London seems to have gone ever so slightly maps crazy of recent. Not only is there the Magnificent Maps exhibition opening at the British Library at the end of this month but BBC4 has joined in with two documentary series on the subject, Maps: Power, Plunder and Possession and The Beauty of Maps.
It's all very geotastic ...
We take the art of geographic lookup for granted these days; type a place name into a form on a web site or feed it into a web service API and hey presto! Most of the time you'll be told whether or not the place name is valid or not and, in case there's more than one place with the same name, either asked to choose which one you mean or be presented with the most likely place.
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.
To paraphrase both Douglas Copland and The Smiths, Geomob, the highly successful mobile/geo/location/place fuelled meetup for geographers, both latent and professional is on hold. Possibly permanently. As Chris Osborne, the founder and organiser, said in an email to all members of the group:
After a wonderful couple of years doing geomob, and the people powered success that was WhereCampEU, I'm afraid to say that I am stepping down to make way for some new blood.
That does mean that there is an opportunity for one or more of you to step up and continue geomob in the spirit it started - free, non corporate, disrespectful and focused on people doing things.
Get in touch if you want to take on the mantle, until then geomob is on hiatus.
Its been a blast
Consider for a moment the word unlimited; it's an adjective and, if you'll pardon the condescension, it means the following:
Except in the world of mobile data or mobile broadband, where unlimited means, in a vaguely disturbing twisted, inverted, doublespeak sort of way, the exact opposite.
Most browsers have a variation on the theme of a home page, which automagically loads your favourite web page when you start the browser or open a new browser window or tab.
A lot of web sites try to capitalise on this, offering earnest entreaties to "make me your home page" ... "no make me your home page" ... "no, choose me for your home page, I have so much personalised content".
They're needy and somewhat neurotic entities these web sites, it's not like I can have all of them as my home page.
Most of them personalise their content for you, based on a registration setting or some other insight, to give you what they think is the information your looking for.
This is not creepy.
It's time to put the Theory of Stuff out to pasture. It's had a good life. It's appeared in 5 of my talk decks (or so Spotlight tells me), in 3 of my blog posts and continues to generate hits on my blog (or so my analytics tells me).
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 ...
