With the explosion of interest in all things geo recently (and for once I think the hyperbole is justified) and thus a large amount of new conferences on the topic, I was somewhat skeptical of how Geo-Loco would pan out. But the presence of Marc Prioleau and other geo-rati such as LikeList’s Tyler Bell, Urban Mapping’s Ian White, Tom Coates, the man behind Yahoo’s Fire Eagle and Waze’s Di-Ann Eisnor, to name but a few, swayed me to participate.

I was interested to hear how Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures would keynote but was sadly disappointed; it was a rambling and somewhat disjointed affair with little structure or insight; the sole exception of which was an interesting technique to quickly mashup your Foursquare check-ins on Google Maps. Thankfully Fred fared much better when interviewed one-on-one later in the day by John Batelle of Federated Media, which produced an engaging discussion on the state of the geo market; some of which I even agreed with.

Proof that Geo-Loco was a fully fledged geoconference was evident in the Twitter back channel which was, by turns, witty, informed, damning, sarcastic, enlightening and downright funny. I may have contributed to this part of the proceedings. A bit. Here’s a brief sampler of some of the comments the speakers and panels contributed to, albeit inadvertently.

• “check-ins are the new currency“. I have yet to buy a beer with an of my 1744 check-ins. More geo-hyperbole sadly. #geoloco
• Have decided this conference is “Geo-Loco, where the Geo-Wonks meet the Geo-Clueless and all points inbetween” #geoloco
• this conference should be renamed as “We all invested in @Gowalla but let’s talk about @Foursquare Instead” #geoloco
• “We live in a world of fomophobia … fear of missing out” #geoloco
• “Is there a problem if I call in sick and then check in somewhere else?” … oh yes, it’s called stupidity #geoloco

One of the braver panels was chaired by Phil Hendrix of IMMR who asked the audience and a panel consisting of the Institute for the Future’s Michael Liebhold, GigaOm’s Liz Gannes, the aforementioned Di-Ann Eisnor, Rackspace’s Robert Scoble and Google’s Lior Ron (who I’m not sure uttered a single word during the entire panel) to pontificate on the futures of location based services.

Now, making predictions of any sort is a risky business at best, even more so when those predictions are on an industry moving as rapidly as geo, a fact I noted last month in an article for Coordinates Magazine …

Attempts to predict the growth, success and uptake of technology are rife. Accurate predictions, less so. “There’s no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home“, said Ken Olsen, then founder and CEO of DEC in 1977. “I think there is a world market for maybe 5 computers” is apocryphally attributed to Thomas Watson of IBM in 1943.

… but the panel gamely attempted to agree, disagree or abstain on 5 statements.

Geo-data will be free, with OpenStreetMap and other crowd-driven open-source data eclipsing commercial vendors.

Oh dear. Not this one again. Quite correctly the panel were split on this. Whilst I’m a big fan and supported of OpenStreetMap, this will not sweep all pretenders to the throne to one side and reign supreme. There is no one sole authoritative source of geographical data in the world for very good reasons; differences in use, in scope, in language support, in coverage, in acquisition methods; the list goes on and on. Even with the success of OSM, I’d still feel safer if the emergency services route their vehicles to where they’re needed by using official national geo data. It’s also worth noting that whilst people don’t seem to want to pay for geographic data any more, both Navteq and Teleatlas were acquired by Nokia and TomTom respectively precisely because of the value inherent in their authoritative views of the world, albeit one tempered by the Personal Navigation Device view of the world.

Location-awareness will be integral to any mobile app.

There was pretty much widespread agreement from the panel on this one. My take, whilst in general agreement, is tempered with the fact that we don’t all live in the Silicon Valley bubble, where there’s 3G coverage everywhere and everyone has a smartphone capable of location awareness. Will location be integral to smartphone apps? Undoubtedly. Will location be integral to all forms of app running on any nomadic device, be it tablet, laptop, phone or otherwise? Only if there’s an infrastructure to support it already in place, which gives the developing nations a disadvantage.

More than half of all mobile advertising in 2014 will be location based.

Not much agreement on this point from the panel and I’m in accord with them; advertising is notoriously difficult to predict at the best of times and to put a 50% figure on all mobile ads being location based in 4 years time should be viewed with extreme cynicism.

Virtually all user-generated content will be geo-tagged.

The panel were enthusiastically with this point and I’m also with them. But again, not everywhere in the world has the networking infrastructure to support geo-tagging so this statement needed to be viewed with cautious agreement. We’re also long overdue a highly publicised event which brings the topic of location privacy to the general public’s attention; the result of which may cause a significant turn off of location services. When, and not if, that happens, the prediction for location based advertising looks on even shakier ground than it is right now.

Proximity will become a critical filter for content.

