in their own right. First of all we need to identify a place, or whether indeed there’s a place at all; this is usually called geoidentification.

identify; verb; establish or indicate who or what (someone or something) is

This is the thing that determines that there is a place in “I’m in London today” but not in “I do love Yorkshire Pudding“.

Once a place has been identified, we need to work out if there’s more than one place of the same name (which is more than likely as we’re stunningly unimaginative where place names are concerned, duplicating and reusing the same name all over the world) and if so, which one. This is usually called geodisambiguation.

disambiguate; verb; remove uncertainty of meaning from (and ambiguous sentence, phrase or other linguistic unit)

Some places are pretty easy to disambiguate; as far as I know there’s only one Ouagadougou and that’s the capital of Burkina Faso. Some places should be easy to disambiguate, least at first sight; take London, that should be easy. It’s the capital of the United Kingdom. Well that’s true but it could also be the London in Ontario, or the one in Arkansas, in California, in Kentucky or any of the other 22 Londons that I’m aware of.

The gentle art of disambiguation is critical to the act of geocoding, geoparsing, geotagging and any of the other words the the location industry chooses to tack geo on as a prefix. Get disambiguation wrong and you fail on two counts.

Firstly, you’re showing your audience that you don’t know or don’t care about what they’re trying to tell you. Secondly, you allow your users the opportunity to specify the same place in a multitude of conflicting ways.

This is part of the problem of GeoBabel; your place is not my place.

So far, so theoretical, but let’s look at a concrete example of this. A few weeks back I added my Twitter account to the Twitter directory site wefollow.com. The first thing you’re asked to do is to supply your location, or to “Type Your City” as wefollow.com phrases it. So I type London and the site starts to attempt to disambiguate on the fly; so do I mean “London, United Kingdom” or “London, Ontario“? But wait, what about the other options?

Which “London” is the one tagged by 436 people but with no indication of which country? What’s the difference between “London, United Kingdom“, “London,UK” and “London England“. Space and punctuation, or the lack of it, is obviously important to wefollow.com here. So let’s try and give the system some help and start to type United Kingdom …

Oh dear. The “London, United Kingdom” still shows up but because I’ve put a space in there I don’t get offered “London,UK” anymore but I do get offered the London in the lesser known country of “Uunited Kingdom” and also “London, Ub2“, which one assumes is the UB2 postal code which specifies the London suburb of Southall.

Your place is not my place.

To be fair, I’m not singling wefollow.com out for attack here; this is just one of many examples of sites who try to use geographic lookup but end up making life difficult for their users (but which London do I pick?) and for themselves (now, how many users in London in the UK do we have?). I’d happily offer to help them; if only I could find any contact information anywhere on the site …

When I tell people I’m going to talk about my theory, a Mexican wave of shoulder slumping passes through the room, coupled with a prolonged sigh from an audience who’ve just resigned themselves to a slow painful death over the coming minutes. Luckily things perk up when my introductory slide of Anne Elk (Miss) and her Theory appears but even so, it’s time to quit whilst you’re ahead.

But before I do …

One of the great thing’s about O’Reilly’s Where 2.0 conference is the vast number of people you meet who just fizz with ideas and intelligence in this somewhat nebulous space that we call location, place or geo. One such person is Sally Applin; she owns the domain sally.com so that’s got her off to a good start. After Where 2.0 she pointed me to her own theory that voyeurism and narcissism sell software.

People like to look at themselves and at other people. If they can do it at the same time–then the application will succeed! Look at Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, MySpace, Skype–basically any software that allows for both looking at others and self viewing, self reading, self posting etc…will sell. We’re on the chimp ladder. We like to compare ourselves and compete.

If you generalise software out to the slightly more generic terms ofservice or product; you’ll see that Sally’s theory complements the Theory of Stuff quite nicely and even provides an exemplar of those businesses and ventures that prove the theory.

This is especially interesting when you look at the success (to date at least) of ventures in the social space, such as Facebook, Twitter and Foursquare. What else are these is not an online way of saying “look at me, here I am, this is what I’m doing” and in doing so generating a vast sea of highly localised and personalised data into the bargain?

I started to write the talk for Where 2.0 in San Jose earlier this year and approached it from the point of a hopeful sceptic who was looking to be persueded that the long promised hyperlocal nirvana was either right here, right now or was at least looming hopefully on the horizon.

