In October of 2012, whilst sorting through my father's personal effects, I was proud to find that I wasn't the first map nerd in the family and that maps seemed to mean as much to my Dad as they do to me.
Lumped in with my father's posessions were also some things from my childhood which my parents had kept, either for sentimental reasons or in the hope that one day, I might have children who might want some of my toys, books and games.
On September 20th, with a new venue and a new tag line, the second W3G (un)conference kicked off the annual three day UK geo-fest that is formed of one day's worth of W3G followed in quick succession by two day's worth of AGI GeoCommunity.
After last year's inaugural geo-festivities in Stratford-upon-Avon, this year W3G grabbed firmly onto the shirt-tails of its big brother, in the shape of GeoCommunity, and relocated to the East Midlands Conference Centre on the grounds of Nottingham University, which is aptly located in, err, Nottingham.
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:
