You're invited to speak at a conference. Great. The organisers want a talk title and abstract and they want it pretty much immediately. Not so great; mind goes blank; what shall I talk about; help! With this in mind, my first thought is normally "can I adapt, cannibalise or repurpose one of my other talks?". This sometimes works. If there's a theme which you haven't fully worked through it can serve you well.

But a conference audience is an odd beast; a percentage of which will be "the usual suspects". They've seen you talk before, maybe a few times. The usual suspects also tend to hang out on the conference Twitter back channel. Woe betide if you recycle a talk or even some slides too many times; comments such as "I'm sure I've seen that slide before" start to crop up. Far better to come up with new and fresh material each time.

I'm currently at the Location Business Summit USA in the Crowne Plaza Hotel in San Jose, California where yesterday I gave a talk on "Of Data Silos, Geo-Babel and Other Geo Malaises". More about that in a later post, but one of the points I raised seemed to strike a chord with the audience ... in 2010, where's the map?

In spite of today's joyous rush to location based services and location based mobile services, the map seems to take a back seat, if it's even present at all. This point was taken up again on one of the opening panels with one of the panelists commenting that "many services don't use maps as an interface".

But there are times when the map is precisely the interface you want to use, especially when you're trying to visualize the impact of a data set on a location and serendipitously my morning trawl of my RSS feeds provided two examples of where the map is and just how effective it can be.

Each time I give my Hyperlocal or Hype (and Local) talk it morphs slightly and becomes more scathing of the term hyperlocal.

I started to write the talk for Where 2.0 in San Jose earlier this year and approached it from the point of a hopeful sceptic who was looking to be persueded that the long promised hyperlocal nirvana was either right here, right now or was at least looming hopefully on the horizon.

A month later and I had the pleasure of sharing the keynote slot with Professor Danny Dorling at the GIS Research UK conference at University College London and I revisited the theme. By this time any hope of hyperlocal nirvana had pretty much vanished.

Yesterday I took the talk out for the final time at the Location Business Summit in Amsterdam and the elephant in the room relating to hyperlocality had grown into a full blown herd of elephants.