A month later and I had the pleasure of sharing the keynote slot with Professor Danny Dorling at the GIS Research UK conference at University College London and I revisited the theme. By this time any hope of hyperlocal nirvana had pretty much vanished.

Yesterday I took the talk out for the final time at the Location Business Summit in Amsterdam and the elephant in the room relating to hyperlocality had grown into a full blown herd of elephants.

My scepticism was echoed by several members of the audience, notably James Thornett from the BBC who blogged about it and with whom I shared a panel on the nebulous concept that is the geoweb today.

But what really seemed to catch the audience’s imagination was my twin memes of Geobabel and the Three W’s of Geo … the where, the when and the what.

The where is what we’ve been doing for centuries; mapping the globe. Whilst it’s a sweeping generalisation, we’ve pretty much done this, albeit to a varying degree of accuracy, coverage and granularity. We’ve mapped the globe, now it’s time to do something with all of this data.

The when is the gnarly problem of temporality, which just won’t go away. Places and geography change over time; how we map a place today doesn’t show how the place was 100 years ago and neither can we expect the geography of a place to be static 100 years hence. As we update our geographic data sets and throw away the old, supposedly obsolete, historical versions, we’re throwing away a rich set of temporality in the process.

Then finally there’s the what; a reference to a place in intrinsically bound to it’s granularity. References to London from outside of the United Kingdom are frequently aimed at the non specific London bounded by the M25 orbital motorway. Zoom in and London becomes Greater London, and then the London Boroughs and finally the City of London and neighbouring City of Westminster.

The strong reaction to these twin memes makes me think that we’ll be seeing these topics continue to raise their heads until we’re able to find work arounds or solutions.

A search for the keywords location and war on the site yields strident post titles including Just In Time For The Location Wars, Twitter Turns on Geolocation On Its Website, Location Isn’t A War Between Two Sides, It’s A Gold Rush For Everyone, What Did The Location War Look Like At SXSW? Like This and Google Escalates The Location War With Google Places.

And Tech Crunch are right, there is a location war going on, but it’s not the war that Michael Arrington and crew are thinking of; this war is much more insidious. It’s the war against GeoBabel and it’s being fought right now on two fronts.

Front number one is your place is not my place. You may think we’re talking about the same place, the same POI, the same location, the same city or neighbourhood but we’re not. You’re fluent in Gowalla, I’m fluent in Foursquare and the rest of the internet is fluent in Geonames, OpenStreetMap and WOEIDs, each with their own subjective view of where. GeoBabel.

The second front is we think we’re speaking the same terminology, we’re not. Recent articles and comments, not exclusively restricted to Tech Crunch, have bandied about the terms place, map, location, centroid, coordinate, long/lat and used them interchangeably and inconsistently. GeoBabel again.

There’s little doubt that the dream of location as a key context is now on the cards and we’re rushing headlong to meet it. We think we’re all speaking about the same thing, but the sad truth is that we’re speaking about totally disparate concepts and terms most of the time.

Until we solve this GeoBabel in the making, the location war will be lost without most of the people impacted by it ever knowing it was being fought.

Hedging my bets and guessing that few, if any, of the audience had been in San Jose at Where 2.0 a couple of weeks back, I gladly accepted and reshuffled, added to and polished my Where 2.0 deck to yield Hyperlocal Deities, Pachyderms, the Letter W, the Number 3 (and some Geo).

The majority of the deck should be relatively self explanatory but I think it’s worth calling out what I’ve labelled the three W’s of geo … where, when and what.

The where is what we’ve been doing for centuries; mapping the globe. Whilst it’s a sweeping generalisation, we’ve pretty much done this, albeit to a varying degree of accuracy, coverage and granularity. We’ve mapped the globe, now it’s time to do something with all of this data.

The when is the gnarly problem of temporality, which just won’t go away. This shows up in two ways. Firstly there’s the fact that places and geography change over time; how we map a place today doesn’t show how the place was 100 years ago and neither can we expect the geography of a place to be static 100 years hence. Secondly there’s the problem of places which only exist at certain times of the year. Take Burning Man and Glastonbury; for most of the year these places are a salt flat in a desert and a farmer’s field but at a certain time they become places in their own right.

Then finally there’s the what and again, this manifests in two ways. Firstly we need to recognise that places aren’t only spelt differently but they’re said differently and “New Orleans” and “Noorlans” are one and the same place. Secondly a reference to a place in intrinsically bound to it’s granularity. References to London from outside of the United Kingdom are frequently aimed at the non specific London bounded by the M25 orbital motorway. Zoom in and London becomes Greater London, and then the London Boroughs.

