How can maps shape the way we see the world? When I look at the mapping being done these days, I love hyperlocal, community mapping. But as has been debated here, some community mapping projects are devoid of adequate context, and therefore it's difficult to assess the meaning of the data. We can map in real time, we may let any one with a connection add their content, but in the end, we have to do it with intent and be clear about what we want to communicate. It has to be more than just, "I now know where and when particular crimes happen in my neighborhood," or "this address pulled a building permit for a bathroom remodel."

So I went looking for great maps, which I defined as those that take information, and by virtue of the mash-up, make it knowledge. This map below was created in 1861 by Charles Joseph Minard, a French engineer. It plots Napoleon's disastrous march to Moscow in 1812. It is not only one of the earliest uses of "mapping," but Edward Tufte, the guru of graphical information design and professor of statistics at Yale call calls it "the best statistical graphic ever drawn."

Source: Edward R. Tufte, The Visual Display of Quantative Information, Cheshire, Conn., 1983, reprint 1995, p. 40)

Beginning at the left on the Polish-Russian border near the Niemen River, the thick band shows the size of the army (422,000 men) as it invaded Russian in June 1812. The width of the band indicates the size of the army at each place on the map. In September, the army reached Moscow, which was by then sacked and deserted, with 100,000 men. The path of Napoleon's retreat from Moscow is depicted by the darker, lower band, which is linked to a temperature scale and dates at the bottom of the chart. It was a bitterly cold winter, and many froze on the march out of Russia. As the graphic shows, the crossing of the Berezina River was a disaster, and the army finally struggled back into Poland with only 10,000 men remaining. Also shown are the movements of auxiliary troops, as they sought to protect the rear and the flank of the advancing army. Minard's graphic tells a rich, coherent story with its multivariate data, far more enlightening than just a single number bouncing along over time. Six variables are plotted: the size of the army, its location on a two-dimensional surface, direction of the army's movement, and temperature on various dates during the retreat from Moscow.

In the end, we might wonder what these two examples of mapping have in common. M. Minard created this map because he was a pacifist, and wanted to illustrate the catastrophe that is war. Creating graphical information to teach and to affect social change had not been done before. Not surprisingly, traditional statisticians were not comfortable with M. Minard new way. That's a bit of the similarity.

When I watch the video Ms. Miller made, a large part of my understanding of the story is a result of the multi media used. Media is not digital because it's delivered via an electronic device; it's digital when it uses multiple medias. Not just the written word, not just the spoken word, not just taped talking heads, not just video or images, or informational graphics. It's the right combination of these. And that takes training. This example by Ms. Miller serves as a model for how to create news using 21st century literacies.

I posted a blog in early May on the Where 2.0 conference, focusing on mapping and social activism; I noted that having a purpose (outside of making money and/or creating cool tools) moves the process and the product along. Where 2.0 was three days of 25 presentations a day and then evening events; so it's no surprise that it was over a month later that the dots from Where 2.0 connected with the dots from my next three conferences: Knight's Future of Civic Media at MIT, The Center for Social Media's Beyond Broadcast, with this year's topic being Mapping Public Media at the American University, and the International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE's) National Educational Computing Conference in San Antonio.

The guiding questions of the Beyond Broadcast conference seemed especially relevant for my locative media practice:

How are media makers using online mapping and visualization tools to tell stories and engage communities? What can those same tools tell us about changes in the public media landscape?

The first dot (still unconnected) came at Beyond Broadcast when a member of the audience commented that hyperlocal mapping is a contested space. His comment was in reaction to the Oakland Crimespotting site. Living in Oakland, he commented that crime in Oakland is no surprise and not news. He pointed out that hyperlocal, crimemapping sites reinforce stereotypes about where crime occurs, and more importantly, who commits it; from his perspectives, these sites don't necessarily inform the community, offer insight into issues, or shed light on potential solution. Interesting comment. Got me thinking.