Well yes, duuh, but isn’t this already happening? Either through our own efforts to obtain relevancy, through constraining search queries to locations or through localised services. The question should really be “automatic, meaningful, proximity will become a key context for content” as there’s no relevancy obtained by automatically constraining results to a local area when what you’re really looking for is information on your next vacation destination.

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.

A strange set of bedfellows you might think (you might also think I’ve been overdosing on LISP as there’s way way too many parentheses in the first two paragraphs alone) … but bear with me.

Eddie Izzard, in his Dress To Kill stage show (“cake or death”), was musing on the way in which people perceive history and this got me to thinking about RSS. But first, this is what he said …

Yes, and I grew up in Europe, where the history comes from. Oh, yeah. You tear your history down, man! “30 years old, let’s smash it to the floor and put a car park here!” I have seen it in stories. I saw something in a program on something in Miami, and they were saying, “We’ve redecorated this building to how it looked over 50 years ago!” And people were going, “No, surely not, no. No one was alive then!”

And the RSS connection? Well in 2005 ZDNet were predicting the death of RSS by way of the death of the RSS reader, and then last year TechCrunch composed an epitaph for Really Simple Syndication saying “Rest in peace RSS. It’s time to completely cut RSS off and switch to Twitter. RSS just doesn’t cut it anymore”.

Yet for me at least RSS is very much alive, well and part of my daily routine of news and information gathering and acquisition (which includes Twitter, but it’s by no way the sole source). Sorry, went back to parentheses there; I’ll try to curb this.

And under my RSS group that contains feeds from sites I’ve noticed and want to read again (yes I could have bookmarked them but my RSS reader, still alive and well in the form of NetNewsWire, aggregates them for me in a way that I find works) and it struck me the other day that there’s a hell of a lot of maps and cartography sites alive and well.

So to Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle? That can be summed up neatly by saying that the observer affects the observed. So is this part of a renaissance of interest in mapping and cartography in general or are there more mapping and cartography sites out there because we’re looking for them and people are responding to a perceived need? With this in mind, here’s a list of sites you should probably read at least once because they show just how much variety and interest there is on the topic of maps out there on the web.

Strange Maps - If you read one maps blog, read this one. It never ceases to inform, amaze, amuse or any combination of the three.

Mapperz – The Mapping News Blog - Regularly updated roundup of what’s new in the world of maps and GIS.

The Map Room – Jonathan Crowe’s Weblog About Maps - Links and articles on maps, map collections, map related resources and anything much map related on the web.

Fuckyesmaps - A boy and a girl with a love for maps. Need I say more?

Fuck Yeah Cartography - More cartographical profanity but basically anything that explores interesting representations of space.

Cartophile - Whoever the anonymous author of this Tumblr powered blog is, one things for sure and that’s that they love anything maps and cartography related.

Cartastrophe - What happens when maps go bad.

Atlas Obscura – Curious and Wonderful Travel Destinations, A Compendium of the World’s Wonders, Curiosities and Esoterica - Not strictly maps related but an online atlas of the weird and wonderful that’s around the world. Punch in your home city or area and be amazed.

Know of any more that should be in my (not dead yet) RSS feed? The comments would be a good place to let me know, you know.

DO

Turn up on time; if I order a cab at 7.00 AM I expect it to arrive at 7.00 AM, not at 7.15 AM with a cheery “don’t worry, the roads are usually clear at this time of day”. They’re usually not.

Either knock gently on my front door to avoid waking the rest of the household or call me on my mobile when you’re outside; the controller took my mobile number for a reason when I made the booking.

Give me a receipt if I ask for one; lots of people travel to the airport on business and asking for a receipt shouldn’t be a foreign concept. Having a pen to write out the receipt is also helpful.

Take the fastest and more direct route to the passenger’s destination. Driving a route which describes 11 of the sides of a dodecahedron because “it’s a short cut” or because “my satnav told me so” isn’t going to be met with any other tip than “learn the Highway Code and your local area, in that order”.

DON’T

Ask for help in programming your satnav en route to get you to Heathrow. It’s one of the most popular destinations around this area. It’s a big airport with 5 terminals and lots of planes. If you memorise the route to just one of the local destinations, this should be the one.

Drive the wrong way down a one way street, attempt to do a 37 point turn in the middle of the street with an increasingly enraged queue of cars behind you and then attempt to blame it on the local council because you didn’t notice the two, very large, No Entry signs at the end of the street. The fact that all the cars on the road are parked in the opposite direction to your direction of travel should be considered a significant hint.

Run the meter in the vain attempt to charge me more than the fixed price quote that I’ve already obtained from your controller the night before. Heathrow Terminal 5 is £20.00 from my house; attempts to charge me £35.00 from the meter will be met with a £20.00 note and utter derision on my part.

