Posts about speaking

Revisiting SoLoMo in Istanbul

2012-11-13 13:52

last time I spoke about whether do embrace SoLoMo or just embrace social, local and mobile I cautioned against the tick in the box approach and against adopting new technologies just because you're exhorted to.

But at first glance, a business running classified listings does seem to put all the right ticks in all the right boxes.

Firstly local. Classifieds are inherently local, offering a way for local businesses and individuals to offer ... stuff ... to other local people. Implementing a local strategy needs your mainstay offering to have a strong geolocation quotient and what could be more local or more geolocation than addresses and postal codes?

Then there's mobile. Most classifieds businesses have either fully or partially transitioned from print to online and if you already have an online presence, you're more than half way to having a mobile online presence.

Finally there's social. Again, there's a strong affinity with classifieds. Nothing spreads faster than word of mouth reputation and harnessing the power of social media to allow people to say "hey, I just found this really cool stuff" is a compelling case for social.

So when the International Classified Media Association, the ICMA, asked me to talk about SoLoMo at their Social, Local, Mobile: Classified Media Strategies conference in Instanbul last week it was an ideal opportunity to see whether my preconceptions to be skeptical about SoLoMo were borne out in practise or whether I'd just overdone the cynicism a bit too much.

If any industry sector is uniquely poised to benefit from the triumvirate of social, local and mobile, it's the classified listings industry. The last time I spoke about whether do embrace SoLoMo or just embrace social, local and mobile I cautioned against the tick in the box approach and against adopting new technologies just because you're exhorted to.

But at first glance, a business running classified listings does seem to put all the right ticks in all the right boxes.

Firstly local. Classifieds are inherently local, offering a way for local businesses and individuals to offer ... stuff ... to other local people. Implementing a local strategy needs your mainstay offering to have a strong geolocation quotient and what could be more local or more geolocation than addresses and postal codes?

Then there's mobile. Most classifieds businesses have either fully or partially transitioned from print to online and if you already have an online presence, you're more than half way to having a mobile online presence.

Finally there's social. Again, there's a strong affinity with classifieds. Nothing spreads faster than word of mouth reputation and harnessing the power of social media to allow people to say "hey, I just found this really cool stuff" is a compelling case for social.

So when the International Classified Media Association, the ICMA, asked me to talk about SoLoMo at their Social, Local, Mobile: Classified Media Strategies conference in Instanbul last week it was an ideal opportunity to see whether my preconceptions to be skeptical about SoLoMo were borne out in practise or whether I'd just overdone the cynicism a bit too much.

As it turns out, I think it was round about a 50/50 ratio. Most of the classifieds people in Instanbul fundamentally got the basic precepts around each of SoLoMo's constituent elements.

But there were two major flies in their respective ointments.

Firstly, as with most industry sectors, the classifieds businesses are experts in ... classified. They're not experts in social, local or mobile. They're far too busy running their business to become experts in anything other than their business. Which means metaphorical toes are dipped in equally metaphorical waters without maybe understanding or appreciating what is meant to be achieved.

Secondly and closely linked with my first point, even if a social, local, mobile or SoLoMo strategy is put in place, it's still not clear what's going to be achieved or how to measure success or failure. Many of the classifieds players I spoke to openly acknowledged that whilst they have social media dashboard and metrics in place, it's a major challenge to interpret a sea of figures and work out what this means in the context of their business area.

I'm still strongly of the belief that if applied sanely and in a way that makes sense for a business, there's a lot to be gained from social, from mobile and from local.

I'm still equally strongly of the belief that SoLoMo, even if it does have a manifesto, is too vague and wooly to be understood by people trying hard to make their business succeed and needs the basic tenets broken out and explained in language the people SoLoMo is trying to help can understand.

As usual, the slides from my talk, which will be just a tad familiar to anyone who read my last SoLoMo post, are below and my deck notes follow after the break.

[scribd id=113080713 key=key-1tr8s6lysr71tcss8g53 mode=scroll]

Slide 2 So, hello, I’m Gary and I’m from the Internet. I’m a self-confessed map addict, a geo-technologist and a geographer. I’m Director of Web & Community for Nokia’s Location and Commerce group. Prior to Nokia I led Yahoo’s Geotechnologies group in the United Kingdom. I’m a founder of the Location Forum, a co-founder of WhereCamp EU, I sit on the Council for the AGI, the UK’s Association for Geographic Information, I’m the chair of the W3G conference and I’m also a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society.

Slide 3 There are URLs in this talk but this is the only URL in the entirety of this talk you might want to take a note of. Although if you go there right now, it'll 404 on you, later today or tomorrow, this is where this slide deck, my notes and all the links you'll be seeing will appear on my blog. That’s an upper case “I” and a number “9” at the end of the URL by the way ...

Slide 4 As you might be able to tell from the title of this talk, I like social and social media ...

Slide 5 Based on social networking theory from the 1980's, social networks and social media are one of today's dominant forces for communication on the internet and the web.

Slide 6 And even though a lot of the social networks that originally launched are no longer with us, we're a social species and social networks are here to stay in some form or other for the foreseeable future of the web Slide 7

Whether it's a social network for your professional profile Slide 8

... for your friends and family to share stuff Slide 9

... for your more technically literate friends and colleagues to share stuff

Slide 10

... or for expressing yourself in 140 characters or less, probably everyone in this room knows and uses social networks to a greater or lesser degree

Slide 11

I also like local ...

Slide 12 I travel a lot, both for work and for when I'm not working. Online local sources of information, both those which are place related and via social media, are to me utterly invaluable.

Slide 13 Local is both a global and a intensely personal thing. My idea of what's relevant and local will differ entirely from yours most of the time. Local maps and local place information allow me to find the things that are important to me, like where to find a good cup of coffee in a new city, where the hotel I’m staying at in a new city is located and other more detailed information about that place.

Slide 14 Local is both a global and a intensely personal thing. My idea of what's relevant and local will differ entirely from yours most of the time. Local maps and local place information allow me to find the things that are important to me, like where to find a good cup of coffee in a new city, where the hotel I’m staying at in a new city is located and other more detailed information about that place.

Slide 15 Local is both a global and a intensely personal thing. My idea of what's relevant and local will differ entirely from yours most of the time. Local maps and local place information allow me to find the things that are important to me, like where to find a good cup of coffee in a new city, where the hotel I’m staying at in a new city is located and other more detailed information about that place.

Slide 16 I also like mobile ...

Slide 17 I like the fact that the social and local services I've come to rely on are not tied to the internet connection at home or at work and that I don't have to have access to a desktop computer or a laptop to use them. My mobile is more than a phone, it's a computer with an internet connection in my back pocket. I use my mobile all the time and I'm not alone; a recent ComScore report shows that in the US more people now spend time on Facebook and Twitter on mobile than they do on those company's respective web sites.

Slide 18 But do I like SoLoMo ... ?

Slide 19 SoLoMo is one of those fantastic acronyms that the tech industry creates on a regular basis, the aggregation and the convergence of the three things I've just talked about ... social, local and mobile.

Slide 20 It even has a manifesto for "everything marketeers need to know about the convergence of social, local and mobile". Given what I've been showing you on the last 16 or so slides, I should love the concept of SoLoMo .... shouldn't I?

Slide 21 But SoLoMo has an odd sense of deja vu for me. I freely admit this is in part down to my healthy sense of cynicism and skepticism where marketing and advertising is concerned but I'm sure we've been here before, where a buzzword or an acronym has been heralded to be the next “big thing” only for the harsh light of day and the passage of time to show otherwise.

Slide 22 Remember the "year of the map" ... ?

Slide 23 The explosion of maps APIs, first from Yahoo!, then from Nokia, Google, Bing, OpenStreetMap and many others have revolutionised maps with only a few lines of JavaScript code. Suddenly maps were everywhere, whether they actually needed to be or not.

Slide 24 Now it's true, that some amazing work has come out of the mapping API, such as Stamen's Pretty Maps that mashes up Flickr’s Alpha shapes, urban areas from Natural Earth and OpenStreetMap road, highway and path data; and which showed that you could produce maps, such as where I live on the outskirts of London and here in Istanbul, that weren't only like no map you'd seen before but were almost works of art in their own right.

Slide 25 Now it's true, that some amazing work has come out of the mapping API, such as Stamen's Pretty Maps that mashes up Flickr’s Alpha shapes, urban areas from Natural Earth and OpenStreetMap road, highway and path data; and which showed that you could produce maps, such as where I live on the outskirts of London and here in Istanbul, that weren't only like no map you'd seen before but were almost works of art in their own right.

Slide 26 It also meant that people even went so far as to link the Twitter API and Modest Maps and make maps for individuals, such as this map that Aaron Cope, ex of Flickr, made for me.

Slide 27 But in becoming widespread, digital maps started to become a commodity and for every good use of a map, the number of maps that are just plain wrong started to increase, such as this, digitally produced, totally wrong map of a local bus route in London, which has been helpfully corrected by a local resident ...

Slide 28 Or a combination of online digital maps, from Google and incorrect spatial data from the US State Department being used as a justification for a border dispute between Nicaragua and Costa Rica in 2010.

Slide 29 Then there was the "check-in economy" which was going to revolutionise advertising and local commerce through checking into a place on your location enabled smartphone. Companies such as Brightkite, Gowalla, Facebook's Places and Foursquare were hailed by the media as the standard bearers for this. Time has not been kind here.

Slide 30 Who here remembers Brightkite? One of the earlier LBS apps to take advantage of the check-in phenomenon. Wikipedia's entry on Brightkite says it all ... "Brightkite was a location based social network" ...

Slide 31 So farewell Brightkite, there's always Gowalla, Facebook Places and Foursquare.

Slide 32 Ah. "Gowalla was a location based social network". I'm having a bit of deja vu here again.

Slide 33 So, no more Brightkite or Gowalla. There's still Facebook Places and Foursquare. And after Facebook's recent IPO, surely Facebook can't get it wrong can it?

Slide 34 Actually Facebook Places lasted just over a year and for a lot of that time, it was only available in the US and automagically turned itself on when I was in Silicon Valley and turned itself off again once I got home to London.

Slide 35 So of the 4 poster children of the check-in economy only Foursquare is left and, apparently, still going strong. Maybe the "check-in economy" didn't really exist.

Slide 36 Fast forward to today and in addition to SoLoMo, there's The Cloud

Slide 37

Now the notion of storage and services hosted remotely and accessed via the internet is nothing new. You can argue that the IMAP server which holds my email and my web host provider are as much cloud services as Amazon's EC2 and S3 and DropBox are

Slide 38

But unlike the digital map and the check-in which are fairly clear and unambiguous, no-one really seems to know precisely what the cloud is; take an unscientific straw poll of 5 people and you'll probably get 5 different answers.

Slide 39 So the "year of the map”, "the check-in economy" and other buzzwords, such as hyperlocal, never really materialised and either were over-used or failed to live up to their much hyped potential.

Slide 40 So back to SoLoMo and back to the convergence of social, local and mobile.

Slide 41 It has to be said that I’m very wary of SoLoMo as a concept, though not of the converging technologies that make up SoLoMo and I encourage you all to be equally wary, as I hope you'll see.

Slide 42 Firstly the concept of social. SoLoMo encourages your business to be social. But almost everything on the internet now is already social, either as an established social network or as a component to existing ventures.

Slide 43 Although Twitter launched in 2006, it's over the last 4 or 5 years that it's become an established part of the internet. Sharing people’s thoughts and trivial day-to-day activities, through to breaking news, from celebrity news, through political events to natural disasters.

Slide 44 Ditto for YouTube, started in 2005 and acquired by Google a year later.

Slide 45 There's also Tumblr, founded in 2007.

Slide 46 And of course, Facebook, launched in 2004.

Slide 47 All of these services and plenty more besides have permanently changed people's expectations and habits of how they use the internet and how they share content with their social community. Even before Facebook's recent IPO, this one site has become a magnet for how brands reach and interact with their customers.

If you're looking to bring a social aspect to your business, how do you compete with the existing platforms and how can you compete with the massive attention that your brand rivals already have on social media platforms? Unless you're bringing something radically new to the table you'll have a hard time competing for your audience's attention. You can take the common route of literally buying attention with deals, coupons and special offers, but that's not a sustainable method of engagement in anything but the short term.

The often overlooked solution to vying for social attention is to make social a key aspect to all of your business and all of the departments that make up your business. "Doing social" can have a benefit but only if it's a core part of the way in which you interact with your customers, past, present and future. Simply having a Twitter account or a Facebook page does not a social strategy make.

Slide 48 Another truism is that there's much much more to mobile and to mobility than just Apple's smartphone offering.

Slide 49 There are a lot of smartphones about and that number continues to grow. In the last 2 years in the United States alone, smartphone growth has risen from under 30% to 50%, whilst there’s been a corresponding fall in feature phone growth, from just over 70% to meet smartphones at 50% in March of this year.

Slide 50 It's true that most companies these days go down the mobile app route and that often means that the starting point is to focus on a single platform. Yet despite what you read in the media, often the social media, there are other platforms out there besides iOS.

Slide 51 There's Windows Phone, and despite me working for Nokia and having a potential bias here, I have to say that this platform is growing fast and offers a differentiating factor to a startup or company expanding into mobile that iOS, with it's massive array of apps, can't now offer.

Slide 52 And then of course, there's Google's Android OS as well. By all means develop, launch and keep updated a mobile app. But don't get complacent and think that your mobile strategy will be successful just because you have a mobile presence on a single mobile platform. Even if you're aggressive and target all of the mobile platforms, there's still the cost and effort involved in maintaining a mobile presence across disparate environments.

Slide 53 Although relatively recent and still somewhat fragmented from a standards point of view, HTML5 is looking to be a viable alternative option for a mobile presence and indeed, some companies, including the Financial Times, are focusing entirely on HTML5 to cut development costs and to work around the restrictions and limitations that each platform's app store or app marketplace has, particularly around revenue generation.

Slide 54 But there's more to mobile than just smartphones, there's also the growing number of tablets

Slide 55

From Apple's iconic iPad

Slide 56

Through Amazon's newcomer, the Kindle Fire plus many other table variants running Android.

Slide 57 And beyond the smartphone and the tablet, there's the connected TV, which is becoming more and more one of the every growing number of screens that vies for our attention on a daily basis.

Slide 58 Finally, in addition to social and to mobile, there's local. But local is more than just localised and relevant information, deals and coupons.

Slide 59 In just the same way in which the "check-in economy" never really materialised, the "deals economy" is not having an easy time. Groupon, once the poster child of local commerce, has had a rough ride, with vendors finding out the hard way that good deals for their customers doesn't necessarily equate to good business for a business. Indeed, the rumours of Groupon's near bankruptcy have forced the company to postpone their promised IPO. And as with social and mobile, the local marketplace is already filled to near overflowing point with competitors and it can be hard for a newcomer to vie for customer's attention against the competition.

To do local successfully, it's not just about choosing to partner with the right tool, say Foursquare vs. Gowalla or Groupon vs. Living Social and hoping that you've chosen a partner with longevity. As with social, it's not just about engaging with your audience. As with mobile, it's not just about putting the tick next to the box that say "have mobile app". It's about looking long and hard at your business and its offering and rewiring it from a local perspective in a way that makes sense for your offering and your audience. It's about convincing your staff and your investors that doing this makes sense for you and for your business. Putting a tick next to the box that says "do SoLoMo" simply isn't enough.

Slide 60 So if SoLoMo is more than just adding social, local and mobile together to be buzzword compliant, what is the success factor in all of this? The answer is content. The internet remains one of the best ways we have today to reach an audience, both as an individual and as a business and that audience is hungry for content ...

Slide 61 ... specifically for digital content. More specifically, an audience that is hungry for quality, current and relevant content. Content that can tell a great story which can boost your brand, content that explains your products and services clearly and unambiguously, content that creates loyalty, that makes your social, mobile and local presence compelling and sticky, content that builds a community around it, via comments, Facebook Likes, Tweets and so on. The harsh fact is that in the fields of social, local and mobile there's a simple equation ... no content or irrelevant content equals no business. You may have an iPhone app or a Facebook page or a deals coupon but these will never make up for a lack of quality content.

Slide 62 But to be more precise, it’s not just about digital content to connect with your audience and with your customers, it’s about local and localised content. This means that you need to reach your audience in a manner with which they’re familiar and comfortable with. Localising to a local language is a good first step but just as importantly, it’s about local knowledge. You, as business owners or employees are in a unique position to know your local area and to give unique insights that other people just don’t know. Let me give you a specific recent example ...

Slide 63 I fly in and out of Berlin’s Tegel airport because Berlin is the European headquarters for Nokia’s Location & Commerce group. This airport is as well known in the city by its airport code, TXL, as it is by its’ full name, Berlin Otto Lilienthal Airport. Last week, whilst in Berlin I was given this tee-shirt. Everyone I know in Berlin immediately understood the local reference, not only to TXL but also the hexagon on the tee-shirt, because the main terminal at Tegel is hexagonal in shape. Local knowledge, local information, local insight.

Slide 64 I fly in and out of Berlin’s Tegel airport because Berlin is the European headquarters for Nokia’s Location & Commerce group. This airport is as well known in the city by its airport code, TXL, as it is by its’ full name, Berlin Otto Lilienthal Airport. Last week, whilst in Berlin I was given this tee-shirt. Everyone I know in Berlin immediately understood the local reference, not only to TXL but also the hexagon on the tee-shirt, because the main terminal at Tegel is hexagonal in shape. Local knowledge, local information, local insight.

Slide 65 I fly in and out of Berlin’s Tegel airport because Berlin is the European headquarters for Nokia’s Location & Commerce group. This airport is as well known in the city by its airport code, TXL, as it is by its’ full name, Berlin Otto Lilienthal Airport. Last week, whilst in Berlin I was given this tee-shirt. Everyone I know in Berlin immediately understood the local reference, not only to TXL but also the hexagon on the tee-shirt, because the main terminal at Tegel is hexagonal in shape. Local knowledge, local information, local insight.

Slide 66 Now, if any industry sector can be said to have a wealth of local, digital, content, it’s the classified market. So, as I begin to wrap this up, I thought it would be a good idea to look at a case study of how one player approaches the trinity of social, of local and of mobile. I choose a classified business from a purely personal perspective. A classifieds business I’ve known as a consumer for a good many years and one who has transitioned from printed media to take on digital media ... so, with the caveat that this is very much a critique and not a criticism ...

Slide 67 I looked at Friday-Ad and for the purposes of this case study I’m looking to get my hands on a nice cheap MacBook Air. The first experience on my laptop is good. The site works out that I’m in the United Kingdom, probably via the domain name and possibly some IP geolocation. Now most modern browsers have built in geolocation facilities so I was a bit surprised to be asked to manually enter my postal code when my browser could have a pretty good idea of where I am. There’s a nice set of social icons present, with the usual suspects of Facebook, Twitter and Google+. To be honest, for an organisation with the pedigree and heritage of Friday-Ad, 1,500 likes and 425 Tweets sounds a bit low to me and it’s not clear what, precisely is being liked or tweeted about. The site, the UK site, or something else? What’s more confusing is the second set of just Facebook and Google+ icons below; this time with 22 likes and no +’s. Maybe this is for me to like of plus the UK site. Or ... not. For an end user, this is not clear at all, in fact it’s contradictory and confusing.

Slide 68

... but let’s not get bogged down in details, so I punch on my postal code and click the button helpfully labelled “Go Local!”.

Slide 69 Good. My postal code has been accepted and the site knows that I’m in Teddington in South West London. But hang on a moment. Remember those confusing social buttons? They’re still here and I’m more confused. The one’s at the top are now at zero and the ones underneath, which I previously thought might be for the UK are now for Teddington and yet the numbers are still exactly the same, 22 likes and no plus’s. I’m still confused.

Slide 70 So in an attempt to find what it is I’m being asked to like I hover my mouse pointer over the like button. But nothing happens. No clues and I’m left clueless. So I mouse over the tweet button and nothing happens here. But wait. I’m a bit of a geek and I notice that there’s a URL in the browsers status bar. I’m also geeky enough to work out that I would be Tweeting about Friday Ad in Teddington. But I wonder how many of the Friday Ad’s non geeky, or to put it another way, normal users would notice this.

Slide 71 So, after searching, I find the MacBook Air I want. It’s not really local but it’s a good price. Then I notice another set of Tweet and Like buttons. This time on the right hand in a box helpfully labelled Options. I am now officially confused. On this page there’s 3 Like buttons, 2 Tweet buttons 2 Google+ buttons, one Email To A Friend button and one Send button which I have no idea what would happen if I click it. Friday-Ad obviously has a social strategy but it’s just not clear how it works for the user and what it is that I’d be liking or plusing or recommending or sending. I have social button overload.

Slide 72 So I retreat from the laptop web experience and go mobile. My first port of call is my phone’s app store but there’s nothing I can find. This is not a bad thing as it does allow all flavours of today’s smartphone market to reach Friday-Ad. I go to www.Friday-ad.co.uk and the site notes I’m on a mobile browser and redirects me to the mobile site. This is good. Again, it knows I’m in the UK and this time, unlike on a laptop browser I’m offered a use current location option.