If it's not news to the residents and doesn't help solve community problems, then what's the value? I visited the Crimespotting site for a more in-depth look with widen eyes. Crime data was "mashed-up," with geographical info; but more accurately, it was two pieces of information overlayed: an event (eg, the crime) and the place where the event occurred. De facto every event has "place" information embedded in it - events happen in place. And it's valuable to know where they happened, but just placing a crime event on a map does not necessarily give us insight into the story. As the Beyond Broadcast panelist Lee Banville, Editor-in-Chief of the Online NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, noted simply mapping "doesn't necessarily tell a story, it introduces a story." Otherwise, he pointed out, a map can become a data dump.

Most Knight grantees have a j-background, so narrative is normally wrapped around any mapping. But still, additional graphical/data info layers would provide material for a more detailed analysis. Just adding place information to data doesn't encourage deep critical thinking. So we ask: what tools might allow us to go beyond simple geographical information and towards analysis and problem solving?

I found the next soon-to-be connected dot at the NECC conference in San Antonio via a GIS presentation by Professor Bob Kolvoord from James Madison University. Graphical Information System (GIS) is connecting data to maps, but the difference is both in quantity and quality of data, as well as intention. The intent is for analysis, not a superficial look. On the flip side, there is a learning curve with GIS software. I took a semester length course in GIS at our community college. It's complicated software for those with little programming experience. But it did allow me to overlay many professionally produced data layers on a map, offering more than just place information. The most prominent commercial provider of GIS software is ESRI, and they have created a light version of their GIS software for K-12 education.

Like it or not, almost any discussion of mapping either begins or ends with Google Earth or Google Maps, and so goes this post. At Where 2.0 this year, keynote speaker John Hanke, Director, Google Earth & Maps invited Jack Dangemond founder and president of ESRI on stage with him to announce a partnership that enables ESRI's newest 9.3 release of their industry-standard ArcGIS suite to be imported into Google Earth/Maps, thereby bringing lots of highly detailed data into the light. Taking into account Google's large layperson user base, Jack Dangemond observed that the partnership represents the emergence of a new "societal GIS." The addition of this new features in the ERSI software facilitates KML output of the GIS data. This output makes it possible to create mashups between deep GIS databases and neogeography databases and tools, between crowdsourced data and professional GIS data, moving beyond just mapping problems to helping create solutions.

The launch of Google News on Google Earth is a milestone in the evolution of the geobrowser. By spatially locating the Google News' constantly updating index of stories from more than 4,500 news sources, Google Earth now shows an ever-changing world of human activity as chronicled by reporters worldwide.

The amount of content available Google Earth is astounding, but even more interesting is the ways in which content can be mashed. Well-established companies have partnered and are contributing vetted content (eg, New York Times, National Geographic), but there is as much, if not more, community created content (eg, Goggle Earth Community, You Tube, Panaramio, wikipedia). In addition, these layers are not limited to words and links, but are multi-media. They include audio, video, and images.

Here's a screencast illustrating how Google Earth, Google News, and the other layers can mash to create dynamic stories.

Chris Anderson (Long Tail fame) also talks about the Vanishing Point theory of news which is the conceptual basis for hyperlocal journalism. He points out that, "our interest in a subject is in inverse proportion to its distance (geographic, emotional or otherwise) from us." The Google Earth toolset allows us to play with these factors. Events that happen on my block might interest me, but aren't news. (Like the guy across the street that keeps "leaving" his old furniture on the corner.) I appreciate being able to choose what is of interest across the globe, what is of interest in my zip-code, what is of interest on my block: the focus is mine to determine. And I like the engagement of media medias.

In addition to updates and upgrades to Google Earth (Street View was added to the latest version, 4.3), Google Maps added Panaramio (photos) and wikipedia.

Certainly local news organizations can (and, indeed, must) find a model that mashes these various medias and modalities to fit their community.

