Counter Terra

Killer Mapp

Please let me be the first to have coined that term!

Tim O'Reilly sparked some interesting discussion on Geowanking today regarding locative services like Mapquest and why they never became killer apps in the "first generation web". Responses ranged from the practical (spatial data/GIS is notoriously balkanized standards-wise) to more utopian visions (geoblogs --> Sim City governance) to the importance of trust/social networks in such services. [I can speak to the balkanization: practically the first 4 hours of lectures in a GIS class have involved how to pussyfoot with ESRI's obfuscated, proprietary data formats.] There's also some skepticism regarding maps in relation to locative services in the first place, as if our fixation with maps as a representation of spatial data were keeping us from seeing something obvious. And then there's the problem that there is still no platform that is really appropriate for serving such data to/from the user. Yet.

Spatial data and web services seem to be crying out to be associated. The consensus seems to be that the result would be a kind of through-the-looking-glass replication of culture(s) in the virtual domain. Again.

I can remember reading Berners Lee's article in Scientific American and just not getting why it would be valuable - but now I see that if you turn the entire internet into a database you get a system that with vastly superior characteristics to that of any single hosted service. You get peer to peer, scaleability, better trust, retention of ownership, division of roles etcetera. The one hassle with distributed content serving is that you need beefy aggregators to aggregate, organize and present the content - but this provides an opportunity for services such as feedster or google to add special value... and it doesn't diminish the public weal.*

Perhaps to put it another way:

I think we're going toward a songlines/waypoint trust and/or locality based collaborative filtering model with a power of patterning that will back burner the reference approach, lending us organic segments that lead us through vast swarms of invisible ore/geospam/noise/chaos/meaninglessness/whatever.*

Friendly Blogs

Some friends have linked me. I link them back. Thanks Paula! Thanks Tom!

And I'll preempively link Chad too while I'm at it. And Jeff (kinda).

Electro Kabuki

Please, please, please let me be the first to have coined that term. Damn.

Sony demos dancing michelin man robots. I found it deeply disturbing.

New Year

I'm back from the break. My Counter Terran resolution is to write more actual content and eschew the annotated link list format I've fallen into.

We'll see. The next year is looking like it'll be pretty tough.