Slide 73

I click through the phone’s warning and I can see that the mobile site now knows where I am. Good.

Slide 74 Not let’s find that MacBook Air. OK. There’s nothing in my local area. Let’s refine the search. Oh, I see. The default is within 10 miles. So I tap the little “x” to remove the distance and tap go.

Slide 75 Still no results. But I found my MacBook Air on the non mobile site. So I tap refine search and then the penny drops. I need to tap refine search, remove the distance constraint, and then tap on refine search again. Really?

Slide 76 So eventually after some experimentation, I find my MacBook Air. And the social element, well if I scroll down I can tweet or like this ad. At least I think it’s that ad. Once again there’s absolutely no context here at all and if I want to do something with Google+ which is on the main site, well I’m out of luck,

Now I want to re-iterate this was a critique and not a criticism. Friday Ad has a business built around local content and local content with a strong and intuitive way of allowing people to interact with it. Friday Ad has a mobile presence as well and one which works intuitively and simply, leveraging browser detection to offer me the mobile site and geolocation. Friday-Ad also knows and uses the major social networks, but it’s this one piece of the puzzle which isn’t cohesive or intuitive for a non technically literate user to comprehend. But overall I think Friday-Ad does a pretty good job. Yes, there could be some more polish applied but overall the key elements of social, local and mobile are all there, even if the fit isn’t a snug one in places.

Slide 77 So please, do mobile and let your products and services break free of the desktop ...

Slide 78 Do social and build a presence and community around your offerings ...

Slide 79 Do local and bring local relevance to your content and to your audience ...

Slide 80 But unless you have money to burn, don't do SoLoMo just because you hear that it's the current trend you need to be part of. It's interesting to note that even as SoLoMo continues to be trumpeted as the next big thing that you have to invest in, there's a buzzword compliant newcomer snapping at SoLoMo's heels.

Slide 81 If recent commentary is to be believed, you now need to invest in ToDaClo ... touch and data and the cloud.

Slide 82 Buzzwords do not make a successful business, service or offering, and I leave you with the ultimate buzzword offering, which Schuyler Erlse sprung on an unsuspecting audience at FOSS4G recently.

Slide 83 Thank you for listening.

Of Digital "Stuff" And Making Your Personal Interweb History

2012-11-03 10:26

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.

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.

$\"Still Waiting To See The Value ...\"$

And then a conversation on Twitter ensued where some people immediately saw the inherent value in their personal location history whilst some people ... didn't.

That conversation was enough to make me go back and revisit the theme and the talk morphed and expanded considerably. Fast forward to this week and I've given the talk in its' new form twice, once at Nottingham University's GeoSpatial faculty and once at the Edinburgh Earth Observatory EOO-AGI(S) seminar series at Edinburgh University.

Maybe now this topic and this talk is finished and it's time to move on. But somehow, I think this will be a recurring theme in talks to come over the next few years.

The slides from the talk are below and the notes accompanying those slides are after the break.

[scribd id=111913058 key=key-15vmdecagp3xopiyihgt mode=list]

Slide 2

So, hello, I’m Gary and I'm from the Internet. I’m a self-confessed map addict, a geo-technologist and a geographer. I’m Director of Web & Community for Nokia’s Location and Commerce group. Prior to Nokia I led Yahoo’s Geotechnologies group in the United Kingdom. I’m a founder of the Location Forum, a co-founder of WhereCamp EU, I sit on the Council for the AGI, the UK’s Association for Geographic Information, I’m the chair of the W3G conference and I’m also a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society. Slide 3

There are URLs in this talk but this is the only URL in the entirety of this talk you might want to take a note of. Although if you go there right now, it'll 404 on you, later today or tomorrow, this is where this slide deck, my notes and all the links you'll be seeing will appear on my blog. That’s an upper case “I” and a zero at the end of the URL by the way … Slide 4

This is not a talk about GIS. This isn't even a talk about GI or geographical information in the usual sense of the words. Nor is this the talk I sat down and started to write. That talk was going to be about how maps are now mainstream and how we’ve managed to find ourselves in the middle of something that could be called a ‘map war’, with Nokia, TomTom, Google, Apple and OpenStreetMap battling it out for overall geospatial supremacy. But I didn’t write that talk. The topic reeked of far too much schadenfreude for me to be comfortable with the topic. So I stopped writing that talk and started to think about another suitable theme. Then something happened. Slide 5

A while back I’d written a talk about the digital history that we are currently creating on the internet. The talk was called ‘Big Data vs. My Data’. I gave the talk at two conferences and it seemed to go down well, which is always gratifying. Slide 6

So I filed the talk away, wrote a blog post on it, and considered the topic pretty much finished. It wasn’t. Slide 7

Then Eric van Rees, the editor of Geoinformatics Magazine got in touch. He said that he’d liked the blog post I’d written and the slide deck notes and would I be willing to convert the talk into a magazine column. So I sat down and tried to condense a 3000 odd work talk, spread over around half an hour into a 750 word printed column. Eventually I succeeded, it got published and people seemed to like it. This was also gratifying. Slide 8

So now I really considered the topic pretty much finished. It still wasn’t. Slide 9

The topic ended up spawning one of those long conversations on Twitter, where some people agreed with me and some …. didn’t. Slide 10

So I went back and revisited the topic and decided it really wasn’t finished. Hopefully this version is the final definitive finished version. Slide 11

This is a talk that goes off in lots of different directions but fundamentally it’s about these two sets of geographical coordinates. Most people here should recognise them as two sets of latitude and longitude. Some of the frighteningly scary people I’ve worked with could probably tell you what country they’re in, just by looking at them. A few, really frighteningly scary people that I know could probably even tell you what city they’re in. But I won’t make you do that. The first coordinate is where I live, near Twickenham Rugby Stadium in West London. The second is pretty much where we are now, in the Old Library in the University of Edinburgh. Why this talk is about these two sets of coordinates, and quite a few other coordinates besides, will, I hope become clearer over the next half an hour or so. Slide 12

One of the things I love about writing a talk is how the things I hear and the things I read and write get mentally stored away and then, somehow, they start to draw together to form a semi-coherent narrative around the talk title that I inevitably gave to the conference organisers around 3 months prior. So it is with this talk, which in Sesame Street fashion, has been unknowingly brought to you by ... Slide 13

Kellan Elliott-McCrea, previously at Flickr and Yahoo! and now at Etsy ...

Aaron Straup Cope, previously at Flickr and Stamen Design and now doing stuff at the Smithsonian ...

... and my children. No, really. This isn't just an excuse to put a photo of my family up on the screen behind me so you can all, hopefully, go "awww". Slide 14

But before I get into anything to do with making history, big data, my data or anything interweb or social network related I want to try and frame the context of my thoughts by talking about communication, or to be more precise, the way in which we communicate. We are, politics and warfare aside, a social species and communicating with each other is something we do a lot of, although the manner in which we communicate has changed a lot.

A lot of our communication is both verbal and non-verbal and relies on face to face, person to person, proximity so that the verbal and non verbal approach comes together to express what we intend to say. Slide 15

Some of our communication is written, the old fashioned way, using pen and paper, although a lot of commentators have called out the "death of the letter". Whether that's true or just good headline making hyperbole remains to be seen, but to be fair, I can't remember the last time I actually sat down and wrote a letter. Slide 16

A lot of our communication is still verbal but via a phone, be that a land line or a mobile. We call and we text. A lot.

Slide 17

But be it talking face to face, texting someone or even writing an email, the intended audience is still narrow, person to person, or person to small audience.

But the interwebs have added to this sphere of communications and now we broadcast our thoughts, feelings and experiences, sometimes regardless of whether we think anyone will see this, let alone empathise or communicate back. Slide 18

While we still talk, meet, engage and sometimes broadcast, like I'm doing right now, this human-to-human interaction has been augmented, maybe complimented by electronic communications.

Slide 19

We're as likely to post a Tweet on Twitter or a status on Facebook or Google+ or another social network as we are to speak face to face. Slide 20

And because this type of communique is electronic, that means it generates data as we go. Today we generate lots of data, big data, on a daily basis. It's probably not unfair to say that there's data being generated in this very auditorium, right now, as I'm saying this. Slide 21

We all seem to be doing this, though ‘all’ is a sweeping over generalisation, but enough of us are making digital ‘stuff’ for it to start to matter and for it to start to be significant. Slide 22

Some of this data is implicit. A by-product of what we're doing. Whether it's our cell phones loosely mapping out where we are, not a privacy invasion I hasten to add, but the simple way in which cellular networks work, but that's a topic for another talk on another day, or our GPS navigation, be it built into our car or our smartphone, providing anonymised traffic data probes to show where freeway congestion is, we don't consciously set out to generate this data. It's a by product of what we're doing. Slide 23

But a lot of this data is very much explicit. We type out a status update on our phone, our tablet, our laptop and we tap or click on the button that says "go" or "submit" or we take a photo, maybe add an image filter or a comment and tap or click the button that says "share" or "upload". Slide 24

By doing this we're explicitly communicating, explicitly broadcasting and sharing with our friend, family, followers and the interwebs in general ... and in doing so, we're playing our part in generating more and more data. Slide 25

And generate it we do. Lots of it. We call it big data, but massive data would be a more accurate definition of it. Whilst our own individual contributions to big data may not be that big, when you put it all together it's part of an ever growing corpus of big data and there's companies that both provide the means for us to broadcast and share this data as well as, hopefully, providing a means of revenue for them to enable them to keep doing this. The amounts that get generated each day is almost too much for us to think about and comprehend. Once a number gets that big, we can't really deal with it. We know it's a big number but what that actually represents is hard for us to get our head around. Slide 26

So let's look at just a small sample of what gets generated on a daily basis from the social big data, communicating, sharing and broadcasting services I tend to use, if not on a daily basis then at least on a weekly basis. I Tweet and update my Facebook status at least once a day, sometimes up to 20 times a day. I check-in to places on Foursquare at least 10 times a day and take and upload photos to Instagram and Facebook around 3 times a week. That's just my contribution, think how many people are doing the same thing to get to the sort of volumes you can see on the slide behind me. Slide 27

As a specific example, I post a single Tweet on Twitter. Weighing in at 72 characters, including spaces and punctuation, it’s only just over half of Twitter’s 140 character maximum. That Tweet is assigned a unique identifier by Twitter, which forms part of the unique URL to that single Tweet. From visiting that URL I can see that Twitter has added who I am, when I posted that Tweet and because I geotagged the Tweet, also where I was when I wrote it. So that’s a little more additional metadata than the 72 characters of the Tweet itself. Slide 28

But if I then take that unique identifier and fire it back at Twitter’s API, I start to see just how much metadata has been added. Slide 29

115 lines of JSON come back to me from that API call, making up 3,338 characters. There’s metadata on the Tweet itself, when it was created, the text of the Tweet, what app I was using to Tweet with, there’s information on my Twitter account, my name, my Twitter name, my account’s unique identifier, my general location, my biography, all the stuff that’s in my Twitter profile. There’s how many Tweets I’ve posted (14,811 at the time), how many followers I have, how many favourites I’ve flagged, how many Twitter lists I appear in. There’s the details of my profile on Twitter’s web site, HTML colours, profile image URL and the like. And because I’ve geotagged the Tweet, there’s the full geographic information about where I was including a bounding box of the locality.

All of a sudden I can see just how Big Data got its name. Slide 30

But how long will all of this continue? Remember the people I spoke about right at the start of this talk, some 16 slides back? It's time to bring them into the picture. Firstly, my children, although this applies equally to pretty much all children. Remember when you were a child? The summer holidaywas endless. The skies were always blue and the sun was always out (remember, I'm from the UK where Summer and sun do not always go together, in fact it was pouring down with rain as I wrote this at home last week). And just like the summer holidaywas endless, so were your parents and the people around you, they were eternal and would always be there. Remember feeling like that? But then the inevitable happened. We grew up and we discovered, often the hard way, that the summer wasn't endless and that almost everything is finite. Slide 31

Social networks aren't finite either. They get born, if they're lucky they grow and then at some time or other they ... stop. If it's a social network you don't use then it doesn't really bother us much.

Slide 32

But if it's a network you've shared a lot of content through, what happens then? A lot of people, myself included, immediately get into "I want my data back" mode. Slide 33

But is it your data. Of course it is. You made it. You composed that Tweet. You shared that link. You took that photo. You were at that place you checked-in at. Of course it's your data.

But there's a point to be made here. You may have created that data, you may own that data, but the copy of that data in that social network is just that. It's a copy. It's not necessarily "your" data and because most of us don't preserve what we send up into the cloud on its way to our social networks, you may have created it, but the copy in the cloud isn't necessarily yours. Slide 34

It's an easy mistake to make. I may be a geo-technologist and many more things besides, but I am not a lawyer, and apart from the lawyers in the room, more of you aren't and most of the people who use social networks aren't lawyers either, unless it's DeferoLaw, which is a social network for the legal profession. Slide 35

... we see phrases like "you retain your rights" ... Slide 36

… another favourite is “you own the content you posted” Slide 37

... and "you always own your information" and immediately the subtleties and complexities of data ownership, licensing, copyright and intellectual property are cast aside. We say to ourselves, "it's my data dammit, I own it, I want it". Slide 38

And it's this belief that we really are lawyers in our spare time that makes people think that somehow the data they've shared via a social network is physically theirs, rather than a bit for bit perfect copy that we've licensed to that social network. We forget for a moment that we're using that social network as a cloud based backup, in some cases the only backup, of our creations and we mutter darkly about "holding my data hostage". Slide 39

The blunt, and often harsh reality, is the age old adage that "you get what you pay for". If you pay, you're probably a customer. If you're using something for "free" (and I say free in very large italics and inverted commas here), then you're probably, unknowingly or unwittingly, the product. Harsh. But fair. It's our content that the social networks monetize and that allows them to keep their servers and disk storage up and running. You might have seen that previous slide with the Tech Crunch post and be thinking "ah, but Flickr Pro is chargeable and if my subscription lapses I can't get my photos back". That's actually not really true, if not particularly simple, but bear with me for a few more slides. Slide 40

Now let's forget "big data" for a moment and think about "your data" instead. Actually, let's think about "my data" for a moment. As of last week, my social media footprint on Twitter, Foursquare, Instagram and Flickr looked something like this. Facebook's numbers would be up there too, but I'll get to that in a moment.

Now in the grand scheme of things, in the massive numbers thrown about around about "big data" this is but a drop in the ocean. But ... Slide 41

I created these check-ins, status updates, tweets and photos. They're important to me. Very important to me. Slide 42

And as Aaron Cope pointed our earlier this year, my small, insignificant contribution to big data is part of my own, very subjective, very personal, history.

Slide 43

As I may have mentioned before, I'm a geo-technologist and a high percentage of my explicit big data contribution has a geo or location component to it. I'd like to map our where I checked-in, I'd like to see where I was when I Tweeted or what photos I took at a particular location. Some of this "mappyness" already exists in some of the big data stores where my contributions live, but not all of it, it's far too niche and personal for that. But it's still important to me. Slide 44

Remember, in 99% of the social networks I use, I'm not the customer, I'm contributing to the product. But how do my regularly used social networks fare here. Regardless of whether I own the data I put up there, how easy is it to get a copy of? Slide 45

Firstly, what about a one click solution? Can I go to a particular page on the web and click the big button which says "give me a copy of my data". Slide 46

Facebook is the only one of my 5 social networks that does this. Well, it almost does this. At least I'm sure I used to be able to do this. Slide 47

I can still request a download of my information. But it now only seems to give me my status updates since I enabled Timeline on my account, though I can still get all of my photos and messages since 2008. Rather than say that this doesn't work, I'll just file this under "needs further investigation" and move on. Slide 48

Sometimes this lack of a one button download of contributed data is a deliberate decision on the part of a given social network. Sometimes, it's a hope that with an API, some enterprising developer will do this, but most of the time, that doesn't always happen. Slide 49

So talking of APIs, surely the remaining social networks will have an API and let me knock up some code to get a copy of my data contributions. Surely? Slide 50

Not all social networks do. An API tends to come after a social network's launch, if it comes at all, and often it doesn't let me do all that I want to do. Slide 51

Thankfully, all the networks I used, with the exception of Twitter not only provide an API, but let me use that API to get my data. All of my data. Slide 52

This is a good thing and meets the requirements for an API to meet what Kellan Elliot McCrea calls "minimal competance". He went on to say

"The ability to get out the data you put in is the bare minimum. All of it, at high fidelity, in a reasonable amount of time.

The bare minimum that you should be building, bare minimum that you should be using, and absolutely the bare minimum you should be looking for in tools you allow and encourage people who aren’t builders to use." Slide 53

Kellan was behind Flickr's API and his sentiments are, to my mind, admirable.

Slide 54

Sadly, Twitter doesn't let me do this and fails the minimal competence test miserably. Deep in their API documentation I found the justification for this as being essential to ensure Twitter's stability and performance and leave it as an exercise to you the audience to work out what I think of this excuse. Slide 55

The sad truth here is that when it comes to our own individual online data history, there's not always a willingness to make it easy for us to get copies of our history, if it's even on the radar at all. Slide 56

But if we can't always get our data history back, maybe the solution is to make an archive of it before it goes in or keep that archive up to date as you go ... a personal digital archive or PDA (and not to be confused with personal electronic organisers, or PDAs, such as the Palm Pilot). Slide 57

Thanks to web APIs and another social network, admittedly one for people who know how to code, a lot of this is already possible and the scope, range and functionality is growing by the day. The irony that I can build my own personal digital archive out of code found on another social network, which itself is built around a source code archival system is not lost on me either. Slide 58

So, firstly, there's my own Instagram (and no, I'm not going to share the URL of where this lives I'm afraid. The idea here is that this is a personal archive, not a clone of a social network). Slide 59

My own Instagram is called parallel-ogram. It's on GitHub; you can download it, configure it, run it. For free. Slide 60

Parallel-ogram works as well on my phone as it does on my laptop, showing me exactly what I've uploaded to Instagram. Indeed, it goes one step further than Instagram as currently there's no way to see what you've uploaded other than through their mobile app. Parallel-ogram doesn't allow me to take photos or upload them, at least not yet, but it does allow me to go back to the day I first uploaded a photo, grabs copies for me and twice a day it uses the Instagram API to see what I may have uploaded and quietly grabs a copy and stashes it away for me. Slide 61

There's also my own archive of Foursquare ...

Slide 62

It's called privatesquare and it's also on GitHub Slide 63

Like parallel-ogram, privatesquare quietly uses the Foursquare API to go back to my first check-in and twice a day quietly synchs my check-ins for me. I can go back and look at them, see maps of them and browse my check-in history. Unlike parallel-ogram, privatesquare also allows me to check-in, even if I don't want to share this with Foursquare. In short it allows me to use it both as an archive and also as a check-in tool, and if I want to use Foursquare's official mobile app, I can do that, safe and secure in the knowledge that privatesquare will keep itself up to date. Slide 64

My photos also end up on Flickr and there’s a private archive of that too Slide 65

It's called parallel-flickr, it also lives on GitHub and it's also filed under "something I really must install, configure and get running when I have some spare time". Slide 66

So I have my own archives of Instagram, Flickr and Foursquare. I sort of have my own archive of Facebook. But what about my Tweets? Slide 67

Well until Twitter decides that their site is stable enough to let me grab my Tweets through their archive, the next best solution is to archive by another means. I've put the RSS feed to my Tweet-stream into Google Reader, which helpfully never throws anything away. I did this a long time ago and I have almost all, but 100% all of my Tweets. Now all I need to do is write some code to read them from Google Reader and then get the Tweet data from Twitter, which then do allow via their API. Sadly, this is also filed under "something I must do when I have the time". It's not perfect, but then again, none of what I've discussed is, but it's a start and that's good enough for the time being. Slide 68

Finally, you might have noticed the links in my slides look sort of like bitly links, only on the vtny.org domain. That's because I've been archiving my short links for a few years now Slide 69

Using my own short URL archive and my own, self hosted, URL shortener. I just thought I'd mention that. Slide 70

So, my big data contribution, my personal online history, is important to me. Yours might be important to you too. We're often told that we can't have our cake and eat it, but with the advent of the personal digital archive, maybe we can thanks to the enterprising people who create APIs in the first place and those who not only use these APIs but also put their code up for all the world to use, free of charge. Your online history may not be that important in the grand scheme of things, but it's your online history, it's personal, you made it. When social networks go the place where software goes to die, you might just want to preserve that personal history before the servers get powered off forever. Maybe the geeks will inherit the Earth after all. Slide 71

I want to wrap up with a slightly cautionary tale, which highlights why our digital stuff and interweb history might just be important in ways you might not immediately think of. A friend of a friend, called Claudio, received a call from the British Transport Police in June of last year. There'd been an assault at Leicester Square Tube station in which an unfortunate individual ended up with broken ribs. The Police had evidence that placed Claudio at the Tube station at the time the assault took place. Could he explain what he was doing at that place and time. It's worth noting here that the assault had taken place in December of 2010, almost 7 months prior.

