As Paul Clarke has pointed out on his blog, not once, but twice, "I assert that train operators know where their assets are: it would be irresponsible if they didn't. And that this information is held within their internal systems".

Here's a good use case for his proposed solution ... wheresmytrain ...

I've been using Posterous for a while now, a quick trawl back through the archives shows the first post I wrote via the service was in August 2009, and I've been using it ever since. It's fiendishly simple and works like this :-

• I write a blog post in my email client and send it to post@posterous.com.
• Posterous expands any links that it can, such as links to my Flickr account, and embeds the graphic inline in the text.
• Posterous autoposts any embedded photos to my Flickr account.
• Posterous looks for any tags in the subject line and autoposts to my Delicous account.
• Posterous date and timestamps the post and puts it up on my Posterous blog at https://vicchi.posterous.com/.
• Posterous autposts the entire blog post to my main, WordPress powered, blog at /.

Like a lot of people, I get most of the information I use, both personally and professionally, from the web; from RSS feeds, from keyword search alerts and from Twitter. The genesis of my recent Theory of Stuff slowly accumulated out of this mishmash of feeds, alerts and status updates.

Firstly I read about EchoEcho, a new location based service which promises all manner of good stuff by showing you where your friends are regardless of which location based service they currently use. Let's leave aside for one moment that the service independence of this app seems to be based around the concept of getting all your friends to use EchoEcho and then consistently getting them to report their location. Let's look at something far more fundamental than that, the strong sense of location deja vu harking back over two years ago. Haven't we been here before?

Post 9/11, post the Shoe Bomber and and post, for want of a better description, the Pants Bomber I've had to travel to the United States in the aftermath of a security incident and have had the dubious privilege of witnessing at first hand the incrementally heightened security procedures that have been put in place. Witnessed as a passenger I might add, so I can only pass comment on what I've seen and not what may or may not be going on hidden behind the scenes and out of site of me and my fellow passengers.

Even pre 9/11, airport and airline security seemed to rely on a degree of ritual, of knowing the right incantations and of knowing the right answer to give to certain key questions; "is this your bag?", "did you pack it yourself?", "could anyone have tampered with your luggage?" and "has anyone given you anything to carry?". Answer the previous questions with "yes, yes, no, no" and you would be granted the honour of being able to check in and pass to the mysterious land of "airside". Answer them incorrectly or get the yes's and no's in the wrong order and your life would become very interesting.

At Heathrow yesterday morning, prior to getting on my (much delayed) flight to San Francisco, I remembered to give the aforementioned answers in the right order (this is critical to success), took off my belt and shoes, took my laptop out of my bag, put the whole lot in large grey plastic trays and while they passed through the x-ray machine, I passed through the metal detector with nary a beep.

We all suffer from SPAM, the unwanted and unsolicited commercial bulk emails that are the reason we have Junk Mail filters and folders in our email clients and servers. A quick glance at the Junk folder for my personal email account shows over 300 of these since the beginning of February alone. If you use some form of instant messenger, be it MSN, Yahoo!, ICQ, AOL or any of the others on the market, you've probably come across SPIM, Instant Messaging SPAM. Then there's also mobile phone SPAM via text messages, comment SPAM, the list goes on and on.

We're poised to start seeing a new form of SPAM raise its ugly head. Let's call it LAMB for now, Location Based Advertising SPAM.

As Ed Parsons pointed out on his blog yesterday, Apple are banning location based advertising in apps. "If you build your application with features based on a user’s location, make sure these features provide beneficial information. If your app uses location-based information primarily to enable mobile advertisers to deliver targeted ads based on a user’s location, your app will be returned to you by the App Store Review Team for modification before it can be posted to the App Store."

This is a good first step in locking down potential abuses of a technology before it has a chance to get out of control. The reason we have SPAM and all the other variants in the first place is that the underlying technologies were designed in an open manner with no control mechanisms in place to thwart unsolicited and unwanted messages and content. But we need to go further than this.