The fun side of GPS is now beginning to shine through. Yes, it’s useful in getting us from A to B, but what if we don’t know which letter we want to get to? What if we don’t care? In that moment, we often turn GPS off, as it’s a technology born of necessity (or, in my case, panic) … but hey, if I knew to within a few paces where I was inside a building and at what time, that could answer a lot of questions. Like whose round it is next!

MySpace urbanism – first, this refers to the role of social networks, on-line profiles and tracking sites as spaces where we project our identities, through which we connect and which could lead to interaction in the real city. Secondly, the term implies that these media can help us to personalise the city: to focus only on the bits and connections that are of specific interest to us personally, to remake the city in our own image.

Geobrowsers have a direct impact on the consumption of news media; they change mainstream storytelling conventions and provide new ways of selecting and filtering news stories. Geobrowsers set the stage for the Geospatial Web as a new platform for content production and distribution. With little effort, users can upload geo-tagged stories and photos to central repositories, making them available to a global audience at the touch of a button.

We often think of mobile technologies simply in terms of their communication capabilities, but their increasing ability to trace our movements and collect information about the spaces through which we pass, can also make it easier for people to keep track of the places and things that matter most to them. Community mapping and sensing projects that use commonly available consumer electronics as environmental measurement devices, enable people to collect and view a wide array of location-based data.

There is a world of information that we can’t immediately see in the streets we walk and drive in, and in the buildings in which we work, play, and live. The great potential of the mobile geospatial web is to reveal this hidden world to us, by adding geospatial and timing data to the user experience in an instant. But this immediacy also presents challenges we must weigh carefully, if we are to successfully create geospatial mobile experiences.

DiBernardo wrote “Spaces” for the “Mobile 2020″ competition that accompanied the opening of the Mobile Life Excellence Center in Stockholm, Sweden last year. The story follows a person exploring the physical and social landscape of an unfamiliar city, receiving … well, just read on to find out!

So what is it about location based services or simply “LBS” that gets everyone excited yet fails to deliver on the promise of automatic, always-on, location assisted services and content? In theory, getting the current location of a mobile phone should not be that difficult. TV shows such as CSI and movies like Minority Report reflect an always-on society where information on a person’s whereabouts is instantly available. In practice however, location is a rather complex issue.

A century of modernity was undone as fast as it came, as new technologies supported new ways of relating between individuals. Networking is now not just marked by the flow of media from the top down – it is, above all, a vast social phenomenon. This is our world, and it is a radically different place from the condition we once knew as modernity (or postmodernity for that matter).

What should you write on an academic blog? If news, trivia, detail and narcissism are all out, then what’s left? When I started my blog “The Digital Geographer”, I decided to sidestep these sins by writing a manifesto on the challenges we faced in designing and implementing a new generation of mobile applications, that will bring the power of location technology to mobile devices everywhere. And since my old history teacher always said there were ten points on any given subject, it has ten points.

Mapping was once the domain of professionals. Cartographers and geo-scientists trained in universities for several years to learn the best techniques for accurately displaying data on maps. The public often saw the end product of the map creation process, but was largely limited to scribbling on paper when it came to creating maps of its own. Beginning in 2005, this paradigm turned upside down. The last three years have fundamentally changed the way people understand their location and geography.

With the creation of Tag Galaxy, Steven Wood wanted to explore the way that people use tags and the connections that become visible when this usage is viewed on a large scale. Tag Galaxy lets you browse photos intuitively via virtual planetary systems representing related tags. The application itself does not know of any logical connection between the concepts described by the tags, but as it observes the literally billions of photos which have been tagged by the users of the photo sharing site Flickr, their choices become apparent and a certain level of collective intelligence is achieved.