I wonder how many of us could say with certainty where we were, what we were doing and whether there was anyone to corroborate this without recourse to some form of aide memoire.

For Claudio, it was entirely feasible that he was at Leicester Square on the night of the assault but worryingly, there was large gaps in his recollection and that of his friends.

Thankfully, by mining his web history and that of his friends he was able to piece together the events of the night, with some additional proof in the form of geotagged photographs.

As the cliche goes, Claudio was eliminated from the enquiries but what I find particularly telling about this anecdote is the strong web history and Big Data elements to it. The initial accusation was built on Big Data, namely Claudio was one of those people who used his Oyster Card to enter the Tube station, which left a date and time stamped record. In fact, the date and time that he entered the station was precisely the same time that the person, captured on CCTV, entered the station. Once the full picture was in place, it could be seen that Claudio was not the suspect that the Police were looking for. But not only was the potential accusation built on Big Data but the defence, the alibi and the proof of his innocence were built on Big Data and people's web histories as well. Slide 72

It wouldn't be an outrageous prediction to see that this sequence of events might start playing themselves out a lot more in the not too distant future as we grow ever more reliant on web based services, Big Data stores and as those data stored start to be interlinked.

The whole tale is worth a read; you'll find it at the end of the URL on the screen behind me. Slide 73

Thank you for listening.

Maps, Maps And MOAR Maps At The Society Of Cartographers And Expedia

2012-09-06 08:45

Commission on Neocartography. Cartography, neocartography, maps; what is there not to like? I'd previously spoken at the UK's Society of Cartographer's annual conference so it was great to be asked by Steve Chilton, SoC and Neocartography chair, to speak at the Neocartography Commission.

Updated September 13th. 2012 with embedded YouTube video.

Wednesday September 5th. 2012 was a day of maps. To be precise, it was a day of maps, maps and MOAR maps. Two events, two talks, back to back. Packed choc-a-bloc full of maps. I also cheated slightly.

Firstly there was the International Cartographical Association's first session of the newly formed Commission on Neocartography. Cartography, neocartography, maps; what is there not to like? I'd previously spoken at the UK's Society of Cartographer's annual conference so it was great to be asked by Steve Chilton, SoC and Neocartography chair, to speak at the Neocartography Commission.

For a change, the talk title and abstract I gave Steve didn't vary during the usual researching and writing of the talk.

`Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Mime-Version: 1.0 (Apple Message framework v1278) Subject: Re: Neocartography workshop X-Universally-Unique-Identifier: d1c70302-eaba-4132-80fb-f74eb1de2347 From: Gary Gale In-Reply-To: DEC2FCE18B20734CAFA668E438482963834F621862@WGFP-EXMBV1.uni.mdx.ac.uk Date: Fri, 20 Jul 2012 14:13:39 +0100 Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable X-Smtp-Server: mail.vicchi.org:redacted Message-Id: BEB576E2-3E8C-4136-803A-0CE5E5456C26@vicchi.org To: Steve Chilton

Actually, I'm going to change the title ... what I'd really like to see up on the web site is this ...

Title: History Repeats Itself And So Does The Map Abstract: Steve Chilton says this just MIGHT be interesting; you'll have to take his word for this

... but that might not work. So try this for size instead

Title: History Repeats Itself And So Does The Map Abstract: History has a habit of repeating itself and so does the map. From primitive scratchings, through ever more sumptuous pieces of art, through to authoritative geographical representations, the map changes throughout history. Maps speak of the hopes, dreams and prejudices of their creators and audience alike, and with the advent of neogeography and neocartography, maps are again as much art as they are geographical information.

... will that do?

G`

But then, no sooner had I got one event for that Wednesday when fellow Yahoo! alumni and now Expedia developer and chief evangelist Steve Marshall asked me to team up with ex-Doppleran and ex-Nokian Matt Biddulph at Expedia's EAN World of Data event which was cunningly masquerading as a BBQ that very Wednesday evening. So I cheated. One day. Loads of maps. Two events. But one talk. Only time will tell whether I got away with it or not.

My talk at the Neocartography workshop was filmed and you can watch it below, if you like that sort of thing. Personally I hate seeing myself on video, it's even more excrutiating than hearing myself on audio.

[youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mSRWy9kMf00]

As usual, the slide deck, plus notes are embedded below, also if you like that sort of thing.

[scribd id=105081787 key=key-28dj39ezex1j55yczevw mode=scroll]

Slide 3

So, hello, I’m Gary and I'm from the internet. I’m a self-confessed map addict, a geo-technologist and a geographer. I’m Director of Places for Nokia’s Location and Commerce group. Prior to Nokia I led Yahoo’s Geotechnologies group in the United Kingdom. I’m a founder of the Location Forum, a co-founder of WhereCamp EU, I sit on the Council for the AGI, the UK’s Association for Geographic Information, I’m the chair of the W3G conference and I’m also a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society.

Slide 4

Most of my talk have a lot of links in them and sometimes I see people rushing to take a note of them if they see something they think is interesting. You might want to do this too, but don't ...

Slide 5

... this is the only URL in the entirety of this talk you might want to take a note of. It's nice and short and easy to scrawl down. Although if you go there right now, it'll just take you to the home page of my blog, but sometime tomorrow or the day after this is where this slide deck, my notes and all the links you'll be seeing will appear.

https://vtny.org/kk Slide 6

It's also fair to say that this talk is something approaching a personal first. When I'm asked to give a talk, I'm usually asked for a title and an abstract some 3 or so months before the talk. That's also a long time before I actually start writing the talk.

Slide 7 / Slide 8

... but this time, not only has the talk title stayed the same, the abstract still fits and it's even the talk I set out to write, and I have the email to prove it.

Slide 9

But enough about me. Let's set some context. We live in a connected world of interwebs and mobiles. Some of you probably know of this thing on the interwebs called Twitter which has hashtags to identify common themes. A popular hashtag is for people who like to take photos of their food. They use the hashtag #foodporn.

Slide 10

Well I take photos of maps and there's lots of maps in this talk. You could say it's pure unadulterated #mapporn and I make no apology for it.

Slide 11

But before I talk about today's maps, I want to set a little historical context.

Slide 12

This is one of the earliest maps we know of, of the world as the Babylonians thought of it. Babylon is in the centre of the map and there's seven triangular islands, 3 of which are missing due to damage, in the "river of bitter water", or the sea. To me, the Babylon map is both art, hope and inspiration for the unmapped areas of their world and the best attempt of the age to be authoritative.

Slide 13

Fast forward several centuries to the "golden age of exploration" and while maps are more recognisably accurate, they're still art. But this art came at a price. You needed to be wealthy to commission such a map and such a map was often given as a notional gift to the rich and powerful to curry favour.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/normanbleventhalmapcenter/2675672726/ Slide 14

Furthermore maps were state secrets; sharing maps was sharing power and influence. The entrepreneurs of the time were the great navigators like Columbus and Magellan, their sponsors were kings and countries; their business plan were maps.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/normanbleventhalmapcenter/5385389984/ Slide 15

But maps don't just have to be geographically accurate. They can show data as well. This 1869 map by Charles Minard shows the losses suffered by Napoleon's army in his 1812 Russian campaign. Beginning at the Polish/Russian border on the left, the thick pinkish band shows the size of the army as they advanced towards Moscow. The thinner black band shows the ever decreasing size of the remains of the army as they retreated in the bitterly cold winter.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Minard.png Slide 16

Another type of not necessarily geographically accurate map are the familiar mass transit and metro maps that you probably all recognise, all descended in some shape or form from Harry Beck's iconic map of London's Tube system.

Slide 17

And then, there's the map that most people of my generation will find immediately familiar, the Ordnance Survey map, from the printed version of the pink LandRanger series of maps through to the online version still found at certain zoom levels on streetmap.co.uk.

Slide 18

And no far too quick resume of maps would be complete without the maps we use on an almost daily basis, from Nokia ...

Slide 19

... from Google

Slide 20

... from Bing

Slide 21

... and from OpenStreetMap. All of these are pretty much authoritative, geographically accurate and cartographically pleasing to the eye. But from the maps of 16th and 17th centuries to today's web and mobile maps, there's something missing. There's some brilliant cartography at work but the art seems to have gotten lost somewhere along the way. Or has it?

Slide 22

This map of where I live, using the Watercolor style from San Francisco based Stamen, is as geographically accurate and authoritative as the maps from Nokia, Google and others, but to my mind this is most definitely art. It also happens to be my second favourite map.

Slide 23

So how did we get here ...

Slide 24

... how did we get from cuneiform impressions on a baked mud tablet ...

Slide 25

... to a watercolour style map that, if allowed, I'd want to hang on my wall in a large as possible size as I could get.

Slide 26

I think the answer is data. Lots of data. Easily accessible data, either in bulk or through an API, either free and open or licensed and proprietary. We now have access to the raw spatial data that was previously the preserve of the professional cartographer alone. People can start to make their own maps, their personal, subjective, art maps in ways never previously possible and they can do this because they want to and just because they can.

Slide 27

We can make maps, not only of what is and of what was but also of what might have been but which never came to pass, such as this map of what Berlin would have looked like if Albert Speer's plan for the city had been realised and if the events of 1945 had been very different from what is in our history books.

https://mypantsareonfire.tumblr.com/post/30302438119/albert-speers-new-berlin Slide 28

There's also a flip side to all of this though. Just because we can make maps from all of this wonderful data we now have doesn't always mean we should make maps, such as this gem from the Ottawa Sun which manages to put Saudi Arabia in Africa, puts Iran on the Arabian Peninsula where Saudi Arabia should be, overlooks the fact that the Sudan is now two countries and gets Malaysia and Indonesia confused.

https://ottawa.openfile.ca/blog/ottawa/2012/suns-same-sex-marriage-map-puts-saudi-arabia-africa-among-other-cringeworthy-errors Slide 29

But the topic of bad maps is another talk entirely, so let's get back to good maps. With access to the underlying spatial data and to other data sets with a spatial element, we can now make maps which provide insights into mapping the unmappable. Some cities have formally defined neighbourhoods, London doesn't. But Tom Taylor's Boundaries took a spatially correct map and mashed up Flickr's Alpha data set to show not where London's neighbourhoods are, but where people think the neighbourhoods are. Which may not be 100% accurate but it's a darn sight better to have a notion of where London's neighbourhoods are than no notion at all.

https://boundaries.tomtaylor.co.uk Slide 30

Then there's this map. Definitely one to be filed under the category of "maps because we can", at first sight this map just looks like the US, with lines joining up the notional centroids of each State. Until you start to play with it in a web browser

Slide 31

And all of a sudden you can start to see what would happen if you decided you really didn't want California, Florida or Texas to be where they currently reside. You can play with this for hours. I did. When I really should have been finishing this talk.

https://mbostock.github.com/d3/talk/20111018/force-states.html Slide 32

The more data sets that people produce, the more people can and will make maps with them, so if you'd ever had a yearning to see where people have discovered fossils, for example, then there's a map to show you that. You can argue that this is nothing more than a classic Web 2.0 style maps mashup, but give people a spatial data set and they'll make a map out of it and sometimes that's good enough

https://earth-base.org/fossils Slide 33

But sometimes people will go several steps beyond a maps mash up and produce something which is only just recognisable as a map and is much more about the data visualisation. Like plumegraph.

https://plumegraph.org Slide 34

Here, the map is relegated to a small piece of digital canvas on which the data is projected. But it's still a map, it's still accurate and even if the data being visualised is part of humanity's less attractive side, it's still visually gorgeous. It's still a map.

Slide 35

Now people sometimes make the mistake of assuming that all of this data we're making maps out of is a relatively recent thing. But long before we had the convenient label of "Big Data", organisations such as the NOAA were creating data sets you could make maps out of, we just didn't make the maps until now. So now, we can have temporal as well as spatial maps, such as the tracks of US tornados over the last 56 or so years ...

https://uxblog.idvsolutions.com/2012/05/tornado-tracks.html Slide 36

... or hurricanes over the last 160 or so years. This map is a particular favourite of mine as it subverts the usual mercator projection we tend to see on maps and instead takes a bottom up approach, with Antartica as the focal point, so we can see how these great storms circle around our planet.

https://uxblog.idvsolutions.com/2012/08/hurricanes-since-1851.html Slide 37

Staying with the theme of wind for a moment. This map shows the realtime wind patterns over the United States. Or at least what the wind patterns were on August 31st, when I took this screen shot. It's a nice classic example of a data map. A visualisation of wind patterns. A key of wind speeds. Nothing particularly special. Until you see the realtime aspect ...

https://hint.fm/wind/ Slide 38

... and suddenly the map comes alive. It moves and almost breathes. As with a lot of today's map visualisations, it's oddly compelling and draws you in.

Slide 39

And now, to coin a Monty Python phrase, for something completely different. We're used to seeing maps in Geradus Mercator's map projections. The first maps we see, often at school, or in an atlas at home, tend to be in this projection. It's easy to forget that this is how maps have been projected since 1569. But if you've seen any of the stunning NASA images of our planet as seen from space, you'll probably have noticed that a Mercator map doesn't look like our planet does from space. The map is distorted to fit the projection. Antarctica is this long white smear along the bottom of the map. Greenland is around 60% bigger than it really is.

There's other map projections. Buckminster Fuller's Dymaxion map is one of my favourites. It makes a bit more sense if you rotate it through 90 degrees.

https://www.bfi.org/about-bucky/buckys-big-ideas/dymaxion-world/dymaxion-map Slide 40

There's no projection distortion. It shows our planet almost as a single island in a massive ocean. There's no splitting of the continents. As Buckminster Fuller put it "the maps we use still cause humanity to appear inherently disassociated, remote, self-interestedly preoccupied with the political concept of its got to be you or me; there is not enough for both".

https://www.westnet.com/~crywalt/unfold.html Slide 41

There's just one more map to go but before I get there, I wanted to look a little bit ahead to where maps might go if you could interact with them with more than just a finger on a touch screen or a mouse or trackpad on a laptop.

What about putting a boarding pass on a map and it would show you where in the airport your gate is. What about putting a mobile phone on the map and it would show you where you could charge it. What if you could put a credit card on a map and it would show you where a bureau de change or an ATM is? MIT's Media Lab have done just this with TaPuMa, the Tangible Public Map. Maybe this is the next generation of intelligent, interactive maps?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l4bz9shk8UU Slide 42

So this is the part of a talk where it's traditional to start to wrap things up and to maybe pontificate where we go from here, or what's going to be happening in a year or so's time.

Sadly, I can't do that. As more and more data becomes available, more and more people are making maps from that data in ways we can't even think of right now. All I can say is that making maps is becoming more and more democratised and while we'll always need formal and authoritative maps, we also have the ability to make our own maps and that ability is becoming easier and easier with each passing month.

Slide 43

And as an example of this democratisation of the map in action, I'll leave you with my personal favourite map, again from Stamen, called Pretty Maps, which seems to be an excellent name as this is definitely a map and it's definitely pretty. Will this be my favourite map in a year's time ... only time, maps and data will tell.

Slide 44

I hope you've enjoyed seeing these maps, as much as I've enjoyed researching them. Thanks for listening.

Photo Credits: Eva-Lotta Lamm on Flickr.

Big (Location) Data vs. My (Location) Data

2012-07-04 14:00

Geodigital asking me if I'd like to talk at the AGI's Northern Conference and thus, after a brief bit of editing to remove the conspicuous Silicon Valley references, this talk relocated from San Francisco to Manchester. As per usual, the slide deck plus notes are below.

For a pleasant change, the guts of this talk didn't metamorphose oddly during the writing. Instead, it geolocated. This was originally planned to be my keynote talk at Social-Loco in San Francisco last month. But I wasn't able to make it to the Bay Area as planned for reasons too complex to go into here. Suffice to say, the slide deck languished unloved on my laptops hard drive, taking up 30 odd MB of storage and not really going anywhere.

Then I got an email from Stuart Mitchell at Geodigital asking me if I'd like to talk at the AGI's Northern Conference and thus, after a brief bit of editing to remove the conspicuous Silicon Valley references, this talk relocated from San Francisco to Manchester. As per usual, the slide deck plus notes are below.

[scribd id=100297709 key=key-15vmdecagp3xopiyihgt mode=list]

Slide 2

So, hello, I’m Gary. I’m a self-confessed map addict, a geo-technologist and a geographer. I’m Director of Places for Nokia’s Location and Commerce group. Prior to Nokia I led Yahoo’s Geotechnologies group in the United Kingdom. I’m a founder of the Location Forum, a co-founder of WhereCamp EU, I sit on the Council for the AGI, the UK’s Association for Geographic Information, I’m the chair of the W3G conference and I’m also a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society.

Slide 3

There are URLs in this talk but this is the only URL in the entirety of this talk you might want to take a note of. Although if you go there right now, it'll 404 on you, later today or tomorrow, this is where this slide deck, my notes and all the links you'll be seeing will appear on my blog.

https://vtny.org/jT Slide 4

One of the things I love about writing a talk for a conference is how the things I hear and the things I read get mentally stored away and then, somehow, they start to draw together to form a semi-coherent narrative around the talk title that I inevitably gave to the conference organisers around 3 months prior. So it is with this talk, which in Sesame Street fashion, has been unknowingly brought to you by ...

Slide 5

Kellan Elliott-McCrea, previously at Flickr and Yahoo! and now at Etsy ...

Slide 6

Aaron Straup Cope, previously at Flickr and Stamen Design and now doing stuff at the Smithsonian ...

Slide 7

... and my children. No, really. This isn't just an excuse to put a photo of my family up on the screen behind me so you can all, hopefully, go "awww".

Slide 8

But before I get into anything to do with location data, big data, my data or anything interweb or social network related I want to try and frame the context of my thoughts by talking about communication, or to be more precise, the way in which we communicate. We are, politics and warfare aside, a social species and communicating with each other is something we do a lot of, although the manner in which we communicate has changed a lot.

A lot of our communication is both verbal and non-verbal and relies of face to face, person to person, proximity so that the verbal and non verbal approach comes together to express what we intend to say.

Slide 9

Some of our communication is written, the old fashioned way, using pen and paper, although a lot of commentators have called out the "death of the letter". Whether that's true or just good headline making hyperbole remains to be seen, but to be fair, I can't remember the last time I actually sat down and wrote a letter.

Slide 10

A lot of our communication is still verbal but via a phone, be that a land line or a mobile. We call and we text. A lot.

Slide 11

But be it talking face to face, texting someone or even writing an email, the intended audience is still narrow, person to person, or person to small audience.

But the interwebs have added to this sphere of communications and now we broadcast our thoughts, feelings and experiences, sometimes regardless of whether we think anyone will see this, let alone empathise or communicate back. A lot of this broadcasting has a location context, be it explicit via a geotag or implicit through mentions of a place or some other geographical construct.

Slide 12

While we still talk, meet, engage and sometimes broadcast, like I'm doing right now, this human-to-human interaction has been augmented, maybe complimented by electronic communications.

Slide 13

We're as likely to post a Tweet on Twitter or a status on Facebook or Google+ or another social network as we are to speak face to face.

Slide 14

And because this type of communiqué is electronic, that means it generates data as we go. Today we generate lots of data, big data, on a daily basis. It's probably not unfair to say that there's data being generated in this very auditorium, right now, as I'm saying this.

Slide 15

Some of this data is implicit. A by-product of what we're doing. Whether it's our cell phones loosely mapping out where we are, not a privacy invasion I hasten to add, but the simple way in which cellular networks work, but that's a topic for another talk on another day, or our GPS navigation, be it built into our car or our smartphone, providing anonymised traffic data probes to show where freeway congestion is, we don't consciously set out to generate this data. It's a by product of what we're doing.

Slide 16

But a lot of this data is very much explicit. We type out a status update on our phone, our tablet, our laptop and we tap or click on the button that says "go" or "submit" or we take a photo, maybe add an image filter or a comment and tap or click the button that says "share" or "upload".

Slide 17

By doing this we're explicitly communicating, explicitly broadcasting and sharing with our friend, family, followers and the interwebs in general ... and in doing so, we're playing our part in generating more and more data.

Slide 18

And generate it we do. Lots of it. We call it big data, but massive data would be a more accurate definition of it. Whilst our own individual contributions to big data may not be that big, when you put it all together it's part of an ever growing corpus of big data and there's companies that both provide the means for us to broadcast and share this data as well as, hopefully, providing a means of revenue for them to enable them to keep doing this. The amounts that get generated each day is almost too much for us to think about and comprehend. Once a number gets that big, we can't really deal with it. We know it's a big number but what that actually represents is hard for us to get our head around.

Slide 19

So let's look at just a small sample of what gets generated on a daily basis from the social big data, communicating, sharing and broadcasting services I tend to use, if not on a daily basis then at least on a weekly basis. I Tweet and update my Facebook status at least once a day, sometimes up to 20 times a day. I check-in to places on Foursquare at least 10 times a day and take and upload photos to Instagram and Facebook around 3 times a week. That's just my contribution, think how many people are doing the same thing to get to the sort of volumes you can see on the slide behind me.

Slide 20

But how long will this continue? Remember the people I spoke about right at the start of this talk, some 16 slides back? It's time to bring them into the picture. Firstly, my children, although this applies equally to pretty much all children. Remember when you were a child? The summer vacation was endless. The skies were always blue and the sun was always out (remember, I'm from the UK where Summer and sun do not always go together, in fact it was pouring down with rain as I wrote this at home last week). And just like the summer vacation was endless, so were your parents and the people around you, they were eternal and would always be there. Remember feeling like that? But then the inevitable happened. We grew up and we discovered, often the hard way, that the summer wasn't endless and that almost everything is finite.

Slide 21

Social networks and social location networks aren't finite either. They get born, if they're lucky they grow and then at some time or other they ... stop. If it's a social network you don't use then it doesn't really bother us much.

Slide 22

But if it's a network you've shared a lot of content through, what happens then? A lot of people, myself included, immediately get into "I want my data back" mode.

Slide 23

But is it your data. Of course it is. You made it. You composed that Tweet. You shared that link. You took that photo. You were at that place you check-in at. Of course it's your data.

But there's a point to be made here. You may have created that data, you may own that data, but the copy of that data in that social network is just that. It's a copy. It's not necessarily "your" data and because most of us don't preserve what we send up into the cloud on its way to our social networks, you may have created it, but the copy in the cloud isn't necessarily yours.

Slide 24

It's an easy mistake to make. I may be a geo-technologist and many more things besides, but I am not a lawyer, and apart from the lawyers in the room, more of you aren't and most of the people who use social networks aren't lawyers either, unless it's DeferoLaw, which is a social network for the legal profession.

Slide 25

We see phrases such as “you retain your rights” …

Slide 26

... like "you own the content posted" ...

Slide 27

... and "you always own your information" and immediately the subtleties and complexities of data ownership, licensing, copyright and intellectual property are cast aside. We say to ourselves, "it's my data dammit, I own it, I want it".

Slide 28

And it's this belief that we really are lawyers in our spare time that makes people think that somehow the data they've shared via a social network is physically theirs, rather than a bit for bit perfect copy that we've licensed to that social network. We forget for a moment that we're using that social network as a cloud based backup, in some cases the only backup, of our creations and we mutter darkly about "holding my data hostage".

Slide 29

The blunt, and often harsh reality, is the age old adage that "you get what you pay for". If you pay, you're probably a customer. If you're using something for "free" (and I say free in very large italics and inverted commas here), then you're probably, unknowingly or unwittingly, the product. Harsh. But fair. It's our content that the social networks monetize and that allows them to keep their servers and disk storage up and running. You might have seen that previous slide with the Tech Crunch post and be thinking "ah, but Flickr Pro is chargeable and if my subscription lapses I can't get my photos back". That's actually not really true, if not particularly simple, but bear with me for a few more slides.

Slide 30

Now let's forget "big data" for a moment and think about "your data" instead. Actually, let's think about "my data" for a moment. As of last week, my social media footprint on Twitter, Foursquare, Instagram and Flickr looked something like this. Facebook's numbers would be up there too, but I'll get to that in a moment.

Now in the grand scheme of things, in the massive numbers thrown about around about "big data" this is but a drop in the ocean. But ...

Slide 31

I created these check-ins, status updates, tweets and photos. They're important to me. Very important to me.

Slide 32

And as Aaron Cope pointed our earlier this year, my small, insignificant contribution to big data is part of my own, very subjective, very personal, history.

Slide 33

As I may have mentioned before, I'm a geo-technologist and a high percentage of my explicit big data contribution has a geo or location component to it. I'd like to map our where I checked-in, I'd like to see where I was when I Tweeted or what photos I took at a particular location. Some of this "mappyness" already exists in some of the big data stores where my contributions live, but not all of it, it's far too niche and personal for that. But it's still important to me.

Slide 34

Remember, in 99% of the social networks I use, I'm not the customer, I'm contributing to the product. But how do my regularly used social networks fare here. Regardless of whether I own the data I put up there, how easy is it to get a copy of?

Slide 35

Firstly, what about a one click solution? Can I go to a particular page on the web and click the big button which says "give me a copy of my data".

Slide 36

Facebook is the only one of my 5 social networks that does this. Well, it almost does this. At least I'm sure I used to be able to do this.

Slide 37

I can still request a download of my information. But it now only seems to give me my status updates since I enabled Timeline on my account, though I can still get all of my photos and messages since 2008. Rather than say that this doesn't work, I'll just file this under "needs future investigation" and move on.

Slide 38

Sometimes this lack of a one button download of contributed data is a deliberate decision on the part of a given social network. Sometimes, it's a hope that with an API, some enterprising developer will do this, but most of the time, that doesn't always happen.

Slide 39

So talking of APIs, surely the remaining social networks will have an API and let me knock up some code to get a copy of my data contributions. Surely?

Slide 40

Not all social networks do. An API tends to come after a social network's launch, if it comes at all, and often it doesn't let me do all that I want to do.

Slide 41

Thankfully, all the networks I used, with the exception of Twitter not only provide an API, but let me use that API to get my data. All of my data.

Slide 42

This is a good thing and meets the requirements for an API to meet what Kellan Elliot McCrea calls "minimal competence". He went on to say

"The ability to get out the data you put in is the bare minimum. All of it, at high fidelity, in a reasonable amount of time.

The bare minimum that you should be building, bare minimum that you should be using, and absolutely the bare minimum you should be looking for in tools you allow and encourage people who aren’t builders to use."

Slide 43

Kellan was behind Flickr's API and his sentiments are, to my mind, admirable.

Slide 44

Sadly, Twitter doesn't let me do this and fails the minimal competence test miserably. Deep in their API documentation I found the justification for this as being essential to ensure Twitter's stability and performance and leave it as an exercise to you the audience to work out what I think of this excuse.

Slide 45

The sad truth here is that when it comes to our own individual online data history, there's not always a willingness to make it easy for us to get copies of our history, if it's even on the radar at all.

Slide 46

But if we can't always get our data history back, maybe the solution is to make an archive of it before it goes in or keep that archive up to date as you go ... a personal digital archive or PDA (and not to be confused with personal electronic organisers, or PDAs, such as the Palm Pilot).

Slide 47

Thanks to web APIs and another social network, admittedly one for people who know how to code, a lot of this is already possible and the scope, range and functionality is growing by the day. The irony that I can build my own personal digital archive out of code found on another social network, which itself is built around a source code archival system is not lost on me either.

Slide 48

So, firstly, there's my own Instagram (and no, I'm not going to share the URL of where this lives I'm afraid. The idea here is that this is a personal archive, not a clone of a social network).

Slide 49

My own Instagram is called parallel-ogram. It's on GitHub; you can download it, configure it, run it. For free.

https://vtny.org/jQ Slide 50

Parallel-ogram works as well on my phone as it does on my laptop, showing me exactly what I've uploaded to Instagram. Indeed, it goes one step further than Instagram as currently there's no way to see what you've uploaded other than through their mobile app. Parallel-ogram doesn't allow me to take photos or upload them, at least not yet, but it does allow me to go back to the day I first uploaded a photo, grabs copies for me and twice a day it uses the Instagram API to see what I may have uploaded and quietly grabs a copy and stashes it away for me.

Slide 53

There's also my own archive of Foursquare ...

Slide 54

It's called privatesquare and it's also on GitHub

https://vtny.org/jR Slide 55

Like parallel-ogram, privatesquare quietly uses the Foursquare API to go back to my first check-in and twice a day quietly synchs my check-ins for me. I can go back and look at them, see maps of them and browse my check-in history. Unlike parallel-ogram, privatesquare also allows me to check-in, even if I don't want to share this with Foursquare. In short it allows me to use it both as an archive and also as a check-in tool, and if I want to use Foursquare's official mobile app, I can do that, safe and secure in the knowledge that privatesquare will keep itself up to date.

Slide 61

I take a lot of photos. Some of them go into Instagram. All of them go into Flickr. But I can archive Flickr as well.

Slide 62

It's called parallel-flickr, it also lives on GitHub and it's also filed under "something I really must install, configure and get running when I have some spare time".

https://vtny.org/jS Slide 63

So I have my own archives of Instagram, Flickr and Foursquare. I sort of have my own archive of Facebook. But what about my Tweets?

Slide 64

Well until Twitter decides that their site is stable enough to let me grab my Tweets through their archive, the next best solution is to archive by another means. I've put the RSS feed to my Tweet-stream into Google Reader, which helpfully never throws anything away. I did this a long time ago and I have almost all, but 100% all of my Tweets. Now all I need to do is write some code to read them from Google Reader and then get the Tweet data from Twitter, which then do allow via their API. Sadly, this is also filed under "something I must do when I have the time". It's not perfect, but then again, none of what I've discussed is, but it's a start and that's good enough for the time being.

Slide 65

Finally, you might have noticed the links in my slides look sort of like bitly links, only on the vtny.org domain. That's because I've been archiving my short links for a few years now

Slide 66

Using my own short URL archive and my own, self hosted, URL shortener. I just thought I'd mention that.

Slide 67

So, my big data contribution, my personal online history, is important to me. Yours might be important to you too. We're often told that we can't have our cake and eat it, but with the advent of the personal digital archive, maybe we can thanks to the enterprising people who create APIs in the first place and those who not only use these APIs but also put their code up for all the world to use, free of charge. Your online history may not be that important in the grand scheme of things, but it's your online history, it's personal, you made it. When social networks go the place where software goes to die, you might just want to preserve that personal history before the servers get powered off forever. Maybe the geeks will inherit the Earth after all.

Slide 68

Thank you for listening.

From Where 2.0 To Just Where; With Meh 2.0 Somewhere In The Middle

2012-04-06 16:16

Where 2012 draws to a close and the lobby of the Marriott Marquis in San Francisco fills with a slew of geo'd-out delegates waiting to check out, it's time for the traditional post conference retrospective writeup. If you were at Where this year or in previous years you'll probably want to skip ahead to the next paragraph, right now. Where, previously called Where 2.0, is one of the annual maps, geo, location conferences. Though it's very Californian and eye wateringly expensive, it's still the place to go to talk, listen and announce anything related to the nebulous industry we call Geo.

After skipping Where 2.0 last year, this year I returned as part of the Nokia contingent and found out that some things had changed.

And so, as Where 2012 draws to a close and the lobby of the Marriott Marquis in San Francisco fills with a slew of geo'd-out delegates waiting to check out, it's time for the traditional post conference retrospective writeup. If you were at Where this year or in previous years you'll probably want to skip ahead to the next paragraph, right now. Where, previously called Where 2.0, is one of the annual maps, geo, location conferences. Though it's very Californian and eye wateringly expensive, it's still the place to go to talk, listen and announce anything related to the nebulous industry we call Geo.

After skipping Where 2.0 last year, this year I returned as part of the Nokia contingent and found out that some things had changed.

Firstly, Where 2.0 was no more. O'Reilly have rebranded the conference as simply Where, with the strapline of the business of location. The conference had also moved from its traditional San Jose venue, via the soul desert that is the Santa Clara Convention centre last year, to a new home at the Marriott Marquis slap bang in the middle of downtown San Francisco.

Secondly, and probably more importantly, whilst Where was as slick and well put together as it's always been, something was missing. It's not easy to put my finger on what precisely was lacking. There seemed to be a lack of ... buzz, for want of a better word. It felt ... muted. Numbers were certainly down from previous years but that alone can't account for the feeling, or lack of it, this year. Granted, the venue was excellent, the food was as well too. The coffee was ... Starbucks. We can't have it all. The wifi almost held up. I met up with a lot of old friends and colleagues, including some from Yahoo! and the after show parties were edgy and the bar was open, free and copiously stocked.

But it did feel more Meh 2.0 (to be said out loud with an indifferent shrug of the shoulders) rather than Where 2.0, and from speaking to other people, I'm not alone in thinking this.

So enough introspection, to the point of this post, which is retrospection. Let's start with the high points.

This was most definitely a Nokia event. Not only were we Gold sponsors of the event but I was lucky enough to get a speaking slot, my second Where appearance, and I was amply aided and abetted by a geographically dispersed crowd of fellow Nokians hailing from not only The Valley, but Atlanta GA, Chicago IL and Berlin. As a bonus, I got to do not one, but two product launches, plus some sneak peeks at what's coming up location wise from the company.

Meh 2.0 notwithstanding, it was also good to see several Yahoo! alumni for a long overdue catchup. Geo-beers may have been conspicuous by their absence, but geo-cocktails were very much apparent.

Sadly, Yahoo! also provided probably the lowest point of the whole conference. Right slap bang in the middle of proceedings, Yahoo! announced yet another round of layoffs, culling almost 2000 employees. When this happens, the last place you want to be when you're waiting to hear whether you still have a job is at a conference and my heart just went out to my ex-colleagues who had to sit their, with a fixed smile on their face, as they waited to hear news from the Yahoo! mothership down in Sunnyvale.

So, to recap, a mixed bag of events and emotions at this year's Where. Personally and professionally I think it was a great, team aided, success. Hopefully we'll all return next year to find the "wow" at Where is back and to put the "meh" firmly behind us.

Wrapping this retrospective up, I should include the traditional slide deck from my talk, together with my notes. You'll find them below, hosted on Scribd this time as an embedded PDF. Since Slideshare went freemium, my decks are now just too big to be hosted by their free account offering which has a 10MB limit. At some point, I'll drag all my decks from Slideshare and put them up on Scribd.

[scribd id=100298958 key=key-23j0fhnk1syubpgvzv5n mode=list]

Slide 2

Good afternoon everyone. I'm Gary. I'm a geo-technologist by profession and a geographer at heart. I’m the Director of Places for Nokia’s Location and Commerce group.

Slide 3

But first some recent history. If you were here at last year’s Where, you would have heard Michael Halbherr, the head of Nokia’s Location & Commerce, introducing you to a concept … a truly global location platform, one that is built on the world’s most accurate mapping and navigation assets. If you were at Nokia World in London in October, you would have heard me talk about the launch of what we now call the Where Platform. Fast forward to today and I want to update you on how Nokia is continuing to deliver on the promise that Michael and I talked about in San Jose and in London … to grow the “Where” ecosystem, to provide a horizontal yet device agnostic set of API offering and a growing list of companies and apps that are using these APIs.

At Nokia Location & Commerce, our aim is to be the Where company. Why?

Today, the internet is well organised around the concepts of “What” and “Who” with search engines and social networks providing the answers to these questions. We are striving to provide answers to questions of “Where.”

Location is massively important to today’s internet, whether it’s on mobile devices, on tablets, on laptops or the other myriad ways in which we access the internet. Over 40% of mobile searches have location within them or are looking for local information. There’s a hunger for location-relevant information and this proves to us that the concept of “local” has never been more essential to today’s users, customers and consumers.

Slide 4

The days of someone owning a single internet connected device are almost over. We’re now buying, owning and using multiple mobile devices. At the same time, these devices are getting smarter – firstly, because they are increasingly connected to the cloud and secondly because they are sensor-rich. From NFC for payment in stores and on transport, to more advanced sensors that interpret if you’re running versus taking a bus, all the way to sensors that connect with devices like wrist band heart rate monitors – these sensor-rich devices provide us with critical data that helps us better understand location related behavior which in turn helps us to identify patterns and trends.

To build the Where Platform, we believe you need four essential components … data, a platform that uses this data, APIs that expose the platform and apps and experiences that showcase the power of the platform and its data.

Slide 5

So first, there’s data; we have a lot of data, from best-in-class, navigation quality, mapping assets through to global, yet local, location based data.

Slide 6

The Where Platform is built on top of this data and what’s more, it learns from the data. We call this a learning engine and it’s because there’s really two sorts of data out there … reference data and activity data.

Let’s start with a Place. Where and what is this Place? This is reference data, the index of world around us and it enables the routine location functions we take for granted, such as search, routing and navigation.

Then there’s activity data that utilizes the types of sensors I just spoke about to understand how people interact with their devices, their apps and the real world around them.

Or to put it another way, we know about a Place and we can know what actually happens, in the real world, at this Place. Put these two types of data together and it becomes what we call smart data and it’s this that powers the Where Platform and enable us to create a digital, predictive model from all the Places and objects in the physical world, including our user’s needs and activities.

Slide 7

The reference and activity data I mentioned earlier, combined as smart data, powers the Where Platform. The platform in turn powers the showcase for this, our apps, which I’ll cover in a few slides time. But apps aren’t enough in today’s world, you need robust APIs as well.

There is a unique opportunity to work with you and with developers to build the where-enabled ecosystem; across verticals and across the screens we use on a daily basis, to power the experiences you’re building for your users.

So let’s dig a bit deeper into the APIs …

Slide 8

We already have a set of modular, configurable, highly performant APIs that are easy to use and to integrate, with an active developer community who appreciate our simple and fair terms of use. For the web, we have JavaScript APIs for Maps and for Places as well as a new Places web service API, more of which in a few moments. We’re going to be unifying the JavaScript APIs for Maps and for Places into single API under the Nokia Maps for JavaScript API banner.

There’s also our Map Image web service API and our upcoming Maps API for HTML5, which I’ll talk more about in a few slide’s time.

And for native mobile use, there’s out Maps API for Qt and our Places API for JavaME and coming later this year our Maps API for Windows Phone.

Slide 9

APIs are of course utterly critical to the Where platform and the Where ecosystem but we also to ensure that we cover all the screens that act as touch-point between the digital and real words for people throughout their day. As I move from my computer at work, to my laptop, to my in-car nav system, to my tablet, our goal is to have an offering for virtually any of these screens.

In addition to the Places API, I also touched on APIs for Qt, for Windows Phone and for JavaME for Nokia devices. For non-Nokia handsets and platforms, you can already see the power of the NLP on maps.nokia.com on the web and coming soon will be native HTML5 support.

You may already know of the Nokia Maps app for Windows Phone, but Nokia Maps is already available via the Amazon Android Store and includes routing for drive, walk and public transport.

We’re also announcing a closed beta of our Nokia Maps HTML5 API, which is the first of many huge milestones we hope to achieve to expand our APIs and presence across screens as quickly as possible.

Slide 10

I mentioned a few slides back that we’re making a commitment to support the Where Platform across all screens, by making the platform device agnostic and truly horizontal. You may recognise the mobile devices behind me and, although these are screenshots of our maps on both Android and iOS, these are not mocks-ups, they’re from real proof of concepts, using the Where Platform. But these are not apps that we’re releasing so don’t rush to your mobiles to try and download them. But if you want to see them live, in action and in person, you’ll be able to see and play with them at the Nokia booth.

Slide 11

Now, a few slides back I mentioned our Places web service API. This is in addition to our Places API for JavaScript and so I’m really pleased, or as we say in Britain, chuffed, to announce the public beta of this …

Through our Places API you can: Discover Places by searching explicitly and nearby Display Place information, basic and extended data attributes, rich content, editorial and user generated content; this is far more than the offerings of some of our competitors Interact with a Place, share it, navigate to it

Through the Nokia Places API, you can find locations in more than 1.5 million areas (cities, districts, and regions) as well as more than 120 million point addresses across 15 countries.

Slide 12

The term Places API is usually synonymous with searching for Place information and with displaying a page containing this information, but there’s far more to Places that just this. Look at these heat maps behind me; they’re great examples of the type of experience you can create using the Nokia Places API. These dynamic heat maps are produced by combining Place categories and other algorithmic inputs to show were you might want to eat or shop. This is great for getting a feel for a locality that you may be unfamiliar with.

We know that a powerful set of API offerings is critical to our ability to recruit partners to help build the Where ecosystem. This is why I’m excited to share the launch of the Nokia Places API web service with you today.

Slide 13

At Nokia, we realize that becoming the Where company is not an easy task. The Platform alone is not enough, nor is produced a set of APIs enough. There needs to be support, documentation and tools which work the way you work. But we also know that sometimes you just want to join in the fun. And so, over the past year we have been working hard to grow the Where ecosystem.

We’ve added customers such as those listed here and these have increased the hits to the platform from 560M/month in Q1 2011 to 4.6B/month in Q1 of this year; that’s around a 750% increase.

Slide 14

For example, we have been working with Yahoo! since late 2010. All Yahoo! sites that have a map element will be served by one of Nokia’s Location & Commerce data center locations around the world.

Slide 15

Whenever one of millions of Yahoo! users checks out a location, Yahoo! sources its mapping/imagery, routing, traffic, and geocoding services from the Where Platform.

As Dirk Daumann (Nokia Head of Map Services Platform) says “We have served millions of Yahoo! users worldwide for around 150 days. Our service has been available to 99.9 per cent. This means that we have constantly exceeded what was agreed, something that we are very proud of. During peaks, we serve 1200 queries per second, a number that we estimate to grow when the transition of all Yahoo! sites to our services has been completed.”

Slide 16

Additionally, we recently announced our partnership with Groupon to collaborate on a redesign of the customer experience of deal discovery, purchase and redemption.

