A lot of great conferences in the UK happen in London. But not all great conferences. For some, you have to travel a little further afield. Maybe to East Anglia. Or more specifically to Norwich, the county town of Norfolk. If you were in Norwich last week, you might have noticed that SyncConf was taking place and I'd been asked by ex-MultiMapper and co-founder of SyncConf, John Fagan to do a talk on something related to maps. How could I refuse?

SyncConf isn't a maps conference or a geo conference; it's a tech conference for the city's tech and startup community. So it seemed to make sense not to go full-on maps nerd for the conference audience but instead look at how we got to the current state of play where the digital map has become ubiquitous. It also allowed me to the opportunity to put a little bit of map porn into a slide deck.

This is how it turned out .. my slide deck and notes follow after the break.

Back in July, I wrote about Big (Location) Data vs. My (Location) Data, which was the theme for a talk I gave at the AGI Northern Conference. The TL;DR premise behind the talk was that the location trail we generate on today's interweb is part of our own digital history and that there's a very one sided relationship between the people who generate this digital stuff and the organisations that aim to make money out of our digital stuff.

Once I'd given that talk, done the usual blog write up and posted it, I considered the topic done and dusted and I moved onto the next theme. But as it turns out, the topic was neither done, nor dusted.

Firstly Eric van Rees from Geoinformatics magazine mailed me to say he'd liked the write up and would I consider crunching down 60 odd slides and 3000 odd words into a 750 word maximum column for the next issue of the magazine.

It's a regular Thursday evening and some things are timeless; the TV transmitter at Crystal Palace is pumping out the mindless fare that is prime time television to London. It's been doing this for as long as I can remember. Of course, the number of channels have changed a bit; television used to be just three channels ... BBC1, BB2 and ITV ... when I was growing up. A quick glance at the TV set in the living room shows that the channels now start at 100 and end at 999, though there's some gaps in that range (and there's still nothing on that I want to watch).

But something else has changed. Switching the other TV set we have on, the one that isn't plumbed into Virgin Media's cable based digital TV service, shows ...

In an interview with GoMo News earlier this year, I talked about "the Bay Area bubble", this is the mind-set found in Silicon Valley "where a lot of the products and services coming out seem to think your user will always have a smartphone, and will always have a GPS lock with an excellent data connection". But does the so called location industry live in its own version of the Bay Area Bubble? Let's call it the "location privacy bubble" for the sake of convenience.

Last week an article entitled "Can you digital photos reveal where you live?" was posted on the Big Brother Watch blog; pop over there and read it for a moment, it's only three paragraphs long ...

One of the things I write about a lot on this blog are the areas of location and online, or digital, identity and how these two areas overlap and sometimes conflict.

I write about this stuff not only because I'm lucky enough to work in both of these areas but I also find them fascinating, compelling and nowhere is this more evident in how individuals and organisations views this arena.

Companies, if they're foresighted enough, are making major plays in the location field, fuelled by the proliferation of location aware devices (cameras, phones, netbooks and the like) and by the convergence of these devices (I use an iPhone ... is it a phone, a camera, a GPS unit, an internet terminal, a computer or some combination of them all?). There's much value to a company in knowing your customer's location and how it changes over time. Indeed it's a truism that it's much less about where you are now and much more about where you've been.

Individuals, if they're informed enough, know about the plays the companies are making in the location field and  should know how to determine the value proposition that is offered when they give up their location.