We’re so close to completing the where of geo, we’ve only just touched on the when and the what remains uncharted territory. And that last pun was fully intentional.

Thus it was with the researching and background behind my talk at Where 2.0 in San Jose on Wednesday. Originally entitled as a declaration, it soon became obvious that “Ubiquitous location, the new frontier and hyperlocal nirvana” was missing a very significant question mark.

The audience seemed a trifle bemused when I told them that the talk was brought to them “by the number three and the word local (hyper and micro)“, but when I mentioned that it included “a theory” a Mexican wave of shoulder slumping swept the (packed) room, followed in short succession by a long sigh.

I couldn’t blame them.

Luckily attention perked up when I mentioned that it was my Theory of Stuff (Stuff? Stuff? Huh?) and illustrated this point with a scene from the classic Monty Python Anne Elk (Miss) and her Theory sketch.

So, to the talk. Just as “the wonderful thing about standards is that there are so many of them to choose them” (apocryphally attributed to Grace Hopper), the wonderful thing about hyperlocality is that it has so many definitions, but a summation of these seem to agree on:

1. entities and events located in a well defined, community area
2. intended for consumption by residents of or visitors to that area
3. created by a resident of or visitor to that area

That’s three elements and continuing the number three, hyperlocality needs to overcome three matching hurdles, three geo hurdles and three location hurdles

1. the ability to have scannable, parseable content
2. the ability to join users to the content
3. the ability to determine what is local and what isn’t in that content

1. the ability to scan and parse content for geographic references
2. the ability to determine where a user is located
3. the ability to determine what is local to a user and what isn’t relative to the user

1. the ability to use IP location
2. the ability to use GPS
3. the ability to use A-GPS

(the third one there is an artifact of the need to make the “number three meme” work and I throw my hands up in surrender for that piece of artifice. Mea culpa)

While we’re on the subject of the “number three meme” there’s also three genera of hyperlocality

1. “classic” hyperlocal; taking, refining and creating local news (outside.in, Patch)
2. “corporate” hyperlocal; where a corporation removes their brand to fit in with the local community (Starbucks and the 15th Avenue Coffee and Tea in NYC)
3. “user” hyperlocal; creating and delivering localised content and information based on checking in (Foursquare, Gowalla, Rummble, etc)

The meme continues with the level of granularity at which hyperlocal services operate:

1. “local”, at county level (Washington Post / Loudon)
2. “hyperlocal”, at city of neighbourhood level (Placeblogger)
3. “microlocal”, at block level (Everyblock)

So far, so (hyper)local. There’s good exemplars of all of the above, in operation, right now. But there’s also several elephants in the room, looming large and waving their trunks for attention.

Is location that ubiquitous? We all say it is but where’s the proof? So 21% of mobile handsets are classed as smartphones (though not all of those have location capabilities), what about the remaining 79%. That’s not that ubiquitous is it?

Then there’s the issues of location and privacy; when location enablers such as Yahoo’s Fire Eagle and Google’s Latitude were launched we had lots of hand waving, foot stamping and Big Brother references from privacy activists, some of which was warranted, some of which were just pleas for publicity.

Most matching of users and content and ad inventory is dependent on technologies which derive location from an IP address. That’s simply not good enough for hyperlocal coverage where the difference between an IP location and a GPS location can be over 10 miles; that’s not even local let alone hyper or micro local.

User hyperlocal isn’t without problems either. Gowalla won’t let you check in unless your GPS lock agrees with the location of a place, eliciting cries of “but I’m here dammit”. Yelp has … issues on how it undertakes hyperlocal. Foursquare allows you to become Mayor of The North Pole from the confort of your own sofa and Fake Mayor on the iPhone bypasses Foursquare altogether.

So the outlook for hyperlocal is all hype then, obviously?

Well not quite. The number of location capable smartphones will continue to grow with 5 million mobile handsets predicted by 2011. Foursquare is growing at a phenomenal rate hitting the 1 check in per second mark recently. 33% of us now read and consume news from a mobile handset and we seem to be quite happy with displaying our location history via check ins, a far cry from the location hysteria of 2 years ago.

This year at Where 2.0 the view of the geo-scape was significantly different from the previous year; I don’t doubt that will be the same for Where 2.0 in 2011. See you all there.