We plan to do this by working with them to offer market-leading, location-sensitive discounts and deals that are more locally relevant and convenient. By the way, as we’re early in our relationship with Groupon, the graphics you can see behind me are a mock-up, not a real app, so no heading to the Marketplace to download please.

Slide 17

What I’ve just been talking to you about over the last 15 minutes or so, shows, I hope, the massive amount of investment and commitment we’ve made over the past year to building a where-enabled ecosystem and in achieving our goal of becoming the Where company.

Similar to our Platform and APIs, we’ve met major milestones with our apps as well. Today, we have 5 apps that are based upon and showcase the Where Platform:

Nokia Drive provides free, in car navigation for driving and reaching destinations safely. Nokia Transport allows you to have all your commuter information at your fingertips: No more carrying around city maps or timetables—it is all on your device, wherever you are. Nokia Maps provides new ways to discover and explore the world around you. Nokia City Lens is an augmented reality browser turns a phone’s camera viewfinder into a new way to spot nearby attractions, shops, restaurants and places of interest. Nokia Pulse is an exciting new way to privately check in, meet up and stay in touch with the people, like family and close friends—with just one click.

In fact, these apps are one of the best ways to illustrate the power of the Where Platform. What we’ve done with our apps is just the beginning. And with the power of the platform and our APIs, the opportunities for you to build unique, location-relevant solutions are endless.

Slide 18

We see an opportunity to work with you to build a where-enabled ecosystem. For all of us to become part of something bigger. To be part of an ecosystem that stretches across screens. That spans B2C, B2B and B2D. That answers consumer’s where-related questions and empowers them to explore and enjoy the increasingly merged physical and digital world around them.

If you’re interested in discussing further how we can work together, please swing by the Nokia booth – it’s number 208.

Slide 19

… thank you for listening

GeoCommunity and LocNav; One Talk, Two Audiences

2011-10-19 23:34

You can argue that it's cheating or you can argue that there's a vague degree of ecological-friendliness but sometimes you just end up recycling and repurposing a conference talk deck for more than one conference. So it was with my keynote at GeoCommunity in Nottingham last month and my keynote at the Location Business Summit in San Jose. One deck, two audiences. As it turns out, taking this approach can yield unexpected benefits.

Firstly there's the UK audience at GeoCommunity, the Association For Geographic Information's annual get-together and all round geo shindig. GeoCommunity is probably the closest the UK has to California's Where 2.0, but with a very different audience and a very different accent. The AGI still draws the bulk of its membership from the GIS heartlands of the GI community, although in recent years the association has dramatically expanded its reach into the web, mobile and neogeography domains.

The Location Business Summit, on the other hand is firstly in San Jose in the heart of Silicon Valley and secondly has a very pronounced American accent and draws the bulk of the audience from the Bay Area where web and mobile, both from a developer and from a business perspective, hold sway.

One deck, two audiences.

The slide deck is above, plus there's a PDF version with the talk notes.

As previously mentioned, the GeoCommunity audience hails, in the main, from the GIS heartland. A talk which deals with context, with search, with relevance, with LBS and with maps and mobile got a great reaction and fitted well with the other closing keynote from the British Library's Kimberley Kowal who put together a gorgeous deck full of beautiful maps, ancient, old and not so old. Steven Feldman has put together a list of these cartographical wonders, if you're interested. Following up old maps with new, digital maps seemed to be a good segue and bridge between printed maps and digital maps. After the talk, people came up to me and said nice words and overall, the reaction seemed to be that this was an area of geo and location that didn't normally appear on their professional radar. That's a sweeping generalisation of course but it was also immensely gratifying.

Fast forward to today; not in the UK but slap bang in the middle of San Jose. Same talk. Same deck. Same sentiments. But a vastly different, though equally good, reaction from the audience. This time the questions and comments focused not on the map, not on LBS but on what the next major step in sensors would be after GPS and on what sources of data LB(M)S needs and lacks.

One deck, two audiences. Even in the same industry, albeit the vague and nebulously fuzzy grouping that we call the location industry, two very different audiences can give two very different reactions. One day, reaction will probably be the same, but today, geo and location really is a very broad church indeed.

W3G 2011; Musings On A Geo Unconference

2011-10-05 11:32

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.

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.

Benefitting from a purpose built conference centre with great in-house catering, great sized conference rooms with massive projection screens, industrial sized quantities of coffee and working wifi, W3G 2011 was a very different beast from 2010's. Except for the bit about the working wifi as half of the time it didn't. Work, that is.

Some things remained the same. A couple of invited guest speakers to kick the morning and afternoon sessions off. The unconference wall, which fellow organiser Rollo Home and myself fretted over filling with sessions but which miraculously was filled with offers of talks before the morning coffee break was over. The inevitable geobeers and geocurry to wrap the day's proceedings up. The aforementioned conference wifi dropping out on a regular basis. The irreverent session titles, which always turned out to be fascinating when you listened to them; "Dinosaurs, Concorde & the Wedge of Geo" anyone?

But some things were different. Firstly the venue. Despite the inevitable wifi issues W3G was for the first time in a purpose built conference venue rather than in a hotel than happened to host conferences and events and the EMCC was a big hit with everyone. Also the ties with the AGI were made much clearer this year with W3G featuring on the reverse of the GeoCommunity swag bag and also meriting a double page spread on the printed GeoCommunity proceedings. It also didn't go unnoticed that a far greater proportion of the W3G audience were spotted at GeoCommunity the following two days. This is no bad thing and merely reaffirms the desire of the W3G organisers to use W3G as a channel into the wider scope of GeoCommunity and to increase awareness of the existence of and relevance that the AGI has to offer.

The second difference was, to put it bluntly, the number of attendees. I'm lucky enough to attend a lot of conferences and across the board numbers are down and sponsors are harder to attract. This year's W3G was no exception to the general trend but despite this there was an upside; the level of interaction, engagement and closeness between speakers, both invited and unconference and audience were simply unprecedented in my somewhat chequered conference experience. But this didn't only happen in the sessions themselves, this spilled over into between-session coffee breaks, across lunch and into the obligatory geobeers and geocurry.

The third difference was the strap line for the event. Last year we used the 3 W's of Geo as a theme and, for a first conference, it worked well. This year we used Because There's More To Geo Than Just Maps And Checkins as a theme and it worked, but only halfway. Checkins were pretty much nowhere to be seen other than the inevitable fight over the Mayorship of the conference and the venue on Foursquare. Maps on the other hand were pretty much everywhere, from Steven Feldman's abridged History of Web Mapping talk (run, don't walk over to SlideShare to see the whole slide deck) through to all of the other unconference sessions. Despite the much predicted death of the map, the map, it would seem, is very much alive, well and positively thriving.

So will W3G be back next year? All the signs are that it will be. Will it be bigger and better than W3G 2011? Only time and the economy will tell if it will be bigger but after this year's event I think it's safe to say it will be better, thanks to the time, effort and overall geo enthusiasm that everyone put into the event.

Communicating To The Communicators (At The CIPR Social Media Conference)

2011-04-14 14:51

CIPR Social Media Conference 2011, allegedly talking about something called The Smartphone Web, to just such a room full of seasoned communicators.

Regular readers of this blog will be aware of my comfort zones when it comes to speaking at conferences. If there's maps, geography or location involved, however tenuous the connection, I'm well within my comfort zone. But speaking to a room full of seasoned communicators, such as Public Relations professionals? That's way outside of my comfort zone.

Nonetheless, on Monday of this week I found myself at the Chartered Institute of Public Relations, in London's Russell Square, at the CIPR Social Media Conference 2011, allegedly talking about something called The Smartphone Web, to just such a room full of seasoned communicators.

I say allegedly talking about The Smartphone Web, as that was the theme and title that the conference organizers asked me to opine on. But as is so often the case, when I sat down to start to write the talk, it morphed into something slightly different.

There's been a meteoric proliferation in social media over the last few years, driven not only by increased awareness and availability of social networks but also by the increasing use of smartphones and the sensors that these devices have built into them. Whereas before, social networking was chiefly about sharing thoughts, comments, views and links, social networking now also allows the sharing of photos and videos, the sharing of location and checking-in to locations. You'll note that I cunningly managed to work location in there, thus retreating ever so slightly to my comfort zone. And so it was that what started out as The Smartphone Web, ended up as The (Geo) (Mobile) (Smart) Social Web.

After a brief introduction and displaying my own set of social media credentials, I looked at the history of social media, of smartphones, of the sensors within these devices and of the convergence of all of these factors into the social media experience we now know and use on a daily basis.

As so many times in the past, writing this talk was an education in itself, and my initial assumptions that social networking and media was a relatively recent, post Web 2.0 bubble, phenomenon, were quickly disabused as I traced the forebears of today's social web as far back as the late 1960's when CompuServe was founded.

I also touched on some of the side effects of today's social web; how social media accounts have become the single-sign-on for lots of online services, bypassing contenders such as OpenID and how you can build web presences entirely from existing social media content with a few simple lines of PHP code. How social media acts not only as a social broadcast medium but also a social conversation medium. How our own social media interactions can form a valuable aide memoire (where was that bar we went to two weeks ago?) and provide insights into our own lives.

I finished the talk with a brief look to the future; how the next billion people getting online are predicted to do so via a phone and not via a laptop or desktop computer and how social media has drawn attention to some of recent time's tumultuous events, such as recent natural disasters and events in the Middle East.

Due to pressures of work I wasn't able to attend the entirety of the one day conference but was lucky enough to arrive in time to see Euan Semple give a fascinating (and at times highly amusing) talk on What Wikileaks Has Taught Us About The Web. I've always liked reading Euan's Twitter stream and to finally meet a social media contact face-to-face was a great way of rounding the day off.

Photo Credits: Lily Monster on Flickr.

Risking Location Predictions at Mashup*'s Digital Trends 2011

2011-02-03 17:16

Dan Howe, Steve Kennedy, Laurence John, Andrew Gerrard and James Poulter I threw caution to the wind and came up with how I see location panning out over the forthcoming 12 months.

Making predictions is not an easy thing. There are very few opportunities to get predictions right and a myriad of ways to get them wrong. At least if you make predictions in private then you're able to keep the horrible realisation of just how wrong you were to yourself. But making predictions in public just increases the scope for public humiliation.

Bearing this in mind, it was with a not insignificant amount of trepidation that I set out to predict some location trends for 2011. The mashup* team had asked me to talk and be part of a panel on Digital Trends and there was really no way I could extricate myself from some public location prognostications. So along with Dan Howe, Steve Kennedy, Laurence John, Andrew Gerrard and James Poulter I threw caution to the wind and came up with how I see location panning out over the forthcoming 12 months.

Trend the first is that privacy will matter. Privacy is one of those things that no one really thinks about, until it's too late. Most users of location based services either don't know or don't care about what the information they're giving up is being used for. This is the current state of affairs and will continue until something happens. What that something will be is impossible to predict, but when it happens, it will end up being reported and sensationalised by the mass media. Far better if we as an industry make location privacy simple to understand and easy to control.

Trend the second is sensor convergence. Look how much gadgetry is crammed into today's smartphones and in more and more feature phones. But A-GPS will only get us so far. Expect to see more sensor technology, such as NFC, appearing in our mobile and nomadic devices to help for those situations where A-GPS just doesn't work.

Trend the third is location is a key feature, not a business. For all the startups and established companies that have jumped on the LBS bandwaggon, only a small handful will survive. Location on its own just isn't enough, you need a solid business model and a way to give your user base what they crave the most ... relevance.

Trend the fourth is a continuation of trend the third, more contextual relevance (and maybe less apps). The cliche of the Internet being an "information hosepipe" is more true today than it ever was; people are looking for ways of finding what they need, where the need it from the morass of data available over a 'net connection. Location is but one of the key technologies that can help increase relevance. This probably means less apps but more useful work being undertaken by those apps.

Trend the fifth is geofencing and would have been seen as incredibly prescient if only Digital Trends 2011 had been 24 hours earlier. I was going to mention geo-fencing and automated check in and check out of Places. But then I woke up the morning of February the 2nd. only to discover that Google had beaten me to it and updated Latitude to do geo-fencing, automated check in and automated check out. Thanks Google!

Digital Trends was the fifth mashup* event I'd been asked to be part of. I like mashup* events, they always have a lively and engaged audience and tend to be beers and networking, followed by short talks and finishing up with a panel discussion. Yesterday's event, hosted at the British Computer Society's headquarters in London's Covent Garden was more of the same, with the odd exception of a distinct lack of anything remotely beer or wine shaped, just lots of tea, coffee, fruit juice and biscuits. Luckily, usual service was resumed after the event with a visit to the Coal Hole on The Strand for a swift pint of London Pride, followed by that staple of any location related event, a visit to the local curry emporium.

There's other coverage of the event courtesy of Eewei Chen, Stewart Townsend, and Dan Howe.

Society of Cartographers Redux

2010-12-08 08:17

Society of Cartographers Summer School in Manchester, UK. It's always great to be invited to speak at a conference but I was particularly excited by the SoC. The geo world I inhabit is one of data, APIs, platforms and data mining and aggregation techniques. Sometimes the map gets lost in all of this. So it was an honour to speak at an event where it was all about the map. The Summer School was written up in November's edition of the SoC Newsletter which is only available to society members, but with permission I've reproduced below the sections of the newsletter which cover my involvement.

To be filed under the "slightly self promoting" department, earlier this year I was invited to speak at the Society of Cartographers Summer School in Manchester, UK. It's always great to be invited to speak at a conference but I was particularly excited by the SoC. The geo world I inhabit is one of data, APIs, platforms and data mining and aggregation techniques. Sometimes the map gets lost in all of this. So it was an honour to speak at an event where it was all about the map. The Summer School was written up in November's edition of the SoC Newsletter which is only available to society members, but with permission I've reproduced below the sections of the newsletter which cover my involvement.

Welcome to the world of the geo data silo: where closed data is open and open data is closed - Gary Gale (Nokia)

Inspired by London Transport maps, various historical maps and his son, Gary has been involved with maps and mapping for many years. His entertaining, informative and well-illustrated lecture took delegates on a short trip along the route taken by location-based communications from smoke signals, pigeons, the compass, maps such as the Mappa Mundi, radio signals and triangulation through to today’s maps as seen in smart phone with GPS-based mobile devices. He then turned his attention to data, silos of data and the “geo-industry” where the map doesn’t seem to be important any more; it’s all about the data and the map is often strangely absent.

Gary then took delegates on another trip, this time into the dark world of ‘Geo-Babel’, where we have data, lots of data, wide and varied, some commercial (Navteq and Teleatlas), some authoritative (Britain’s Ordnance Survey) and some of it crowd- sourced and growing aggressively (OpenStreetMap), some from unlikely sources (Flickr) and some from location-based social networking services (Foursquare and Gowalla). All this data, often available and free, a cartographer’s dream, but wait, Gary explains that there is now a darker side to data. Much of this ‘free’ data appears to be locked in its own private little data silos, ironically at a time when previously proprietary data becomes unlocked and open (Ordnance Survey), crowd-sourced data becomes locked behind a well meaning but restrictive license, the question is posed to delegates, how can we, as part of the geo-industry, dig ourselves out of this hole? Mike Shand

Panel discussion: “All this data is good but what about the cartography?”

The last session of the conference was setup as a panel discussion, with the theme of “All this data is good, but what about the cartography?” In order to start the ball rolling the preceding presentation was by Gary Gale (Nokia/Ovi Maps). His grandly entitled presentation - Welcome to the world of the geo data silo; where closed data is open and open data is closed - certainly resonated with me, particularly “the four horsemen of the geopocalypse”. Gary sat aside to allow his fellow panelists a short rant-space each. Richard Fairhurst concentrated on his vision of carto-goodness. He made an interesting analogy between industrial carto (Google), Boing Boing carto (retro 8-bit games style map) and Artisan carto (cartography with care). For a laugh (I presume!) he proposed a figurehead for web cartography and then flipped up a slide with three figureheads - Jobs, Gates and Chilton. He was followed by Bob Barr with a wider view of maps and quality. I then tried to propose some questions to the panel (eg: you have shown examples of good/bad design - but what are you exactly looking for when you are making those choices?) - and then opened it up for audience participation and questions/comments. We really should have recorded this session as there was a wide- range of points made, few of which I can now recall! You really needed to be there to get the full impact of the panelists’ views and the lively discussion that ensued. Steve Chilton SoC Chair

When I last wrote about my theory of GeoBabel I seem to recall saying I was retiring it. That's still true but seeing as I didn't actually write the newsletter my geoconscience is clear on this point.

Finding Inspiration And Teaching Myself Location History At The BCS Geospatial SG

2010-10-09 12:36

GeoBabel firmly put to rest, I was looking for inspiration when Andrew Larcombe asked me back to the British Computer Society's Geospatial Specialist Group to speak. After a week of drawing a blank, with Andrew sending gentle messages of encouragement via Twitter Direct Message (OI - GALE. TITLE. NOW!!) inspiration finally arrived from a variety of sources. Firstly there was Mashable's History of Location Technology infographic. Then there the brief history of location slides I'd used in a few of my previous talks. There was the rather fine 3D visualisation of geolocation history that Chris Osborne used at W3G and at GeoCom 2010. And then there were two questions that kept cropping up when speaking to people at conferences ... "this location stuff's only recent isn't it?" and "I can't keep up with this geo stuff, it's all moving too fast, where's it going?".

So I started to research this. I knew that location had a long history but I was taken aback to find out just how long that history was. I'd tended to think of the human race using longitude and latitude to work out their location sometime in the 1700's, about the same time as the race to make a working, reliable marine chronometer. It came as a bit of a shock to find out that longitude and latitude were first proposed in 300 BC and were first used to locate a position on the surface of the Earth in 200 BC. Focussing on use of location, on location sharing and on LBS/LBMS and putting GIS to one side I came up with A (Mostly) Complete & (Mostly) Accurate History Of Location (Abridged).

With GeoBabel firmly put to rest, I was looking for inspiration when Andrew Larcombe asked me back to the British Computer Society's Geospatial Specialist Group to speak. After a week of drawing a blank, with Andrew sending gentle messages of encouragement via Twitter Direct Message (OI - GALE. TITLE. NOW!!) inspiration finally arrived from a variety of sources. Firstly there was Mashable's History of Location Technology infographic. Then there the brief history of location slides I'd used in a few of my previous talks. There was the rather fine 3D visualisation of geolocation history that Chris Osborne used at W3G and at GeoCom 2010. And then there were two questions that kept cropping up when speaking to people at conferences ... "this location stuff's only recent isn't it?" and "I can't keep up with this geo stuff, it's all moving too fast, where's it going?".

So I started to research this. I knew that location had a long history but I was taken aback to find out just how long that history was. I'd tended to think of the human race using longitude and latitude to work out their location sometime in the 1700's, about the same time as the race to make a working, reliable marine chronometer. It came as a bit of a shock to find out that longitude and latitude were first proposed in 300 BC and were first used to locate a position on the surface of the Earth in 200 BC. Focussing on use of location, on location sharing and on LBS/LBMS and putting GIS to one side I came up with A (Mostly) Complete & (Mostly) Accurate History Of Location (Abridged).

The first 15 of my slides takes the story of location from 3200 BC, with the first use of celestial navigation to 1960, with the launch of the first navigation satellites. That's not the first GPS satellites, they didn't come along until 1969.

And then things really start to accelerate with the headlong rush to the internet, to smart phones, to PNDs (Personal Navigation Devices), to online maps on phones, to LBMS (Location Based Mobile Services) to attempts to own the "Place space" from Facebook, Foursquare and Gowalla.

I finished my talk with an illustration of how services are frantically adding "check-in" facilties and how the early adoptors in the location sharing and check-in space aren't necessarily the leaders now, some 4 years after they were first launched. 4 years is an awfully long time in technology and an awfully large amount has been launched, been shuttered, succeeded and failed over that time.

Post talk, a lively and pointed Q&A session ensued and I was asked to make some predictions for the location space in the coming year. As I've written about before, predictions are notoriously hard to make and even harder to make them correctly. Having said that, I can't believe that check-ins are the nadir of the location space. The more services that add them, the more time it takes for the end-user to get a relevant experience ... check-in fatigue. The end goal has to be increasing relevance in your online and mobile experience and that has to mean less fragmented apps (more GeoBabel) and more integration of location as a feature and not a business in itself.

Finally, an hour and a half after we'd started, the talk and the Q&A was over; there's only one thing you can really do after that and that's head out into Covent Garden in search of geo-beers and a geo-curry. Which is just what happened.

Talking GeoBabel In Three Cities (And Then Retiring It)

2010-10-08 15:48

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.

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.

But sometimes you can get away with it and so it was with my theme of GeoBabel. Three conferences: the Society of Cartographers Summer School, The Location Business Summit USA, AGI GeoCommunity 2010. Three cities: Manchester, San Jose, Stratford-upon-Avon. Three audiences: cartographers, Silicon Valley geo-location business types, UK GIS business types.

