GPS in the desert

40 degrees 47.701 min N 113 degrees 48.737 min W NAD83/WGS84

Some location technologies are most interesting when you're in the middle of nowhere.....
from GPS expo 2006 Bonneville Salt Flats Utah
Saturday July 29th BWYG: Bring what ya got that goes by Global Positioning System.
An informal unmediated gathering of guided meandering research and development using GPS, location awareness, and saltboards.
You are not invited. You are alerted. It is the Salt Flats. It is America. It is free.
0 plush, 1 gallon per person H20, bring 5 to be safe.

Geotagthings

Geotagthings is a simple way to assign any web resource - anything with a url - a location in the normal, human physical world. The tagging process works much like del.icio.us style bookmarking - surf the web, click on the geotagthings bookmarklet, then double-click a point on a map to easily assign a lat,long to the url.

Once you've tagged some things, you can get feeds for your stuff, in georss or kml... or you can get custom feeds based on certain locations. Use the feed generator to define a place and a radius, and anything tagged by the geotagthings community that comes within that range will show up in your feed.

Geotagthings is pluggable. It's not a destination, nor a community site. It's meant to be used by destinations and community sites, or simply while going about your business, surfing the web.

Why in the World?

Why would anyone want to assign a geographic location to a web page? The simple reason is that people are already doing various projects that fell within the scope of making web data _also_ geographic data and we felt that there was a need for a low-impact, easy to use tool to help in our own little way. The more involved reason is that the Internet and other networks are very rap- idly spilling out into the physical world. Whether you call it pervasive networks, ubiquitous computing or the geospatial web, one can easily anticipate that the networks need geographic semantics. In the physical world, location means more than a uniform resource locators (URLs). In the physical world, the data that is sluicing around also needs to know where it is according to an additional set of geographic information, such as latitude/longitude, or relative location to canonical landmarks, or simply the town or city in which that previously non- geotagged data has relevance.

Decorative Newsfeeds

’Decorative Newsfeeds’ is a web-linked artwork, fusing new technology with news information in a permanent electronic sculpture by leading UK artists Jon Thomson and Alison Craighead.
The work uses a live web feed to generate up-to-the-minute headline news from around the world. This unfurls endlessly, ‘ticker tape’ style, passing through three colourful curving tracks of ultra bright LED’s. Seen up close, passers-by can read the interweaving news content, while from a distance, and particularly at night, it just seems to be a pleasant, light filled and decorative animation.
Thomson and Craighead specialise in using new technology and communication systems in their work. Working with Jayex Technology, on a bespoke screen, connected permanently to the internet, this is the first time that LED text has followed tight and overlapping curves.
Thomson said of their work: ‘We follow on from the artistic traditions of manipulation and appropriation while exploring the myriad ways in which new technologies and electronic global communications networks are changing the way we perceive the world around us.’
Craighead added that: ‘Our interest in this commission is due to a recent trend in our work to make sculptural screen-based installations that utilise live network data sources like weather data, blogs, and headline news feeds.’

what we find changes who we become

Who would have thought a librarian could offer some of the most interesting insights into the development of ubiquitous computing. The book 'ambient findability looks at how we find things changes their importance.
This goes someway to explaining the dominance of Google, and how fundamental its role is in the next generation of computer use ( and also why Bill Gates is so scared of an internet search engine). In a time when the focus is away from the PC and on to the internet, then the 'the network is the computer' . Google provides a supposedly efficient way of doing what most people want to do on the net: search. Thus the control of the net is dominated by people not offering information, but means of searching and categorizing information. ( see Observer Business, p. 39, 14.05.06).

So we either need better librarians (ie someone to do it for us) or better filters( ways of managing information ourselves).

for filters the following from Ton Zijlstra's Blog has some interesting ideas:
Filtering: pattern search through social context and feedback
For pattern searching two things are key. First, information can no longer be viewed as objective, but need to be seen as always embedded in subjective social contexts, and second that feedback loops are needed to make patterns emerge from the information abundance.

So for me to be effective in my own information use I need to have a very good social network that forms my filter. This means having a balanced set of relationships with a myriad of people (not: sources) who are willing to share their subjective views with me. They show me what matters to them on a daily basis, and what may warrant a response from me.

So for me to be effective in my own information use I need to share my information. Share traces (my bookmarks, my pictures), share information (blogpostings, e-mails, articles, bookmarks), share relationships (go talk to her, go meet him). Because through this sharing networks of meaning become visible: patterns emerge because what I share becomes part of the inputs of my social filter. It helps my relationships know better what to share with me (helps them become better filters), it helps my relationships to want to share with me, and in turn see me as part of their filter to make sense of the world.

I share therefore I am