The exceptions were the tools and apps in the social activism thread. Notable were:

InSTEDD rushed into Myanmar immediately after the cyclone put in the field its beta version of GeoChat even though it was still in a "proof of concept" stage. GeoChat allows multiple users with cell phones in the field to connect to a centralized coordinator to collect and map data on Google Earth, Google Maps, or Virtual Earth. InSTEDD is trying to offer interoperability to a mapped-based command center.

"We want everyone to benefit form the tools and technologies we know can save lies. We want those technologies to work anywhere, any time, and under the harshest conditions. We listen and learn: What is needed? What works? What doesn't? We collaborate with technology developers, researchers, experts in human and animal health, and communities to develop better methods to improve early disease detection and disaster response."

InSTEDD was the TED Prize Wish of 2006 winner Larry Brilliant. Brilliant, who became the head of Google.org, the philanthropic arm of Google, requested the TED community help build a global early-response system to detect new diseases or disasters as quickly as they emerge or occur.

Larry Brilliant's TED talk

Where does a news organization fit in this paradigm? Is it distribution? Is it an intimate knowledge of the place? What could news organizations be doing to add to the response? Do we have the strongest distribution network? Ask yourself what additional role the New Orleans Times-Picayune could have played during Katrina, (especially on their breaking news posts) if they had been a part of an InSTEDD network.

LifeMapper 2 is an open-source project out of the University of Kansas Biodiversity Institute using mapping and data to forecast impacts of climate change, loss of biodiversity, spread of invasive species, and emerging diseases.

Distribution map and occurrence data for the western meadowlark.

The Lifemapper web site offers several options for how a visitor can access archived Lifemapper distribution data. The Species Search Form lets you interactively specify the common name or taxon and generates maps for all species matching the search request. Lifemapper also provides three web services that let users integrate Lifemapper data with other programs:
bq. * QueryTaxa Service--a web service equivalent to the Species Search form--outputs the data providers, number of locality points, and number of models computed for a specific taxon.
* Web Mapping Service--generates a Lifemapper map as a gif image file.
* QueryByLocation Service--outputs all species that are predicted to be present at a specified location.

Green Map System energizes a diverse global movement of local mapmaking teams charting their community's natural, cultural and green living resources. There are 450 locally-led map projects in 50 countries, and have an interactive map in beta.

Clarification: In the original entry I mistakenly placed Green Map under the umbrella of prominent tech non-profit, NetSquared. Green Map is a Featured Project in this year's NetSquared Mashup Challenge but is a separate 13 year old non-profit. Wendy Breyer of Green Map Systems added some additional info in the comments section that I'll bubble up:

Our forthcoming inclusive interactive Open Green Map will significantly extend our reach as it lowers barriers to participation while collecting public insights, images and impacts on diverse sites, routes and resources worldwide. It's set to launch in mid-2008, with work-in-progress viewable now at GreenMap.org/ogm. We welcome the input and support of Media Shift Idea Lab readers!

Global Green Map

In the end, these tools enable grassroots, community-based map-making, but are also a very valuable source of information, real-place, real-time. It happens, it becomes data, and it's mapped. As well as being essential for crisis situations, this dataset, map and info can provide a range of on-the-ground perspectives that aren't easily unearthed by the outside community. Digging out embedded cultural knowledge can lead to information not otherwise easily attained.

As Where 2.0 is a conference about what is coming down the geo-pike, it's no surprise that it's less about what is happening now. Naturally, very few of these tools presented have been implemented. One of the few content folks I met during the 3 days asked me if I thought there was any There (a la Gertrude Stein) in Where.

My opinion? Yes, but not yet. Yes, but not because of the tools or apps, or the products and services, but because folks really like their devices. And they like them because with them they are connected ever more deeply to place and community. It's There when the connection comes.

From www.lojoconnect.com:

Shorthand for locative journalism, LoJo is the name of a project launched by a team of Northwestern University graduate students to study the intersection of journalism and emerging location-based technologies. Through this project, we hope to create interactive and informative mobile experiences that push innovation in journalism.