I've written about GeoBabel before; it's the problem the location industry faces as we build more and more data sets which are fundamentally incompatible with each other. This incompatibility arises either due to differing unique geographic identifiers, where Heathrow Airport, for example, is found in each data set, with differing metadata and a different identifier, or due to different licensing schemes which don't allow data to be co-mingled. We now have more geographic data than before but each data set is locked away in its own silo, either intentionally or through misguided attempts to be open.

The slide deck, embedded above, is the one I used in San Jose. The ones for Manchester and for Stratford-upon-Avon are pretty much identical but are on SlideShare as well.

As another way of illustrating the problems of GeoBabel, I came up with what I've termed The Four Horseman Of The Geopocalypse. All very fin de siecle but it seemed to be understood and liked by the audience at each talk.

The first Horseman is not Pestilence but Data Silos. All of the different types of geographic data we have, international and national commercial data, national and crowd sourced open data, specialist and niche data and social network crowd sourced data each live in isolation to each other with the only common denominator being the geo-coordinates each data set's idea of a place has.

The second Horseman is not War but Licensing. Nowadays in the Web 2.0 community we're used to having access to data but we're not willing to pay for it. Licenses vary between closed commercial licenses and open licensing. But even in the open license world there are silos, with well meaning licenses becoming viral and attaching themselves to any derived work.

Which segues neatly to the third Horseman, who's not Famine but Derivation. Each time you create something from data, you're deriving a new work in the eyes of most licenses and that means the derived work often has the original license still attached to it. You do the work, but you don't own the work.

Finally, the fourth Horseman is not Death but Co-Mingling. There is no one single authoritative geographic data set, you need to find the ones which work for you and for your business or use case. That means you need to mingle the data sets and frequently the licenses you have for those data sets explicitly prohibit this.

But now after three outings, it's time to retire GeoBabel, for now at least, just as I retired my Theory Of Stuff earlier this year. That means I had to find a new theme to talk about at my next event, the Geospatial Specialist Group at the British Computer Society. But that's in my next post.

Photo Credits: Nick. J. Webb on Flickr.

W3G – A Chair’s Eye View

2010-10-01 10:00

GeoCommunity, the annual conference of Britain's Association for Geographic Information, took the brave (and in my view totally necessary) step of branching out from their traditional GIS heartland audience (sometimes referred to somewhat disparagingly as paleotards) to take on board the views of the neo-geographers, Web 2.0 and LBMS community (sometimes equally disparagingly called neotards). Mud-slinging labels aside, both geographic communities benefitted from the Geo-Web Track as it was called. I was lucky enough to be asked to participate and the Geo-Web Track was a resounding success, for both the paleo-geography and neo-geography camps.

This year, attempting to build on the success of the Geo-Web Track, I was asked by the AGI to chair a one day conference to run on the day before GeoCommunity 2009. Originally pitched as a true unconference I went for an (un)conference, half way between the joyous informality of an unconference and the formality of an invited speaker conference. So we had both, unconference sessions (all of which were filled with ease) and a set of invited guest speakers and keynotes. Trying to think of a name, I came up with W3G ... the 3 W's of Geo, which had cropped up in a blog post in April of this year. Any resemblance in name between W3G and the W3C is, of course, purely intentional.

Attending any sort of conference is a tiring affair; chairing and organising one is truly exhausting. While most of the thanks on the day and afterwards were directed at me, the real thanks needs to go to my fellow organiser, Rollo Home, with the support of Chris Holcroft and Claire Huppertz, all of whom had their hands more than full with GeoCommunity starting the very next day after W3G.

As chair, I gave the opening introduction, to set the theme and tone of the day and to introduce the unconference element to those unfamiliar with the concept.

So should W3G have existed at all? The GeoWeb Track at GeoCommunity 2009 certainly showed that there was an appetite for the neo-geographic side of the Location Industry, so why not integrate W3G or the GeoWeb Track into the main GeoCommunity again? That's a difficult decision to come to ... whilst there was probably around 30% of the audience of W3G attending GeoCommunity, that still leaves 70% of the audience who were totally new to the AGI. Would they have paid the asking price of a GeoCommunity ticket? Probably not. The neo-geography side of things does tend to thrive on free or low cost events (with the notable exception of O'Reilly's Where 2.0 in Silicon Valley, which is both excellent and eye-wateringly expensive). So for this year at least, W3G served a valuable dual purpose, bringing the AGI to the attention of a community which probably didn't know it even existed and allowing a whole load of latent geographers to meet, talk, learn and network ... as well as consuming vast amounts of coffee, beer and curry. In that order.

We're already talking about repeating the success of W3G next year in some shape or form; something I definitely want to be involved in. But I would like to see the gap between the GIS heartland and the neo-geographers, which still seem to be a long way apart at times, narrowed or even closed. The AGI is eminently poised to help bring these two parts of the community together and GeoCommunity 2011 would be the ideal event to do this, making it a Geo Community in the truest sense of the word. In 2009 I questioned whether GeoCommunity would unite the two polarised worlds of geo ... the answer in 2010 is that we've take a few steps in the right direction, but we're still not there yet. Photo Credits: Paul Clarkel on Flickr.

Last year GeoCommunity, the annual conference of Britain's Association for Geographic Information, took the brave (and in my view totally necessary) step of branching out from their traditional GIS heartland audience (sometimes referred to somewhat disparagingly as paleotards) to take on board the views of the neo-geographers, Web 2.0 and LBMS community (sometimes equally disparagingly called neotards). Mud-slinging labels aside, both geographic communities benefitted from the Geo-Web Track as it was called. I was lucky enough to be asked to participate and the Geo-Web Track was a resounding success, for both the paleo-geography and neo-geography camps.

This year, attempting to build on the success of the Geo-Web Track, I was asked by the AGI to chair a one day conference to run on the day before GeoCommunity 2009. Originally pitched as a true unconference I went for an (un)conference, half way between the joyous informality of an unconference and the formality of an invited speaker conference. So we had both, unconference sessions (all of which were filled with ease) and a set of invited guest speakers and keynotes. Trying to think of a name, I came up with W3G ... the 3 W's of Geo, which had cropped up in a blog post in April of this year. Any resemblance in name between W3G and the W3C is, of course, purely intentional.

Attending any sort of conference is a tiring affair; chairing and organising one is truly exhausting. While most of the thanks on the day and afterwards were directed at me, the real thanks needs to go to my fellow organiser, Rollo Home, with the support of Chris Holcroft and Claire Huppertz, all of whom had their hands more than full with GeoCommunity starting the very next day after W3G.

As chair, I gave the opening introduction, to set the theme and tone of the day and to introduce the unconference element to those unfamiliar with the concept.

So should W3G have existed at all? The GeoWeb Track at GeoCommunity 2009 certainly showed that there was an appetite for the neo-geographic side of the Location Industry, so why not integrate W3G or the GeoWeb Track into the main GeoCommunity again? That's a difficult decision to come to ... whilst there was probably around 30% of the audience of W3G attending GeoCommunity, that still leaves 70% of the audience who were totally new to the AGI. Would they have paid the asking price of a GeoCommunity ticket? Probably not. The neo-geography side of things does tend to thrive on free or low cost events (with the notable exception of O'Reilly's Where 2.0 in Silicon Valley, which is both excellent and eye-wateringly expensive). So for this year at least, W3G served a valuable dual purpose, bringing the AGI to the attention of a community which probably didn't know it even existed and allowing a whole load of latent geographers to meet, talk, learn and network ... as well as consuming vast amounts of coffee, beer and curry. In that order.

We're already talking about repeating the success of W3G next year in some shape or form; something I definitely want to be involved in. But I would like to see the gap between the GIS heartland and the neo-geographers, which still seem to be a long way apart at times, narrowed or even closed. The AGI is eminently poised to help bring these two parts of the community together and GeoCommunity 2011 would be the ideal event to do this, making it a Geo Community in the truest sense of the word. In 2009 I questioned whether GeoCommunity would unite the two polarised worlds of geo ... the answer in 2010 is that we've take a few steps in the right direction, but we're still not there yet. Photo Credits: Paul Clarkel on Flickr.

Cartographically Speaking; Data (Lots), Maps (Not So Much), Problems (Many)

2010-07-30 15:32

Society of Cartographers Summer School at the University of Manchester where I'm lucky enough to have been asked to give a talk on geographic data. This topic should come as no surprise to anyone who's come across one of my blog posts.

I'll be talking about Welcome To The World Of The Geo Data Silo; Where Closed Data Is Open And Open Data Is Closed; the talk abstract is now up on the SoC web site and it's reproduced below.

In September I'll be at the 46th. Annual Society of Cartographers Summer School at the University of Manchester where I'm lucky enough to have been asked to give a talk on geographic data. This topic should come as no surprise to anyone who's come across one of my blog posts.

I'll be talking about Welcome To The World Of The Geo Data Silo; Where Closed Data Is Open And Open Data Is Closed; the talk abstract is now up on the SoC web site and it's reproduced below.

We've been mapping the world around us for centuries, even before the Mappa Mundi first appeared in Hereford Cathedral. But now, as location becomes ubiquitous (if you have a smartphone and you're not in an urban canyon), as the major and minor players coalesce into the nebulous thing we call the "geo industry" and as there's sources of geographic data everywhere, suddenly the map isn't the important thing anymore. Now, it's all about the data.

At this year's Where 2.0 in the heart of Silicon Valley, a veritable geo-fest if ever there was one, the map was strangely absent. Instead we have data, lots of data.

Some of it commercial and authoritative (Navteq and Teleatlas), some of it niche and authoritative (Urban Mapping), some of it country specific and authoritative (Britain's Ordnance Survey) and some of it crowd sourced and growing aggressively (OpenStreetMap). But there's also data from unlikely allies, from geo-tagged photos (Flickr), from location based social networking services (FourSquare and Gowalla) and from forward thinking experimental authorities (Vancouver's Open Data Catalogue).

Data, data everywhere. Some physical, some spatial, some subjective, some colloquial. But all of it locked in its own private little data silo. There's much irony here as well, as previously proprietary data becomes unlocked and open (Ordnance Survey) and open, crowd sourced data become locked behind a well meaning but restrictive license.

You could call this Geo-Babel and we're in the midst of it right now. How can we recognise this and, more importantly, how can we as part of the geo industry dig ourselves out of this hole?

... now I just need to write the talk and the accompanying slide deck in time.

Photo Credits: bionicteaching on Flickr

Geo-Loco; Where The Geo-Wonks Meet The Geo-Clueless And All Points Inbetween

2010-07-29 19:26

Geo-Loco conference, chaired by geo-eminence grise Marc Prioleau.

With the explosion of interest in all things geo recently (and for once I think the hyperbole is justified) and thus a large amount of new conferences on the topic, I was somewhat skeptical of how Geo-Loco would pan out. But the presence of Marc Prioleau and other geo-rati such as LikeList's Tyler Bell, Urban Mapping's Ian White, Tom Coates, the man behind Yahoo's Fire Eagle and Waze's Di-Ann Eisnor, to name but a few, swayed me to participate.

I was interested to hear how Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures would keynote but was sadly disappointed; it was a rambling and somewhat disjointed affair with little structure or insight; the sole exception of which was an interesting technique to quickly mashup your Foursquare check-ins on Google Maps. Thankfully Fred fared much better when interviewed one-on-one later in the day by John Batelle of Federated Media, which produced an engaging discussion on the state of the geo market; some of which I even agreed with.

Last week I was in San Francisco, ostensibly to meet with fellow Nokians in Mountain View and Palo Alto, the homes of Google and Stanford University respectively. But I was also there to take part in a panel on the topic of "is geo loco a business or a feature?" at the Geo-Loco conference, chaired by geo-eminence grise Marc Prioleau.

With the explosion of interest in all things geo recently (and for once I think the hyperbole is justified) and thus a large amount of new conferences on the topic, I was somewhat skeptical of how Geo-Loco would pan out. But the presence of Marc Prioleau and other geo-rati such as LikeList's Tyler Bell, Urban Mapping's Ian White, Tom Coates, the man behind Yahoo's Fire Eagle and Waze's Di-Ann Eisnor, to name but a few, swayed me to participate.

I was interested to hear how Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures would keynote but was sadly disappointed; it was a rambling and somewhat disjointed affair with little structure or insight; the sole exception of which was an interesting technique to quickly mashup your Foursquare check-ins on Google Maps. Thankfully Fred fared much better when interviewed one-on-one later in the day by John Batelle of Federated Media, which produced an engaging discussion on the state of the geo market; some of which I even agreed with.

Proof that Geo-Loco was a fully fledged geoconference was evident in the Twitter back channel which was, by turns, witty, informed, damning, sarcastic, enlightening and downright funny. I may have contributed to this part of the proceedings. A bit. Here's a brief sampler of some of the comments the speakers and panels contributed to, albeit inadvertently.

"check-ins are the new currency". I have yet to buy a beer with an of my 1744 check-ins. More geo-hyperbole sadly. #geoloco
Have decided this conference is "Geo-Loco, where the Geo-Wonks meet the Geo-Clueless and all points inbetween" #geoloco
this conference should be renamed as "We all invested in @Gowalla but let's talk about @Foursquare Instead" #geoloco
"We live in a world of fomophobia ... fear of missing out" #geoloco
"Is there a problem if I call in sick and then check in somewhere else?" ... oh yes, it's called stupidity #geoloco

One of the braver panels was chaired by Phil Hendrix of IMMR who asked the audience and a panel consisting of the Institute for the Future's Michael Liebhold, GigaOm's Liz Gannes, the aforementioned Di-Ann Eisnor, Rackspace's Robert Scoble and Google's Lior Ron (who I'm not sure uttered a single word during the entire panel) to pontificate on the futures of location based services.

Now, making predictions of any sort is a risky business at best, even more so when those predictions are on an industry moving as rapidly as geo, a fact I noted last month in an article for Coordinates Magazine ...

Attempts to predict the growth, success and uptake of technology are rife. Accurate predictions, less so. “There’s no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home“, said Ken Olsen, then founder and CEO of DEC in 1977. “I think there is a world market for maybe 5 computers” is apocryphally attributed to Thomas Watson of IBM in 1943.

... but the panel gamely attempted to agree, disagree or abstain on 5 statements. Geo-data will be free, with OpenStreetMap and other crowd-driven open-source data eclipsing commercial vendors.

Oh dear. Not this one again. Quite correctly the panel were split on this. Whilst I'm a big fan and supported of OpenStreetMap, this will not sweep all pretenders to the throne to one side and reign supreme. There is no one sole authoritative source of geographical data in the world for very good reasons; differences in use, in scope, in language support, in coverage, in acquisition methods; the list goes on and on. Even with the success of OSM, I'd still feel safer if the emergency services route their vehicles to where they're needed by using official national geo data. It's also worth noting that whilst people don't seem to want to pay for geographic data any more, both Navteq and Teleatlas were acquired by Nokia and TomTom respectively precisely because of the value inherent in their authoritative views of the world, albeit one tempered by the Personal Navigation Device view of the world. Location-awareness will be integral to any mobile app.

There was pretty much widespread agreement from the panel on this one. My take, whilst in general agreement, is tempered with the fact that we don't all live in the Silicon Valley bubble, where there's 3G coverage everywhere and everyone has a smartphone capable of location awareness. Will location be integral to smartphone apps? Undoubtedly. Will location be integral to all forms of app running on any nomadic device, be it tablet, laptop, phone or otherwise? Only if there's an infrastructure to support it already in place, which gives the developing nations a disadvantage. More than half of all mobile advertising in 2014 will be location based.

Not much agreement on this point from the panel and I'm in accord with them; advertising is notoriously difficult to predict at the best of times and to put a 50% figure on all mobile ads being location based in 4 years time should be viewed with extreme cynicism. Virtually all user-generated content will be geo-tagged.

The panel were enthusiastically with this point and I'm also with them. But again, not everywhere in the world has the networking infrastructure to support geo-tagging so this statement needed to be viewed with cautious agreement. We're also long overdue a highly publicised event which brings the topic of location privacy to the general public's attention; the result of which may cause a significant turn off of location services. When, and not if, that happens, the prediction for location based advertising looks on even shakier ground than it is right now. Proximity will become a critical filter for content.

Well yes, duuh, but isn't this already happening? Either through our own efforts to obtain relevancy, through constraining search queries to locations or through localised services. The question should really be "automatic, meaningful, proximity will become a key context for content" as there's no relevancy obtained by automatically constraining results to a local area when what you're really looking for is information on your next vacation destination. Photo Credits: Ken Yeung on Flickr. Written at the London Heathrow BA Lounge (51.47286, -0.48726) and posted from the Radisson Blu hotel, Berlin (52.519648, 13.40258)

Retiring The Theory of Stuff; But First, A Corollary

2010-05-04 16:52

Theory of Stuff out to pasture. It's had a good life. It's appeared in 5 of my talk decks (or so Spotlight tells me), in 3 of my blog posts and continues to generate hits on my blog (or so my analytics tells me).

When I tell people I'm going to talk about my theory, a Mexican wave of shoulder slumping passes through the room, coupled with a prolonged sigh from an audience who've just resigned themselves to a slow painful death over the coming minutes. Luckily things perk up when my introductory slide of Anne Elk (Miss) and her Theory appears but even so, it's time to quit whilst you're ahead.

But before I do ...

It's time to put the Theory of Stuff out to pasture. It's had a good life. It's appeared in 5 of my talk decks (or so Spotlight tells me), in 3 of my blog posts and continues to generate hits on my blog (or so my analytics tells me).

When I tell people I'm going to talk about my theory, a Mexican wave of shoulder slumping passes through the room, coupled with a prolonged sigh from an audience who've just resigned themselves to a slow painful death over the coming minutes. Luckily things perk up when my introductory slide of Anne Elk (Miss) and her Theory appears but even so, it's time to quit whilst you're ahead.

But before I do ...

One of the great thing's about O'Reilly's Where 2.0 conference is the vast number of people you meet who just fizz with ideas and intelligence in this somewhat nebulous space that we call location, place or geo. One such person is Sally Applin; she owns the domain sally.com so that's got her off to a good start. After Where 2.0 she pointed me to her own theory that voyeurism and narcissism sell software.

People like to look at themselves and at other people. If they can do it at the same time–then the application will succeed! Look at Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, MySpace, Skype–basically any software that allows for both looking at others and self viewing, self reading, self posting etc…will sell. We’re on the chimp ladder. We like to compare ourselves and compete.

If you generalise software out to the slightly more generic terms ofservice or product; you'll see that Sally's theory complements the Theory of Stuff quite nicely and even provides an exemplar of those businesses and ventures that prove the theory.

This is especially interesting when you look at the success (to date at least) of ventures in the social space, such as Facebook, Twitter and Foursquare. What else are these is not an online way of saying "look at me, here I am, this is what I'm doing" and in doing so generating a vast sea of highly localised and personalised data into the bargain? Photo Credits: wili_hybrid on Flickr.

The Letter W and Hype (or Local) at the Location Business Summit

2010-04-29 12:06

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.

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.

My scepticism was echoed by several members of the audience, notably James Thornett from the BBC who blogged about it and with whom I shared a panel on the nebulous concept that is the geoweb today.

But what really seemed to catch the audience's imagination was my twin memes of Geobabel and the Three W's of Geo ... the where, the when and the what.

The where is what we've been doing for centuries; mapping the globe. Whilst it's a sweeping generalisation, we've pretty much done this, albeit to a varying degree of accuracy, coverage and granularity. We've mapped the globe, now it's time to do something with all of this data.

The when is the gnarly problem of temporality, which just won't go away. Places and geography change over time; how we map a place today doesn't show how the place was 100 years ago and neither can we expect the geography of a place to be static 100 years hence. As we update our geographic data sets and throw away the old, supposedly obsolete, historical versions, we're throwing away a rich set of temporality in the process.

Then finally there's the what; a reference to a place in intrinsically bound to it's granularity. References to London from outside of the United Kingdom are frequently aimed at the non specific London bounded by the M25 orbital motorway. Zoom in and London becomes Greater London, and then the London Boroughs and finally the City of London and neighbouring City of Westminster.

The strong reaction to these twin memes makes me think that we'll be seeing these topics continue to raise their heads until we're able to find work arounds or solutions. Photo Credits: Nad on Flickr.

The 3 W's of Geo (and hyperlocal deities and a pachyderm)

2010-04-16 17:53

Jeremy Morley from the Centre for Geospatial Research at the University of Nottingham and Muki Haklay at University College London got in touch with me. The GIS Research UK Conference was in full swing, and OpenStreetMap founder Steve Coast had had to drop out of the conference due to ill health; would I think about stepping in for the closing keynote of the conference?

Hedging my bets and guessing that few, if any, of the audience had been in San Jose at Where 2.0 a couple of weeks back, I gladly accepted and reshuffled, added to and polished my Where 2.0 deck to yield Hyperlocal Deities, Pachyderms, the Letter W, the Number 3 (and some Geo).

Earlier this week, Jeremy Morley from the Centre for Geospatial Research at the University of Nottingham and Muki Haklay at University College London got in touch with me. The GIS Research UK Conference was in full swing, and OpenStreetMap founder Steve Coast had had to drop out of the conference due to ill health; would I think about stepping in for the closing keynote of the conference?

