2004-02-12

35 Ways to Find Your Location 
http://conferences.oreillynet.com/cs/et2004/view/e_sess/4657


Method 0:

assume you're on the earth

accuracy: ~510 square megametres
availability: until we conquer space

[I'm not going to be noting down any of these because Chris's slides are really
good and there's a lot of info. So only the stuff that isn't on the slides
already.]


Method 8: ask someone.

limitation: requires social interaction.


[man, i'm knackered.]


Method 20: Street names

Japan doesn't have street names.


Method 23: Landmarks and littlemarks [nice term]

If you take a lot of photos of a city and display them pretty much randomly,
people will see one they recognise and place themselves near that.


Method 28: geowarchalking

Requirements: crazy pirate geo-grafitti gangs.

Sticker postcodes everywhere.


Method 36:

cool idea about reverse geolocating. rfid card gets scanned and tells the rfid
where the scanner is. the rfid remembers the location of where is was last
scanned.


Method 39:

the road most travelled

Amsterdam Real Time, http://www.waag.org

recording and aggregation of accurate flows

time, speed and quantity of movement

maps autogenerate themselves


* A few messages:

What if you want to be lost?

electronic acquisition pays no attention to geography - or the way humans think
about their location.

[this is psychogeography. think about context, where you are in relation to
other things. and where other things are *isn't* the distance. for humans,
distance isn't the gap between coordinates, it's also the *meaning* distance
between two things. and meaning is curved: two things really close together are
meaningfully connected, but two things 1000km apart and 2000km apart are about
the same amount connected, ie both meaninglessly.]

matt jones asks: can you talk about things that make you feel less lost, not
just give you coordinates?

[great question. and actually something that applies to this whole conference:
can we have software that makes us feel more human, rather than something that
just itemises the canonical names of people you know? i hope so, and i think so.
we're seeing now social software at a point where the ideas behind it can be
applied to all kinds of systems and they'll make people's lives better. and
what's more, we can start from first principles and really figure it out. i
hope, i hope. and, folks, that's all.]