The six-member team of LoJo are new media graduate students at Northwestern University. Led by Associate Professor (and Knight Grantee) Rich Gordon, the team is exploring the intersection of journalism and locative media. While working on their semester-long project, the LoJo team are blogging their research and sharing it, averaging a post a day.

To date, their posts have highlighted gps-enabled road tours, gps and social networking, mobile advertising (the nemesis of locavists), and carbon footprint data to encourage social activism. Change in the newsroom is going to come from the students of today who are, by virtue of their time and place, changing the tools of the trade. The shift is too big, the old infrastructure too deep for change to happen from within. In digital storytelling circles it's well founded lore that there is only one story: Death and Resurrection (aka phoenix rising from the ashes). LoJo is the start of a new media perspective in the news room. These grad students have grabbed devices and headed out into the field to create and to experience, and more importantly, to create an experience.

As the LoJo team explains:

From now until mid-June, we'll be writing about current applications, emerging trends, likely limitations, ground-breaking projects in the field and other topics to digital media that we find interesting. We'll also share our progress in creating a multimedia project that showcases how location-based technology can enrich journalism and engage audiences. We hope you'll check back from time to time to see what we're up to and let us know what you think.

LoJo team member Joyce Chang hit upon Jeremy Hight's concept of narrative archeology as she blogged on Antenna Audio's latest project WallGuide, a gps-enabled tour of the Berlin Wall, using original source material and personal narratives to recapture a time and place, not so long ago, but already fading in memory.

Our project was initially discussed as a way to depict a future event - to show what Chicago would look like if it wins the 2016 Olympic bid - but we've also realized that locative storytelling can be a rich tool for envisioning the past.

I'm excited by LoJo's definition and exploration of locative journalism. I am blogging (stayed tuned) the Where 2.0 conference and have added Where 2.0 location to LoJo's Interactive Map. So, if you're doing some LoJo journalism, add to the map, contribute to the legacy.

Editor's Note: Also, check out the LoJo students' report on their project over at the MediaShift blog.

The application highlights exploration. And to date, their most prominent geo-broadcasters are those journeying the world, but as with any broadcast, it's only as good as the content. I've tried to do live "on-the-road, isn't-this-a-beautiful/interesting/amazing-place pieces", and geez did mine fall flat. Perhaps a better unique selling proposition might be: See this place I know, right here, right now; it's videoed, geo-tagged, and online.

The greatest potential lies in the exploration of places that broadcasters know intimately and personally, and their choice of located, pushed content. They can wrap that content around some targeted, but small amount of reflection, born of that specific knowledge, and located in time and place. Then you have a piece of value. Space becomes place when it is imbued with meaningful content, and this is where geo-broadcasters could shine. If not, I'm not sure how it differs from a travelogue, or as we in the PBS world know so well, a Rick Stevens show.

Barb Iverson, a Seero geo-broadcaster and journalism professor in Chicago, noted in her E-Media Tidbits blog entry on Seero noted:

As I worked with this application, my reporter sense tingled. And I noticed something else.

It happens like this: My students and I are walking an area of Chicago's Loop between Congress and Randolph, State and Lake Michigan on the east. They're taking photos and videos, and locating interesting geographic places (buildings as well as intersections or what sociologists call "third places"). We're collecting material to create a Seero info-map focusing on the architectural, historical, political, and public geography of that small slice of territory. Seero then publishes our information and sites, along with whatever their software finds. So when my reporters do livecasts, they'll have multimedia spatial context available to supplement their video reporting.

Take this further: Imagine linking construction permits, building code reports and violations, lists of tenants, floor plans, and other information with important buildings. Then, when a crime, accident, political scandal, or other breaking news happens in that area, you can quickly produce an info-map or site, enhancing your coverage in real time, and including live broadcasts.

In addition, with the Seero service geo-broadcasters can also push factoids and interesting tidbits about the place to accompany their "page." There is nice integration with twitter so they can alert their fan-base (this said with only the smallest amount of sarcasm) that they are going online.