Hedging my bets and guessing that few, if any, of the audience had been in San Jose at Where 2.0 a couple of weeks back, I gladly accepted and reshuffled, added to and polished my Where 2.0 deck to yield Hyperlocal Deities, Pachyderms, the Letter W, the Number 3 (and some Geo).

The majority of the deck should be relatively self explanatory but I think it's worth calling out what I've labelled the three W's of geo ... where, when and what.

The where is what we've been doing for centuries; mapping the globe. Whilst it's a sweeping generalisation, we've pretty much done this, albeit to a varying degree of accuracy, coverage and granularity. We've mapped the globe, now it's time to do something with all of this data.

The when is the gnarly problem of temporality, which just won't go away. This shows up in two ways. Firstly there's the fact that places and geography change over time; how we map a place today doesn't show how the place was 100 years ago and neither can we expect the geography of a place to be static 100 years hence. Secondly there's the problem of places which only exist at certain times of the year. Take Burning Man and Glastonbury; for most of the year these places are a salt flat in a desert and a farmer's field but at a certain time they become places in their own right.

Then finally there's the what and again, this manifests in two ways. Firstly we need to recognise that places aren't only spelt differently but they're said differently and "New Orleans" and "Noorlans" are one and the same place. Secondly a reference to a place in intrinsically bound to it's granularity. References to London from outside of the United Kingdom are frequently aimed at the non specific London bounded by the M25 orbital motorway. Zoom in and London becomes Greater London, and then the London Boroughs.

We're so close to completing the where of geo, we've only just touched on the when and the what remains uncharted territory. And that last pun was fully intentional. Photo Credits: The Norman. B. Leventhal Map Center, wokka and Thurrock Phil on Flickr.

Where 2.0 - Hype (or Local?)

2010-04-03 10:40

Ubiquitous location, the new frontier and hyperlocal nirvana" was missing a very significant question mark.

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.

The audience seemed a trifle bemused when I told them that the talk was brought to them "by the number three and the word local (hyper and micro)", but when I mentioned that it included "a theory" a Mexican wave of shoulder slumping swept the (packed) room, followed in short succession by a long sigh.

I couldn't blame them.

Luckily attention perked up when I mentioned that it was my Theory of Stuff (Stuff? Stuff? Huh?) and illustrated this point with a scene from the classic Monty Python Anne Elk (Miss) and her Theory sketch.

So, to the talk. Just as "the wonderful thing about standards is that there are so many of them to choose them" (apocryphally attributed to Grace Hopper), the wonderful thing about hyperlocality is that it has so many definitions, but a summation of these seem to agree on: 1. entities and events located in a well defined, community area 2. intended for consumption by residents of or visitors to that area 3. created by a resident of or visitor to that area

That's three elements and continuing the number three, hyperlocality needs to overcome three matching hurdles, three geo hurdles and three location hurdles 1. the ability to have scannable, parseable content 2. the ability to join users to the content 3. the ability to determine what is local and what isn't in that content

the ability to scan and parse content for geographic references
the ability to determine where a user is located
the ability to determine what is local to a user and what isn't relative to the user
the ability to use IP location
the ability to use GPS
the ability to use A-GPS

(the third one there is an artifact of the need to make the "number three meme" work and I throw my hands up in surrender for that piece of artifice. Mea culpa)

While we're on the subject of the "number three meme" there's also three genera of hyperlocality 1. "classic" hyperlocal; taking, refining and creating local news (~~outside.in~~, Patch) 2. "corporate" hyperlocal; where a corporation removes their brand to fit in with the local community (Starbucks and the 15th Avenue Coffee and Tea in NYC) 3. "user" hyperlocal; creating and delivering localised content and information based on checking in (Foursquare, Gowalla, Rummble, etc)

The meme continues with the level of granularity at which hyperlocal services operate: 1. "local", at county level (Washington Post / Loudon) 2. "hyperlocal", at city of neighbourhood level (Placeblogger) 3. "microlocal", at block level (Everyblock)

So far, so (hyper)local. There's good exemplars of all of the above, in operation, right now. But there's also several elephants in the room, looming large and waving their trunks for attention.

Is location that ubiquitous? We all say it is but where's the proof? So 21% of mobile handsets are classed as smartphones (though not all of those have location capabilities), what about the remaining 79%. That's not that ubiquitous is it?

Then there's the issues of location and privacy; when location enablers such as Yahoo's Fire Eagle and Google's Latitude were launched we had lots of hand waving, foot stamping and Big Brother references from privacy activists, some of which was warranted, some of which were just pleas for publicity.

Most matching of users and content and ad inventory is dependent on technologies which derive location from an IP address. That's simply not good enough for hyperlocal coverage where the difference between an IP location and a GPS location can be over 10 miles; that's not even local let alone hyper or micro local.

User hyperlocal isn't without problems either. Gowalla won't let you check in unless your GPS lock agrees with the location of a place, eliciting cries of "but I'm here dammit". Yelp has ... issues on how it undertakes hyperlocal. Foursquare allows you to become Mayor of The North Pole from the confort of your own sofa and Fake Mayor on the iPhone bypasses Foursquare altogether.

So the outlook for hyperlocal is all hype then, obviously?

Well not quite. The number of location capable smartphones will continue to grow with 5 million mobile handsets predicted by 2011. Foursquare is growing at a phenomenal rate hitting the 1 check in per second mark recently. 33% of us now read and consume news from a mobile handset and we seem to be quite happy with displaying our location history via check ins, a far cry from the location hysteria of 2 years ago.

This year at Where 2.0 the view of the geo-scape was significantly different from the previous year; I don't doubt that will be the same for Where 2.0 in 2011. See you all there.

Written at Where 2.0 2010 in the San Jose Marriott (37.330323, -121.888363) and posted from home (51.427051, -0.333344)

Geo on the Horizon at Horizon Geo

2010-03-21 20:46

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.

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.

The day was split into three thematic tracks:

The Location Challenge
- What are the challenges specific to the capture and management of location data?
- What is the state-of-the-art in the technologies available to store, query and present location data?
- How do we understand location in context, especially in real-time, on the move?
Whose Data Is It Anyway?
- What data should be considered “personal”?
- Should I “own” data about me, such as where I am, my home electricity usage, my bank transactions?
- How can users be enabled and encouraged to manage this data?
- What technologies are available to do this?
- How, when and by whom should “personal” data be exploited?
- What checks and balances should be in place to protect all stakeholders, including both citizens and service innovators?
Can Crowds Be Authoritative?
- Crowd sourcing is a powerful technique for data collection enabled by modern handheld devices, but how far can user-contributed data be trusted?
- What are the processes required in order to meld crowd-sourced data with existing, authoritative, datasets?
- What are the legal implications of generating, combining and using such user-generated datasets?
- For example, what environmental details could citizen sensors collect?
- How might this change our understanding of the live state of the world?

The location challenge session was a basic introduction to geo and to location, just to get everyone on the same page. A small wry cheer from myself and Ed was caused by the mention of slippy maps after half an hour of pure GIS but the session was also notable for reminding us that GPS isn't just the domain of the US NAVSTAR system, though it's the one we're most familiar with and which is considered pretty much synonymous with GPS (the Wikipedia entry for GPS redirects to the NAVSTAR entry). But there's also the Russian GLONASS, the Chinese COMPASS and the European Galileo systems chafing at the heels of NAVSTAR and threatening it's hegemony. We also touched on the accuracy of satellite navigation systems, ranging from the fictitious, with Dan Brown asserting that "(GPS) is accurate within 2 feet anywhere in the world", even when in the toilet in the Louvre, to the technically feasible, with accuracy of 1 cm being touted as possible. Though no one in the room was able to articulate precisely what use 1 cm GPS accuracy would be.

The low point of the session was a rambling and tedious sales pitch from Oracle which can be summarised concisely as "there's an explosion of (geographic) data coming, you need to buy our (highly priced) servers in order to cope with it". It's a shame no-one's told Flickr about the need for Oracle servers as they've been making MySQL and commodity Linux servers cope with an explosion of data for a while now.

The high point of the session was a (rather hip looking) Doctor who's name escaped me who'd managed to do something that eludes many commercial concerns. They'd managed to put together a prototype, intelligent car pooling and routing service, complete with web, mobile and SMS interfaces, together in just a few weeks. Oh and it worked as well; this was not only deeply impressive but illustrated the positive social and community facet of this thing we call location.

An an erstwhile privacy nerd, the session on whose data is it anyway? was fascinating, defining and categorising a whole range of what can be considered personal data: * access data (name, address, phone number) * direct data (photos) * intrinsic data (fingerprint, genome) * state data (location, activities) * transactional data (finance, journeys, purchases) * interaction data (things I say and do) * indirect observation data (energy usage) * things I create data (emails, texts, documents, photos) * things I'm given data (emails, texts, documents, photos) * things I've seen data (documents, tweets, locations)

With all of this data being out there, in a variety of data sinks, both personal, governmental and commercial, the concept of a distributed, durable, scalable and trusted personal data store was floated as a theoretical solution; much emphasis should be placed on the word theoretical by the way. A worthy theoretical concept, the notion of if you need to know about me, ask my PDS, is alas one that the majority of the audience who hail from a commercial background, view as interesting but flawed and not viable in the real world.

The high point of the session was a recommendation to read Paul Ohm's Broken Promises of Privacy; the low point the need to Lynne Truss to visit the room unannounced to pounce on the person who thought that "Who's Data is it Anyway?" was acceptable for a title slide.

The final can clouds be authoritative session started aptly withe a quote from Wikipedia and paired Muki Haklay from University College London against Glen Hart from the Ordnance Survey. Whilst the pairing may have been unintentional, following a strong proponent of the crowd sourced OpenStreetMap with a pointed, if tongue in cheek, talk from the OS made comparisons difficult to avoid. Stephen Feldman's write up of the day has more insight on this final session and is well worth a read.

Acronym of the day goes to BHP, which left the audience looking perplexed until it was revealed as a Bloody Hard Problem. Days like this are essential to draw academia away from a pure research perspective and to get representatives of commercial organisations and academia talking on common ground ... that in itself is a BHP which Horizon goes a long way towards solving. Photo Credits: basiijonez, ians and Martin Whitmore on Flickr.

WhereCamp EU - The Geo Unconference Experience for 180 People

2010-03-16 12:02

Entering the longitude and latitude above into one of the many online mapping sites on the web will show you the St. Pancras branch of wallacespace, close to London's Euston and Kings Cross St. Pancras rail termini and seems a fitting and apt way to write a blog post about WhereCamp EU, the first geo unconference to be held in the United Kingdom and in Europe.

51° 31' 36.8364" N, 0° 7' 44.0466" W

Entering the longitude and latitude above into one of the many online mapping sites on the web will show you the St. Pancras branch of wallacespace, close to London's Euston and Kings Cross St. Pancras rail termini and seems a fitting and apt way to write a blog post about WhereCamp EU, the first geo unconference to be held in the United Kingdom and in Europe.

WhereCamp is traditionally held in California's Silicon Valley after the Where 2.0 conference and is based on the BarCamp unconference ethic to be a counterpoint to the expensive and corporate outlook of Where 2.0. Last year, both myself and Chris Osborne were at both Where 2.0 and WhereCamp and both came up with the idea of "wouldn't it be great to bring WhereCamp to Europe?"

Just under a year of planning, organising and wheedling cash out of sponsors, Chris and myself, with the support of the rest of the organising team, welcomed 180 people to Europe's first WhereCamp.

I was both proud and privileged to kick start things off with an introduction to how WhereCamp EU came to be, explaining to the slightly bemused but thoroughly enthusiastic audience just what an unconference is and how it all worked.

I'd decided that a good way to introduce the event would be to define where, unconference and WhereCamp EU: * where - the question asked by people when they try and work out how much it will cost to get to Where 2.0 and WhereCamp in Silicon Valley. * unconference - a conference without all the things you hate about conferences, such as massive corporate involvement, sales pitches and formality * WhereCamp EU - a two day, free unconference about all things geo, place and location

I then handed over to Chris who totally upstaged me with a gorgeous visualisation of how OpenStreetMap mapped Central London, courtesy of his day job with ITO.

The key to WhereCamp EU, just like any other unconference is "the wall", which is where the days of the conference are marked off in half an hour slots. An unconference is a user or participant driven conference; if you want to see what's going on, you check out the wall, if you want to participate, you grab a PostIt note, write your name and the talk title down, find a free slot on the wall and make sure you turn up on time. Participation is usually a brief talk followed by a, sometimes passionate, Q&A session, but it can also be an open forum discussion, a demonstration or some good old fashioned hacking.

Unconferences are common in the US, where the concept originated, but less so in Europe, so the organising team made sure that we seeded the wall with initial talks to get things started and to show people how it worked. Our initial fears that the wall would remain empty were quickly quashed as a sea of yellow PostIts took over the wall, fuelled by a melee of talk proposers, anxious to get their talk into a free slot, and participants who wanted to see what the next session was all about.

My initial talk in the main room was on Location, LB(M)S, Hype, Stealth and Stuff and provided a series initial thinking points around the LBMS hype, around gathering stealth data and on how my Theory of Stuff validates the success and failure of location based ventures.

Yet again I was upstaged by the (err) creative and passionate talk titles which appeared on the wall.

After a totally exhausting day we retired to a local bar for geo-beers, courtesy of one of our sponsors, and to review the day. I wasn't able to make the second day of the unconference due to family commitments but my sources tell me it was an equal success.

High points for me were standing in front of a room full of people at the kick off session, a lot of whom had travelled a significant distance to be there; watching the ladies toilets being used furtively by the men; seeing the youngest participant in a conference I've even seen (3 months) and watching Hal Bertram from ITO produce jaw droppingly gorgeous data visualisations.

Out of all the things I've done in the geo industry, being involved with putting WhereCamp EU together has got to be a personal and professional high. It would be good to do it all over again next year wouldn't it ... ?

Deep In The Twitter (Developers) Nest

2010-03-15 16:27

WhereCamp EU, there was the London Twitter Developer’s DevNest.

Angus Fox, one of the organisers of the DevNest, had first got in touch with me last year after the launch of the Yahoo! Placemaker web platform that allows recognition of place references in unstructured text. Placemaker plus Twitter status feeds seemed an ideal candidate for a mashup and Angus was keen to get me to talk to his hard-core Twitter and social media literate developer audience.

The last week has been crammed with planning for and finally realising the first WhereCamp unconference to be held in Europe. More of that later but before WhereCamp EU, there was the London Twitter Developer’s DevNest.

Angus Fox, one of the organisers of the DevNest, had first got in touch with me last year after the launch of the Yahoo! Placemaker web platform that allows recognition of place references in unstructured text. Placemaker plus Twitter status feeds seemed an ideal candidate for a mashup and Angus was keen to get me to talk to his hard-core Twitter and social media literate developer audience.

Then in November 2009 Twitter announced their use of WOEIDs, the language neutral geographic identifiers that underpin Placemaker and the other Yahoo! Geo Technologies platforms, in their new Trends API. Naturally all of the Geo group at Yahoo! were excited, verging on ecstatic, at this. But getting our respective schedules in synch with each other wasn’t the easiest of things and 2009 came to a close without getting a firm date in the diary.

2010 arrived and Twitter launched their Trends API and exposed WOEIDs to the world and Angus got in touch again and we both put the seventh DevNest in our respective schedules.

Come the evening of Wednesday March 10th and I made my way to the Sun Microsystem's Customer Briefing Center, just north of London Bridge where I was joined by Ewan MacLeod, the straight talking and highly entertaining and informing editor of Mobile Industry Review, Paul Kinlan, Developer Programmes Engineer at Google and a plentiful supply of beer and pizza.

Ewan went first and you knew he was tapping into a rich vein of mobile geekery when a slide of his tee shirt drew such loud chuckles and guffaws from the audience, myself included.

Ewan's deck is on SlideShare.net here and it speaks for itself even without an accompanying video; I strongly urge you to browse through his deck for some fascinating stats on mobile phone usage, breakdown and penetration and for the low down on exactly how much impact the iPhone is, and more importantly, isn't making.

I was up next and gave a talk on (Almost) Everything You Ever Wanted To Know About Geo (with WOEIDs), which attempted to give this tech savvy audience a background on what geocoding, reverse geocoding and geoparsing are, why this isn't a trivial task, what WOEIDs are and why they're important for geo and for deriving meaning from content, such as Twitter status updates.

My deck accompanying the talk is above and there's also a (slightly shakey) video to accompany it as well.

Closing the talks was Google's Paul Kinlan who gave us the low down on Google's Buzz and showed that the adage of never work with children, animals and live demos still has life it in.

Accompanied throughout by beer and pizza courtesy of the event's sponsors, the Twitter DevNest was thoroughly enjoyable, a bit of a revelation in places and showed that Twitter has a deep and very enthusiastic developer following.

Mashup, Location and London

2010-02-26 14:31

LBi in the old Truman Brewery on London's Brick Lane for Mashup's Location ... It's Moving On. I've spoken at a Mashup event once or twice before but this time the organising team threw caution to the wind and asked me to chair the panel discussion.

Prior to kicking the panel discussion off, I attempted to gently suggest some topics to my fellow panelists that we might want to discuss.

We started off with a quick review of my Theory of Stuff and how it applies to deriving value from location and location data and briefly visited Gartner's hype curve which puts location based services on the so called Plateau of Productivity. This is a good thing apparently. I then presented the panel with a series of "yes, but" style trade offs to mull over. * Smartphones vs. other phones; 21% of phones expected to have GPS by EOY 2009, but what about the other 79% without? * LBS and LBMS vs. other (older) location systems (APIs and so on); LBS and LBS apps get all the publicity but what about key location APIs, platforms and services? * "where's my friends" vs. creating value and creating data; "where's my friends" doesn't work as a (sole) business proposition but creating value added data does -- FourSquare and Gowalla are creating geotagged local business listings from check ins. * "where's my business" vs. location based advertising; Tesco and Starbucks are the latest companies to launch apps to drive customers to their premises, but what's needed to drive location based ads? * "where I think you are" vs. "where I say I am"; For a user, being able to be their own source of truth is imperative, but how can you reconcile this with your business needs? * "where you are" vs. "where you've been"; (AKA tracking vs. privacy) How to walk the fine line between providing enhanced relevance via a user's location and being accused of tracking them.

Last night I was at LBi in the old Truman Brewery on London's Brick Lane for Mashup's Location ... It's Moving On. I've spoken at a Mashup event once or twice before but this time the organising team threw caution to the wind and asked me to chair the panel discussion.

Prior to kicking the panel discussion off, I attempted to gently suggest some topics to my fellow panelists that we might want to discuss.

We started off with a quick review of my Theory of Stuff and how it applies to deriving value from location and location data and briefly visited Gartner's hype curve which puts location based services on the so called Plateau of Productivity. This is a good thing apparently. I then presented the panel with a series of "yes, but" style trade offs to mull over. * Smartphones vs. other phones; 21% of phones expected to have GPS by EOY 2009, but what about the other 79% without? * LBS and LBMS vs. other (older) location systems (APIs and so on); LBS and LBS apps get all the publicity but what about key location APIs, platforms and services? * "where's my friends" vs. creating value and creating data; "where's my friends" doesn't work as a (sole) business proposition but creating value added data does -- FourSquare and Gowalla are creating geotagged local business listings from check ins. * "where's my business" vs. location based advertising; Tesco and Starbucks are the latest companies to launch apps to drive customers to their premises, but what's needed to drive location based ads? * "where I think you are" vs. "where I say I am"; For a user, being able to be their own source of truth is imperative, but how can you reconcile this with your business needs? * "where you are" vs. "where you've been"; (AKA tracking vs. privacy) How to walk the fine line between providing enhanced relevance via a user's location and being accused of tracking them.

I was then joined by Chris Osborne (#geomob and Ito World), Alex Housely (Rummble), Jon Fisher (Vodafone), David Glennie (MIG) and Alan Patrick (Broadsight) for an hour's worth of lively, animated, opinionated and occasionally profane panel discussion, making the job of ring-mastering all the more challenging and a whole lot of fun at the same time.

The audience chimed in with a variety of questions, some pointed, some speculative and some downright rambling before we retired to the bar and then out to sample one of Brick Lane's finest curry houses; it's a shame we didn't find one of the finest but a decent post event wind down took place anyway in the basement of an establishment which had "Spice" in the name. I think.

All in all, a geotastic evening all round.

Written and posted from the Yahoo! London office (51.5141985, -0.1292006) Update: 1 March 2010

It seems that the topic of the Mashup* event and the buzz of publicity that the team created on social media streams, including Twitter, were sufficient to get my introductory deck onto the Featured Presentations & Documents section of the SlideShare home page.

Updated and posted from the Yahoo! London office (51.5141985, -0.1292006)

What Happens When Geography and Innovation Collide

2010-01-28 22:27

consultation into opening up the Ordnance Survey's United Kingdom mapping and geographic data is out and is no doubt being debated, looked at, discussed, pulled apart and opined on. Whilst every Ordnance Survey employee I've ever spoken to is utterly in favour of this move there's still continued resistance to openness, though the gap between the two extremes of FreeOurData and the UK Government's Cabinet Office is closing and closing fast. Of course, it doesn't help when the Ordnance Survey asserts rights over the crime maps produced by London's Metropolitan Police either.

