fisharepeopletoo

A del.icio.us of places

Anywhereblogs uses (is?) a folk taxonomy, or folksonomy.

Cell Spotting tries to do the same, but it only allows one name for each cell, fixed by the person who gets there first.

Here's a poem about names:

And in a tender mood he, as I guess,
Christened one flower Love-in-idleness

Is There Any Other Kind?

Maps Are For People Who Don't Know Where They Are

"We present findings from a study of the ways in which positioning is done in everyday talk over the mobile phone.

We show that a location is more than a coordinate on a map, and give examples of how people formulate location in a number of different ways according to the particulars of the activity.

Based on these findings, we argue that rather than delivering location information in the form of geographical coordinates, location-based services should describe location in ways relevant to the users, thereby supporting the existing positioning practice."

"I'm waiting where we met last time": exploring everyday positioning practices to inform design

I don't think I need to add anything to that except to ackowledge that I got it from the Angermann weblog, where there are more quotes, and warn you that much as I'd love to have read the full paper you need a subscription.

Doh. Free registration to read it.

Geo Whiz

Some shrewder observations on the “geo-annotation what-does-it-all-mean/why-the-f**k-would-anyone-do-it” question, best summed up in the post and comments on the Akav weblog.

I don’t like the phrases “geo-tagging” or “geo-annotation” much. They don’t convey any sense of place-filtered conversations among groups of people, sparked by shared locations.

And this idea of conversations seems to me a much richer understanding, and a much better starting point for devising facilities and interfaces, than “lets-nail-facts-to-maps-using-GPS” geo-tagging.

My mate Dan is slaving away right now, finishing our place-filtered conversation system for bog-standard mobile phones (2G, GSM, WAP), Anywhereblogs. It’ll be free, and hopefully it’ll be usable anywhere in the world when we’ve done a bit more work on it.

We’ll be trying it out at the Ultrasound festival, and I’ll be giving a little talk about it.

For anyone who doesn’t happen to be in the North of England that day, not to worry, this is a quick summery (with illustrations):

“Lost tourist” services (like Crunkie) try to use mobile phones to navigate through the world.

“Conversation” systems take the real world as an interface to navigate round mobile phones.

Frank Breuer

Atelier Bow-Wow

And On A Personal Note