The best use of the Seero is as the latest addition to hyper-local content acquisition and distribution. I don't often start up conversations with strangers, but stuck during an interminable wait at O'Hare, I struck up a conversation with a women who used to live in in my hometown of San Francisco. We got to talking about one intersection on Russian Hill. She knew the intersection well, I knew the intersection well: the shops, the traffic patterns, the change during the day, the sounds - the entire urban ecosphere. This was a hyperlocal, connected conversation, and a pleasure for both of us.

The geo-web space is burgeoning, both online and for mobile devices, due to the distribution options. Wi-Fi and mobile hotspots, a-gps and cellphone triangulation puts you online most of the time. These stories are about connectivity, connections, and the local...and that means location.

One participant from a medium-sized paper in New York State took me up on my offer to walk her through the process. She thought it was cool and wanted to bring it into her newsroom. We soon hit the wall: systemic infrastructure issues like only administrators can add applications (standard operating procedure, that's why you need a laptop); firewalls keep links/emails out; older machines can't speedily process server-based apps. Old media entrenched. We need a new media framework. For me, one of the most important new media hallmark is, "Grab the gear and go do it yourself (Sound like Punk Rock?)...and make it multimedia." If you wait for things to happen from the top-down, I think you wait for a pink-slip.

I wanted to show this adventuress and oh-so-smart editorial writer how she could write a multimedia editorial, place it Google Earth, embed links, audio, video, comments, and then have it download so that any one could experience (you're not really reading) it. Unfortunately, over the phone and using company gear, we couldn't make it happen. But it got me thinking...

Then last week the New York Times and Google partnered to provide a NYT layer in Google Earth allowing you to track articles geographically. The New York Times is now part of the GE dataset included in the application. Their placemark includes headlines and first paragraphs with a link back to the website for the complete story. You can now browse New York Times news based on geography. Has the New York Times become hyperlocal, even though the content may not have that perspective. if all goes according to plan, the news will be updated every 15 minutes.

So, here is my story, and in true new media fashion, I made a YouTube video. Because it's a new media piece about the partnership, it should explain how you might use these tools yourself.

So says the video that launches, Urbanista Diaries, the second phase of the Nokia's advertising campaign for its N82 series phone. The first phase of the campaign followed four of Nokia's favorite bloggers on a trip around the world armed only with, "their wits, guile, and a Nokia N82 multimedia computer." (Two of the four were already blogging on Nokia and mobile devices, and all four skew toward mobile geekiness, although with a fair amount of the artiste sprinkled on top.) Their mission? Capture the stories and the beauty of the places they visited, making sure to use the N82 in the process. This the four did in relay form documenting over 22 stops.

The claim is made, more often than ever (especially by those companies having a vested interested in making the claim), that the convergence of gps, photography, video, and the web will change the way we experience our world, definitely changing how we report and document those experiences. As says Arto Joensuu, global e-marketing director at Nokia, "Urbanista Diaries offers... a great illustration of how the multimedia computer enriches your Internet experience by bringing context and location-based information to your reach."

In addition to instantly sharing mobile images through email and blogs, Nokia has integrated its Sports Tracker software into the concept; once installed on the mobile device (or to use Nokia terminology "multimedia computer") speed, distance, and time are automatically stored. Images taken with the camera can be instantly uploaded and placed on a map. With date, time, location, and images all tagged, you have the story.

For this second phase of the campaign, Nokia is partnering with four large media organizations: CNN, Wallpaper.com, National Geographic, and Lonely Planet. Anchor Richard Quest and techie Dale Fountain from CNN will be v- and mo-blogging the news from all over the world as part of inthefield.blogs.cnn.com. Wallpaper.com (online fashion and design site with print version of magazine) are reporting on fashion week in London, Paris and Milan in real time. From National Geographic, scientists Dr. Renée Friedman in Egypt, Biochemist Valerie Clark in Madagascar and Primatoloist Catherine Workman in Vietnam will be documenting their work using multimedia and mapping, and enabling in-the-field collaboration in real time. Pretty amazing. And finally, Lonely Planet will have five of its trekkers participating also.

