April 6, 2005: My own private SFO: a personal geography is Mike's map of a "place" he's spent a lot of time in over the past year. Love it!

There seem to be two distinct approaches to the collision of space and information. The first is to create a new view to some portion of the world by collecting and organizing "reality" (photos, timestamps, GPS data) into a coherent information space. Examples include mappr, Mike's own PhotoGeoBlog, and other 21st century variants on what is at heart a travelogue. The second is the reverse: layering information (annotations, reviews, links) onto real space. Examples here include HIPS, Vindigo, and lots more.

But I'm guessing the really interesting stuff happens when you drop the self-consciousness of either approach and build things that are what they are by virtue of knowing where they are and, further, where location-awareness is only one facet. So, for example, you're driving to a family dinner in the next town and your car is low on gas and it knows that if you don't stop and fill up over at that Shell station by the onramp you'll run out of gas before you get to Aunt Vida's house, so it tells you. I'm sure there are plenty of less-cheesy examples, but you get the drift.