After much teasing and tantalising, one of the long rumoured Facebook location features is out in the wild in the form of place community pages. They vary in scale from a hamlet in Spain ...

... through to New York City.

It's clever though not particularly sophisticated at this stage; a simple exposure of Wikia's underlying geo metadata and it probably took very little effort to implement. Facebook appear to treat places as people, hence the exhortation to connect with the place.

The well known, highly opinionated and occasionally error prone Tech Crunch seems to think there's a location war going on.

A search for the keywords location and war on the site yields strident post titles including Just In Time For The Location Wars, Twitter Turns on Geolocation On Its Website, Location Isn't A War Between Two Sides, It's A Gold Rush For Everyone, What Did The Location War Look Like At SXSW? Like This and Google Escalates The Location War With Google Places.

And Tech Crunch are right, there is a location war going on, but it's not the war that Michael Arrington and crew are thinking of; this war is much more insidious. It's the war against GeoBabel and it's being fought right now on two fronts.

There's a danger in looking at too many press releases; you can easily come to think that the view of the world that these pieces of writing portray are a fair and accurate representation of the real world.

Thus both myself and the ever readable James Fee were vastly amused to see Michael Arrington's TechCrunch refer to CloudMade's OpenStreetMap.

Sometimes writing a talk and putting together an accompanying slide deck is an education in itself. You set out with a point you want to make and in researching the evidence to back up your assertions you find out that the point you originally wanted to make isn't actually correct. You could give up at this point, which is not to be recommended as you're already on the conference schedule, or you could accept that your reasoning was flawed in the first place and make your talk instead centre on why you were wrong.

Thus it was with the researching and background behind my talk at Where 2.0 in San Jose on Wednesday. Originally entitled as a declaration, it soon became obvious that "Ubiquitous location, the new frontier and hyperlocal nirvana" was missing a very significant question mark.

Last Friday I ventured north to Nottingham, along with Ed Parsons, Steven Feldman and Muki Haklay to attend the one day Supporting the Contextual Footprint event run by the Horizon Digital Economy Research institute at the University of Nottingham. Along the way I discovered a manner of tracking my journey that I'd hadn't previously considered, but that's covered in a previous blog post.

The focus of the Horizon event was to discuss the infrastructure needed to support location in its role as a key context and to identify any research theme that came out of the discussions; a classic case of the ill defined and fuzzy interface between the commercial world and that of academia.

I've been tracking my journey and in doing so inadvertently uncovered a sea change in the way in which we view the whole thorny issue of location tracking.

Yesterday, Ed Parsons and I drove from London to Nottingham and back to attend the one day Supporting the Contextual Footprint event run by the Horizon Digital Economy Research institute at the University of Nottingham and I had Google Latitude running on my BlackBerry, with location history enabled, as I usually do.

Using the pre smartphone, pre GPS, pre Latitude method of writing it down, the journey went something like this:

This is a post about location (for a change); but it doesn't have to be about location as it's all about mistaking a vital element for the end game itself. I should explain.

I recently got contacted by a gentleman in the US who was looking to register a lot of domain names, in a manner which recalled the rush to buy domain names in order to make a profit as the dot com boom rushed headlong to become the dot bomb bust and which resulted in the unlovely pass-time of domain squatting.

After seeing a lot of mention of location, location based services and location based mobile services in the media, the position of location based services on Gartner's most recent hype curve and seeing a lot of acquisition activity in the location space, he was looking to register domain names with LBS in them.