It's taken a while but the consultation into opening up the Ordnance Survey's United Kingdom mapping and geographic data is out and is no doubt being debated, looked at, discussed, pulled apart and opined on. Whilst every Ordnance Survey employee I've ever spoken to is utterly in favour of this move there's still continued resistance to openness, though the gap between the two extremes of FreeOurData and the UK Government's Cabinet Office is closing and closing fast. Of course, it doesn't help when the Ordnance Survey asserts rights over the crime maps produced by London's Metropolitan Police either.

But baby steps, as my friends in the United States often say. One such step is GeoVation, a Wikiword style merging of geography and innovation. Last year I was approached by the organisers of the GeoVation challenge to be a judge in an endeavour that "allows innovative thinkers and geographic data to come together for social, environmental and economic benefit through the use of geography". It looked like an Ordnance Survey public relations exercise to provide a seed fund to encourage entrepreneurs to use Ordnance Survey data. But the organisers had good credentials, I knew most of them and respected them and so I actually read the small print. Yes, GeoVation was funded and supported by the Ordnance Survey. Yes, the seed fund pot, some £20K, came from the Ordnance Survey. But using Ordnance Survey data was not obligatory, mandatory or even strongly encouraged. I heard the phrases "what about GeoNames" and "what about OpenStreetMap" enough to accept the offer and become a GeoVation judge. Not everyone thought this was a good idea or saw beyond the Ordnance Survey involvement. It wasn't just me either, I was joined by Steve Coast the founder of crowd-source mapping project, OpenStreetMap; James Alexander, CEO of Green Thing, the online service that encourages people to lead greener lives; James Cutler, CEO of eMapSite, the incredibly tall Peter ter Haar from the OS and we were helped by chairperson Steven Feldman. There were a lot of submissions and ideas to look through. 380 people signed up, 170 ideas were submitted and almost 70 ventures were formally proposed to be entered into the award. We had some reading to do. Let's briefly mention the venture submissions for a moment. They varied. Oh how they varied. It's unfortunate to say that a 15 minute video submission, a one page submission which doesn't actually tell you what the venture is and a 20 page submission which still doesn't tell you what the venture is are unlikely to engage the attention of the judges. But in the end we came up with a shortlist of 9 ventures and descended on the Ondaatje Theatre in London's Royal Geographical Society for the final showcase. Each venture had 4 minutes to pitch their idea to the judges, followed by brief questions from the judges and from the audience. It doesn't sound easy and it wasn't, but each pitch put their heart and soul into it. After all the pitches were over, the judges retired to a back room for plenty of coffee and some animated voting and discussions. After 45 minutes we emerged, blinking, into the light, still friends and still talking to each other. In first place and walking away with £10K were MaxiMap, a large scale education floor map of the British Isles which helps children understand the geography of where they live. In second place, accompanied by a fetching gorilla suit, and loping away with £7K were Mission: Explore London, a team of geography addicted teachers, designers and artists who wanted to help children explore the city. And in third place with £3K was London Blue Plaque Search, dedicated to making the iconic GLC/GLA/LCC/English Heritage blue plaques open to everyone. After almost 6 months of meeting, discussing, debating and geopontificating GeoVation was finally over. At least for 2010. The challenge and awards will be returning in 2011 with even less Ordnance Survey involvement, though hopefully they'll still contribute towards the seed fund. And as I seem to be quoted as saying in several places ... "One of the judges, Gary Gale, Director of Engineering for Yahoo! Geo Technologies, said: 'The standard of entries was fantastic and the scope of them far-reaching and varied. Each of the finalists can and should be proud of getting to the finals and being able to showcase their geo-vision. But in the end, the judges decided that MaxiMap was the one idea that could make the most impact and had the greatest potential.'" ... and I can't really sum it up better than that. Photo credit: pomphorhynchus on Flickr Written and posted from home (51.427051, -0.333344)

Posted via email from Gary's Posterous

The Future of Web Apps? Bad Wifi, Booth Mobbing, Geo and Lots of Schwag

2009-10-06 11:18

Yahoo! Developer Network blogand was published there on October 5th; it's duplicated here for posterity.)You're stuck in a room on the first floor of a venue with no natural light, people keep expressing surprise that you're there, there's a bizarre voucher system operating for getting a cup of coffee and the free public wifi is holding up far better than the venue's net connectivity which is buckling under the strain of multiple laptops, iPhones and Androids.It can only be a tech conference; this one is in London and it's called FOWA, or the Future of Web Applications to give it its full name and it was held in the rather grand sounding Kensington and Chelsea Town Hall, near High Street Kensington tube station.

There's a booth with some strangely comfortable sofas and chairs, a purple orchid, loads of purple swag, "geoballs" and a free wifi point called yahooligans.

(This post was originally written for theYahoo! Developer Network blogand was published there on October 5th; it's duplicated here for posterity.)You're stuck in a room on the first floor of a venue with no natural light, people keep expressing surprise that you're there, there's a bizarre voucher system operating for getting a cup of coffee and the free public wifi is holding up far better than the venue's net connectivity which is buckling under the strain of multiple laptops, iPhones and Androids.It can only be a tech conference; this one is in London and it's called FOWA, or the Future of Web Applications to give it its full name and it was held in the rather grand sounding Kensington and Chelsea Town Hall, near High Street Kensington tube station.There's a booth with some strangely comfortable sofas and chairs, a purple orchid, loads of purple swag, "geoballs" and a free wifi point called yahooligans.

Sitting cozily between the PayPal and Vodaphone booths, this has been the home of the Yahoo! Developer Network and Yahoo! Geo Technologies teams for the last 48 hours.I presented on both days as part of the University Sessions track. On Thursday I talked about "Place not Space; Geo without Maps"; which was somewhat incorrect given that it featured a guest appearance by Google Earth. Using Yahoo! Placemaker, I showed how you could extract places from web content and sanitise the content with YQL. Whilst it would be great if all the web used Yahoo! web services, we need to work with the rest of the world, so I showed how you could use the long/lat metadata returned by Placemaker to drive Google Earth.Then on Friday I talked about how "Geocoding and Geoparsing are Easy"; I may have been somewhat economic with the truth. Geocoding isn't easy and Geoparsing is even less so. This talk showed some of the pitfalls that frustrate us and how we need to model geography in real and colloquial terms and not simply structured and formal terms. Or to put it another way "we can make the internet work better by making it understand how we speak in the real world".Both sessions were really well attended, with people standing at the back during the Friday talk, which is a great thing for a speaker to see. FOWA attendees are a very geo-savvy crowd who asked lots of intelligent, challenging and pretty direct questions. There's nothing I like more than an audience that "gets" a topic.Back at the booth we were gently but firmly mobbed during break sessions which was pleasantly surprising, given that we were on the first floor. An entirely non-statistical review of the questions we came across on the booth showed three main trends:* Tell me about YQL and YUI - they're really cool * Tell me more about this "geo" stuff * Is the wifi really this bad?

As an industry we thrive on a strange barter system based around the acquisition and donation of items of branded schwag. We continued this fine tradition with loads of "geoballs" and some much prized YDN screwdrivers. We also thrive on vast amounts of caffeine so it seemed only fair to run a competition with the prize of a coffee machine which resembles the robots that were used in the Fiat "designed by humans, built by machines" ad campaign. To win, all you had to do was guess the number of unique users that hit the Yahoo! UK network on Tuesday September 1st 2009.Answers ranged from the hugely optimistic "a lot", to some very precise, yet very wrong, figures, ranging from 20 thousand all the way up to an insane 2.3 billion. The real answer was 24,452,863 users and we were able to unite Raymond Tamblyn of Visa Worldwide with the coffee machine for his answer of 23 million.And then after 2 days of no natural light, slightly crazed from too much caffeine and throats croaking from too much talking, the booth was dismantled, the purple orchid found a home and we stepped back into the fading daylight and hip shopping area of High Street Kensington and headed home for the weekend and to an internet connection that works.Lousy wifi seems to be the hallmark of a great web event. Oh the irony. Posted via email from Gary's Posterous

Know Your Place; Adding Geographic Intelligence to your Content

2009-09-25 15:37

SlideShare.

Day two of the AGI GeoCommunity conference and the conference as a whole has ended. We discussed neogeography, paleogeography and pretty much all points in between, finally agreeing that labels such as these get in the way of the geography itself. I was fortunate enough to have my paper submission accepted and presented a talk on how to Know Your Place at the end of the morning's geoweb track. The paper is reproduced below and the deck that accompanies it is on SlideShare.

Know Your Place; Adding Geographic Intelligence to your Content

Abstract

Yahoo! GeoPlanet exposes a geographic ontology of over six million named places, enabling technologies that join users with with most geographically relevant information possible and forms the heart of the Yahoo! Geo Technologies group's technology platform.

GeoPlanet uses a unique, language neutral identifier for (nearly) all named places around the world. Each place exists within a graph of other places; the relationships between places are categorised by the nature of the relationship, categorised by administrative hierarchy, geographical scope and place type, amongst other.

GeoPlanet’s geodata repository is exposed by publicly available web service platforms that allow places to be identified within content (Yahoo! Placemaker) and investigated by place name or identifier (Yahoo! GeoPlanet). Users are able to navigate rich metadata associated with a place including the place hierarchies and obtain parent, child, belong-to and neighbouring relationships.

For example, a list of first level administrative entities in a given country may be obtained by requesting the list of the children of that country. In a similar manner the surrounding postal codes of a given post code by be obtained via a request for its neighbours.

The framework for this is uniform and consistent across the globe and facilities geo-enrichment and geo-identification in a wide range of content, both structured and unstructured.

Place-based Thinking

Traditionally geography has been treated as a purely spatial exercise; this is certainly the case on the internet. Places are specified in terms of their longitude and latitude, and so cities or towns are referenced by the co-ordinate pair that identifies the theoretical or arbitrary centre of the place.

From this it can be seen that everything on the internet which is location related is referenced by a co-ordinate pair that has little relevance to a human but much relevance to a geographer or software which can algorithmically undertake a radius search from a point. Instead of a spatially based approach to location, Yahoo! Geo Technologies take a place based approach.

The map above shows a spatially correct map of the central area of the London Underground network similar to those produced up until the early 1930s; in the central area of London the map is compressed due to the close proximity of the lines and their stations.

In 1932 the familiar Tube map, shown below, was produced by Harry Beck in the form of a non geographic linear diagram. Whilst not geographically or spatially correct it is far more accessible and information rich due to Beck’s assumption that people are less concerned with the exact location of a station and more interested in how to change between lines and get to their destination.

We have taken a not dissimilar approach with our repository of named places, where a place can be a monument, a park, a colloquial region such as the Home Counties and continent or even the Earth. We have taken each of these different place names at all of their differing granularities and given them unique identifiers, called Where On Earth Ids.

WOEIDs

The Where On Earth ID is a unique and permanent global identifier, shared publicly via the GeoPlanet and Placemaker API platforms.

They are language neutral, thus the WOEID for London is the same as for Londres, for Londra and for ロンドン, whilst recognising, for the London in the United Kingdom, that London, Central London, Greater London and the City of London are geographically related though separate places.

Their usage ensure that all Yahoo! APIs have the ability to employ geography consistently and globally.

A Global Geographic Ontology

Within our geodata repository we know not only where a place is geographically located, via its centroid, but also how these places relate to each other. This is more than an index of places, it is a geographic ontology of named places, each of which is referenced by a WOEID.Using the postal town of Stratford-upon-Avon as an example, we can determine the children of a place, its parent, its adjacent places and non administrative or colloquial areas that a place belongs to or is contained within, at the following granularities.

Supernames
Continents
Countries
Counties
Regions
Neighbourhoods
ZIP and Postal Codes
Custom Geographies

Joining People with Content and Content with People

We can use Placemaker to parse structured and unstructured content and to identify the places referenced, each of which is represented by a WOEID. Where more than one potential place exists for each name, a ranked list of disambiguated names is presented.

Each of the WOEIDs returned by Placemaker have the notional centroid and the bounding box, described by the South West and North East coordinates, as attributes. This allows the concept of a place to be displayed, such as that for the postal town of Stratford-upon-Avon, as shown below.

For each WOEID, we can use GeoPlanet to determine the vertical relationships of the place, such as which cities are in a country or which postal codes are within a city. We can determine the states, provinces or districts with in a country and which countries are on a continent. This powerful vertical hierarchy can be easily navigated from any WOEID.

GeoPlanet also contains a horizontal-like hierarchy, which frequently overlaps. If searching against a specific place such as a postal code, we can determine the surrounding postal codes as well; if searching for a town, we can determine the surrounding postal towns, as shown below.

GeoPlanet contains a rich ontology of named places, which allows us to look up places and where these places are. But more powerful is the relationship between places which allows users of GeoPlanet to add geographic intelligence to their use cases and applications, browsing the horizontal and vertical hierarchies with ease to discover geographic detail that no other point radius-based search would allow us to do.

Capturing the World’s Geography as it is Used by the World’s People

The Oxford English Dictionary, often criticised for capturing transient or contentious terms, states its goal as “to capture the English language as it is used at this time” and not to impose how things are called. In the same vein, our goal is to capture the world’s geography as it is used by the world’s people.

We aim to follow the United Nations and ISO 3166-1 guidelines on the official name for a place but we strive to know the informal, the ethnic and the colloquial. We are less concerned with imposing a formal geography as we are with describing how a place is described today and what its relationship is with its parent, its children and its neighbours.

Thus we recognise that MOMA NYC (WOEIDs 23617044 and 2459115) is used to refer to the Museum of Modern Art in New York, that San Francisco (2487956) is the more commonly used form of The City and County of San Francisco and that the London Eye and the Millennium Wheel are synonymous (WOEID 22475381).

A Tale of Two Stratfords

Stratford is an important tourist destination, due to the town being William Shakespeare’s birthplace, with both the “on-Avon” and “upon-Avon” suffixes being used to refer to the town. GeoPlanet recognises both Stratford-on-Avon and Stratford-upon-Avon (WOEID 36424) when referring to the postal town and further recognises Stratford-on-Avon (WOEID 12696101) as the administrative District which is the parent for Stratford-upon-Avon.

“the Council often gets asked why there is a difference in using the terms 'Stratford-on-Avon' and 'Stratford-upon-Avon'. Anything to do with the town of Stratford is always referred to as Stratford-upon-Avon. However, as a district council, we cover a much larger area than the town itself, but did not want to lose the instantly recognised tag of Stratford, so anything to do with the district is referred to asStratford-on-Avon.”

Appendix A - Data Background

The GeoPlanet geodata repository is derived from a variety of sources, both spatial data vendors, openly available sources and Yahoo! sourced. In raw form, it occupies 25 GB of storage; after automated topology generation and semi automated processing to clean the data and to remove duplicates, the final data footprint is around 9.5 GB. A specialised Editorial team assesses overall data quality and integrity, areas of ambiguity and challenging geographics, such as disputed territories and colloquial areas.

Appendix B - Further Reading

Posted via email from Gary's Posterous

Location and Privacy - Where Do We Care?

2009-09-24 10:44

Terry Jones, Audrey Mandela and Ian Broadbent, chaired and overseen by conference chair Steven Feldman.

Our location is probably the single most valuable facet of our online identity, although where I currently am, whilst interesting, is far less valuable and personal than where I've been. Where I've been, if stored, monitored and analysed, provides a level of insight into my real world activities that transcends the other forms of insight and targeting that are directed at my online activities, such as behavioural and demographic analysis.Where I've been, my location stream if you will, is a convergence of online and real world identity and should not be revealed, ignored or given away without thought and without consent.In the real world we unconsciously provide differing levels of granularity in our social engagements when we answer the seemingly trivial question "where have you been?". To our family and close friends we may give a detailed reply ... "I was out with colleagues from work at Browns on St. Martin's Lane, London", to other friends and colleagues we may give a more circumspect reply ... "I was out in the Covent Garden area" and to acquaintances, a more generalised reply ... "I was in Central London" or even "mind your own business"As with the real world, so we should choose to reveal our location to applications and to companies online with differing levels of granularity, including the ability to be our own source of truth and to conceal ourselves entirely, in other words, to lie about where I am. Where I am in the real world should be revealed to the online world only on an opt-in basis, carefully considered and with an eye on the value proposition that is being given to me on the basis of revealing my location to a third party. My location is mine and mine alone and I should never have to opt out of revealing where am I and where I've been. Posted via email from Gary's Posterous

As part of this year's AGI GeoCommunity '09 conference, I took part in the Privacy: Where Do We Care? panel on location and the implications for privacy with Terry Jones, Audrey Mandela and Ian Broadbent, chaired and overseen by conference chair Steven Feldman. Our location is probably the single most valuable facet of our online identity, although where I currently am, whilst interesting, is far less valuable and personal than where I've been. Where I've been, if stored, monitored and analysed, provides a level of insight into my real world activities that transcends the other forms of insight and targeting that are directed at my online activities, such as behavioural and demographic analysis.Where I've been, my location stream if you will, is a convergence of online and real world identity and should not be revealed, ignored or given away without thought and without consent.In the real world we unconsciously provide differing levels of granularity in our social engagements when we answer the seemingly trivial question "where have you been?". To our family and close friends we may give a detailed reply ... "I was out with colleagues from work at Browns on St. Martin's Lane, London", to other friends and colleagues we may give a more circumspect reply ... "I was out in the Covent Garden area" and to acquaintances, a more generalised reply ... "I was in Central London" or even "mind your own business"As with the real world, so we should choose to reveal our location to applications and to companies online with differing levels of granularity, including the ability to be our own source of truth and to conceal ourselves entirely, in other words, to lie about where I am. Where I am in the real world should be revealed to the online world only on an opt-in basis, carefully considered and with an eye on the value proposition that is being given to me on the basis of revealing my location to a third party. My location is mine and mine alone and I should never have to opt out of revealing where am I and where I've been. Posted via email from Gary's Posterous

First #geomob Meetup

2008-11-28 09:29

Last night I presented a deck on Fire Eagle at the first London Geo/Mobile Developers Meetup, held at Google’s UK headquarters in Victoria; the full write up is here.

Talking on Fire Eagle thumbnail Last night I presented a deck on Fire Eagle at the first London Geo/Mobile Developers Meetup, held at Google’s UK headquarters in Victoria; the full write up is here.

BCS North London and BCS Geospatial SG

2008-09-24 09:22

Last night I presented a deck on Mobile Location Based Services at the British Computer Society in an event organised by the North London Branch of the BCS and the BCS Geospatial Specialist Group at the BCS headquarters in Covent Garden; the full write up is here.

BCS Logo Thumbnail Last night I presented a deck on Mobile Location Based Services at the British Computer Society in an event organised by the North London Branch of the BCS and the BCS Geospatial Specialist Group at the BCS headquarters in Covent Garden; the full write up is here.

Gary Gale

The Ubiquitous Digital Map (Abridged)

Of W3G, AGI And Other Geographical Acronyms

Revisiting SoLoMo in Istanbul

Of Digital "Stuff" And Making Your Personal Interweb History

Maps, Maps And MOAR Maps At The Society Of Cartographers And Expedia

Big (Location) Data vs. My (Location) Data

From Where 2.0 To Just Where; With Meh 2.0 Somewhere In The Middle

GeoCommunity and LocNav; One Talk, Two Audiences

W3G 2011; Musings On A Geo Unconference

Communicating To The Communicators (At The CIPR Social Media Conference)

Risking Location Predictions at Mashup*'s Digital Trends 2011

Society of Cartographers Redux

Welcome to the world of the geo data silo: where closed data is open and open data is closed - Gary Gale (Nokia)

Panel discussion: “All this data is good but what about the cartography?”

Finding Inspiration And Teaching Myself Location History At The BCS Geospatial SG

Talking GeoBabel In Three Cities (And Then Retiring It)

W3G – A Chair’s Eye View

Cartographically Speaking; Data (Lots), Maps (Not So Much), Problems (Many)

Geo-Loco; Where The Geo-Wonks Meet The Geo-Clueless And All Points Inbetween

Retiring The Theory of Stuff; But First, A Corollary

The Letter W and Hype (or Local) at the Location Business Summit

The 3 W's of Geo (and hyperlocal deities and a pachyderm)

Where 2.0 - Hype (or Local?)

Geo on the Horizon at Horizon Geo

WhereCamp EU - The Geo Unconference Experience for 180 People

51° 31' 36.8364" N, 0° 7' 44.0466" W

Deep In The Twitter (Developers) Nest

Mashup, Location and London

What Happens When Geography and Innovation Collide

The Future of Web Apps? Bad Wifi, Booth Mobbing, Geo and Lots of Schwag

Know Your Place; Adding Geographic Intelligence to your Content

Location and Privacy - Where Do We Care?

First #geomob Meetup

BCS North London and BCS Geospatial SG