geobloggers

Apparently some genius “sees huge potential as more people become aware of GPS and geotagging.”

Carrying on, “That mainly comes down to GPS devices in cars and mobile phones raising people’s awareness of location-based services,” he said. “It wasn’t really in people’s consciousness even a year ago. … We’re very much at the beginnings.”

You can read more of that over in the New York Times.

Watching the consumer side of things they seem to be faced with the same old problem of wondering wether to buy a new Camera/Gps Unit/SatNav as always. Now, or wait a couple of weeks for the next newsest and greatest thing to come out, as the technology updates seem to come think and fast.

From this side of the fence however everything continues to move achingly slowly. Waiting for things that seem blindingly obvious to eventually see the light of day. Having been on the inside of a couple of these things though I can see how it happens ;)

Anyway, this came through from Aaron (via mattb I think), Nokia’s Location Tagger. The key quote here being …

“In the near future, we hope to make location tagging a seamlessly integrated part of your Nokia experience. Until then, Nokia Location Tagger is a small standalone application that gives you a sneak preview”

Quite why the N95 with its fancy pants GPS and camera doesn’t already do this is anyones guess, I’d hazard a couple myself but as I want them to send me phones and stuff I’ll keep quiet. [disclaimer: I have a beard and so do some people at Nokia, therefore beard affinity rules apply and I'm biased to be nice to them]

So basically we can assume that in the N95 and future phones we’ll have the option to do ‘location tagging’ with less hoops to jump through. And when that happens we can finally all throw our hands in the air and say ‘thank fuck for that, it’s about time’.

Unless our mums happen to be around in which case we’ll say ‘thank goodness for that, it’s jolly well about time’.

Anyway, to get back to the point a little, I think peoples awareness of location based stuff is sufficiently raised, judging by Helio adverts I’ve seen anyway, that now’s a good time to be throwing in the ‘Location Tagging’ stuff without scaring people too much.

No but wait, there’s more because there’s no such thing as a short post. You can tell when things have really nearly hit the big time when there’s a hint of fun, and here’s the hint …

Garmin: fun location type stuff in a GPS unit.

In which you get to define a real-world play area. Throw in some Points of Interest, add a story that links them all together and then compile the results into a ‘cart’ that can then be uploaded and downloaded again onto an actual real-life GPS unit.

To clarify my position a little bit, I’m thinking Photos from Flickr as Points of Interest and by ‘compile’ into a cart I’m hoping Open-and-easy-to-hack-file-format.

I’m going to echo Brady’s wishes on two points …

1. “hopefully the car units come next” because frankly, who walks?
2. “Where I think Wherigo will gain the broadest appeal is for more general content delivery. As I was playing with the demo game I kept thinking how useful Wikipedia would be on this platform (there are thousands of geo-tagged pages)” and I’m thinking that sending a Flickr Set with descriptions to a handheld GPS unit (or car SatNav) would make great thing to send to other people.

Next I’m going to totally abuse my position at Flickr to try and get my hands on one, I’ll let you know how that goes.

In answer to the original question however, Are We Nearly There Yet?

Yes, nearly.