Gary Gale

Day two of the AGI GeoCommunity conference and the conference as a whole has ended. We discussed neogeography, paleogeography and pretty much all points in between, finally agreeing that labels such as these get in the way of the geography itself. I was fortunate enough to have my paper submission accepted and presented a talk on how to Know Your Place at the end of the morning's geoweb track. The paper is reproduced below and the deck that accompanies it is on SlideShare.

Day one of this year's AGI GeoCommunity conference saw the geoweb track draw a sizeable, if varying, share of the delegate audience; some sessions were crammed tight and reduced to standing room only whilst others had a slightly less cozy but still enthusiastic crowd.

As part of this year's AGI GeoCommunity '09 conference, I took part in the Privacy: Where Do We Care? panel on location and the implications for privacy with Terry Jones, Audrey Mandela and Ian Broadbent, chaired and overseen by conference chair Steven Feldman.

Our location is probably the single most valuable facet of our online identity, although where I currently am, whilst interesting, is far less valuable and  personal than where I've been. Where I've been, if stored, monitored and analysed, provides a level of insight into my real world activities that transcends the other forms of insight and targeting that are directed at my online activities, such as behavioural and demographic analysis.

Where I've been, my location stream if you will, is a convergence of online and real world identity and should not be revealed, ignored or given away without thought and without consent.In the real world we unconsciously provide differing levels of granularity in our social engagements when we answer the seemingly trivial question "where have you been?". To our family and close friends we may give a detailed reply ... "I was out with colleagues from work at Browns on St. Martin's Lane, London", to other friends and colleagues we may give a more circumspect reply ... "I was out in the Covent Garden area" and to acquaintances, a more generalised reply ... "I was in Central London" or even "mind your own business"

As with the real world, so we should choose to reveal our location to applications and to companies online with differing levels of granularity, including the ability to be our own source of truth and to conceal ourselves entirely, in other words, to lie about where I am. Where I am in the real world should be revealed to the online world only on an opt-in basis, carefully considered and with an eye on the value proposition that is being given to me on the basis of revealing my location to a third party. My location is mine and mine alone and I should never have to opt out of revealing where am I and where I've been.

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Last night was the icebreaker for the AGI GeoCommunity conference in Stratford-upon-Avon (but not Stratford-upon-Avon, oh no, that's the district not the town you know) and the run up to the conference has started extremely well, with the added bonus for me that John McKerrell of mapme.at used a quote from one of my decks as the #geocom landing page. Twitter is abuzz with commentary on what's happening and who's going to be doing what, all accompanied by the eponymous #geocom hashtag and everyone's hoping that the conference lives up to their expectations. As Thierry Gregorious aptly put it on Twitter "#geocom If this feed is producing messages at current rate, will people be glued to their mobiles instead of the presentations?" ... we shall see.The ice breaker dinner well and truly broke ice and I landed up on a table full of geostrangers and Andrew Turner; as table 24 we put in a rather respectable joint second place in the 100 question quiz, but then crashed and burned to 3rd place after not being nearly accurate enough in the tie-breaker question on when precisely did the Berlin Wall come down.After a surprisingly good dinner, with surprisingly good wine we sat through a surprising, and intriguing, comedienne who appeared to be the result of a union between Jasper Carrot and Victoria Wood. It was certainly an experience.Finally everyone headed to the bar where some overworked and entirely good natured bar staff served us geolibations, geolagulavins and geo-gin-and-tonics until the early hours.And the conference hasn't even begun yet ... Posted via email from Gary's Posterous

Look at all of this stuff that fell down the back of the internet and got lodged in my Delicious bookmarks ...

• Posterous recently gained themes and Twitter lost the background and avatar settings for lots of accounts, mine included.
• Need to write München, Côte or Café with proper accents while on a Mac? Easy when you know how.
• If you live in London, apparently you're either very rich or a loser. It also rained a lot and the world ended, at least in Old Street.
• Spotify can scrobble to Last.fm ... why did I not know this?
• Want to know how Google Streetview is put together? Google Japan have a explanation.
• I reached an inspiration dead-end while preparing for this week's AGI conference; turns out I'm not alone.

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So next week is GeoCommunity '09, the annual conference for the Association of Geographic Information and everyone's getting thoroughly excited at the prospect of putting the word "geo" in front of everything, including georant, geobeer (although only in half measures for some reason), geochat and conference chair Steven Feldman's personal favourite, geolagavulin.

It rained last night in London. This is not news. This is not even an uncommon occurence. Granted, it was heavy rainfall, as evidenced by the windows of the restaurant in Soho last night being drenched every time a car went up Wardour Street and by the tree branch which was floating off down the road outside my house.

None of this explains why our public transport infrastructure seems to come to a sudden shuddering stop everytime the weather (rain, snow, autumn leaves, frost, ice) for which this country is reknown, actually happens. I'm sure the Victorians didn't have this sort of problem when they built the railways and I'm sure they had pumps to get rid of the rain when it collected, inconveniently, in tunnels too.

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The end of the week, semi regular, hand selected, carefully edited snapshot of what made it into my Delicious bookmarks this week.

• Last week I blogged about my experiences with an electronic boarding pass, hosted on my iPhone, while travelling home from Amsterdam's Schipol airport. Cult of Mac came across it, liked it, and used it as a basis for an article. Which was nice.
• Remember those Venn Diagrams you did in maths class? Now you can use one to work out which of the subclasses of nerddom you belong to. Naturally I place myself in the geek with a life subclass, which is strangely absent from the diagram.
• At the weekend I upgraded my work MacBook Pro to Snow Leopard, Apple's latest version of the OS X operating system. And then 4 days later I downgraded it back to Leopard.
• Want to buy used toilet paper, a used tombstone or a rottweiler called Mr Giggles? Some people think you do.

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