Don’t attempt to argue with me that my house isn’t in the neighbourhood I mentioned when I made the booking; I’ve been living here 10 years and all of my neighbours plus the Royal Mail are in agreement as to which neighbourhood we’re in. The fact that it’s also written in large red letters on the street name signs is also a clue. Having said that, if you miss the large red No Entry signs at the end of the road, you’ll probably miss the large red letters on the street name signs.

Jump red traffic lights on the way to the airport. Even more so, don’t jump red traffic lights and when I point out that you’ve jumped a red traffic light, stop the cab in the middle of the road, reverse into the oncoming traffic and try to argue that the light really wasn’t red when you jumped it. The presence of other driver gesticulating violently through their rolled down windows with the elbows jammed onto the car horn might also be considered a contextual clue.

Turn right on a no right turn junction because “you know a short cut”. Even more so, don’t turn right on a no right turn junction, jumping a red traffic light into the bargain and in doing so cut across the path of three lanes of fast moving traffic which misses colliding with the passenger side of the car by a fraction of a millimeter. I’m liable to get irate under these circumstances.

Owing to overwhelming demand by apps that use the service, the London Underground feed has had to be temporarily suspended. We hope to restore the service as soon as possible but this may take some days. We will keep everyone informed of progress towards a resolution.

In the meantime, if you want to see how it does looks when the API is up and running there’s a video clip of Matthew Somerville’s recent Science Day hack visualisation over on my Flickr photo and video stream.

I assert that train operators know where their assets are; it would be irresponsible if they didn’t

Whilst the plethora of train operators that fragmented from the ashes of the old British Rail network haven’t answered this challenge yet, Transport for London has, opening up just such data as part of the London Datastore API. In today’s age of talented web mashup developers, if you release an API people will build things with it if the information is useful and interesting and that’s just what Matthew Somerville of MySociety did at the recent Science Hack Day … a (near) realtime map of the London Underground showing the movement of trains of all of the Tube lines. A screen grab wouldn’t do it justice and it takes a while to load, so a video grab might help here.

Coming down the escalators at Waterloo and want to know whether to head for the Bakerloo or the Northern Line to take you north of the river? Now you can tell which line has a northbound train closest to Waterloo.

Want to see just how close the gap is between Leicester Square and Covent Garden on the Piccadilly Line really is? Now you can.

Of course, this doesn’t solve every problem …

1. If you’re on the escalators at Waterloo how do you get 3G data coverage to view this mashup on your phone as Transport for London still haven’t manage to achieve cellular coverage underground, unlike Amsterdam, Berlin and other cities?
2. The site will probably be the target of a tutting campaign from the Health and Safely police insisting that such a visualisation will cause people to run for the train and of course, they might trip and hurt themselves.
3. If you’re at the top of the escalator and the train is in the station, now, right this very minute now, how do you get down to the platforms quickly?

Whilst I can’t answer the first two of these questions, this publicity stunt from Volkswagon at Berlin’s Alexanderplatz U-Bahn station might just hold the solution for the third question … a slide!

Sometimes a map becomes more than just a spatial representation and becomes something else.

Sometimes a data visualisation becomes more than just the underlying data and almost takes on a life of its own.

When these two things meet or collide the results can be spectacularly compelling and produce, unintentionally … art? Look at the image below … filigree lace work? Crochet for the deranged of mind? Silk for the sociopath? Macrame for the mad? Sadly none of the above.

It’s instead an image from the Geotagger’s World Atlas but it’s still unintentionally beautiful.

The maps are ordered by the number of pictures taken in the central cluster of each one. This is a little unfair to aggressively polycentric cities like Tokyo and Los Angeles, which probably get lower placement than they really deserve because there are gaps where no one took any pictures. The central cluster of each map is not necessarily in the center of each image, because the image bounds are chosen to include as many geotagged locations as possible near the central cluster. All the maps are to the same scale, chosen to be just large enough for the central New York cluster to fit. The photo locations come from the public Flickr and Picasa search APIs.

I could look and stare at the all the images in Eric’s Flickr set for hours. Correction, I have stared at the images for hours.

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.

He may no longer be Mr. President but apparently George. W. Bush had a curious grasp of the world’s geography.

Keeping with the theme of President of the United States, this highly colourful view of the world comes from the mind of a Mr. Reagan. Allegedly.

First there’s how the Swedes see Europe; Britain is characterised by inventing soccer, inventing hooligans and beer (all three of which may be related) amongst others. The other European countries don’t fare much better.

Heading South and slightly East is the self styled Chosen Nation of Hungary. While the descriptions are mostly one or two words, they’re not that flattering.  Britain is simply jobs, while other member states are characterised as tourist hordes, pizza, last minute hotels and beer land.