It's important to note that the last four phones released by Nokia all contain integrated gps units. Garmin, the world's largest maker of gps devices recently developed the Nüvifone, its own phone. And with the iPhone, the big news in the latest update was the partnership with Skyhook Wireless, which brought its "location-aware," platform to the iPhone. The iPhone is now uses wifi hotspots and cellphone towers to triangulate location, good to within 20 meters.

Nokia is leaving the realm of geeky (but artistic) beta-testers and introducing gps-enabled and location-aware devices into traditional reporting environs like CNN and wallpaper.com. As handset makers embrace navigation and location-aware sensors as a standard part of mobile devices, more and more everyday people become multimedia documentarians: chroniclers of both time and place. Reporters and bloggers should be all over this...even if you think only in words.

Navigating life (and the news) has begun.

The system also enables construction companies to get location data early in the development process so that they can factor trees into the equation and thereby create protective measures before starting a project. In addition to protecting the trees, by including species, age, and height information for each tree and making the information publicly available online, the government hopes to raise awareness and engender stewardship by the citizenry, and perhaps building a more sustainable relationship between species and within the community.

The World Wildlife Fund has started this fabulous online geo-tagging project that is a melding the real with the virtual into a nearly perfect hybrid experience.

At the mybabytree.org website, we are rewarded with a very cute (sorry, but there is no other word that fits) animation that sheppards the visitor through the process of buying a sapling (or baby tree) to be planted in the Sebangau National Forest in Central Kalimantan, Indonesia. Through a very simple but elegant animation you are educated about the tree you chose (you have 3 choices), about the need for action, "the heart of Borneo's forest area is 1 of the only 2 places on Earth where orangutans, elephants and rhinoceros still co-exist," and about the process of buying, nurturing, and eventually planting the sapling in the forest.

While the idea is great, the execution brilliant (JWT did the creative), the social good unassailable, what makes this unlike any online donation site is the process that connects the donor with the tree. Once the tree is planted, it is a given a number, geo-tagged with lat/long coordinates, and located in a Google Earth kmz file, which is then sent to the donor.

Here's the Goggle Earth file of the project.

The Google Earth images will need to be updated to see the growth of the trees. Also, it would be very cool to see who else from around the world is planting trees. A really wonderful model is Kiva, a micro-lender supported by everyday people. For as little as $25, anyone can participate in online micro-lending. Kiva pools the small amounts and disperses the micro-loans through local agencies. Investors not only choose their region and entrepreneur, but they can see who else has donated to the same entrepreneur. The site is updated when a micro-loan payment is made. When the full amount has been paid back, investors can choose to reinvest or to pull out their funds. Additionally, online investors can leave messages, upload images, or be anonymous. It has the feel of a social networking site, but with a purpose greater than just chattering amongst ourselves.

I bought ten saplings in Indonesia for 5.50 a piece.
I invested in 8 micro-loans in Africa at $25 a piece.
And my OLPC XO came today.

Much of locative media work I do is with HP proprietary's Mediascape software. It's been in beta for a couple of years, but finally HP landed in a partnership with the UK's Futurelab in Bristol to put a friendly face (and GUI) on the software, and to develop educational and community-based projects that use it. The software is now called Create-a-Scape.

When HP Bristol and Futurelab partnered, the Mediascape software was updated/upgraded, repackaged, and rebranded to "Create-a-Scape," it became a great piece of software to create and experience mobile locative games. It made perfect sense; sometimes (especially for kids) it's not enough to just experience; there's got to be a goal, a reason to be.

Futurelab has long been one of my primary "go to," places for great ideas around the innovative uses of technology for community engagement. Futurelab focuses on R&D, but also on widespread implementation within the community. There's lots of info on the "how to," as well as hard evidence and practical advice born of actually doing the projects. Speaking to my interest are the many projects they develop that use locative media and mobile technologies. They have been the early adopters and innovators with projects like The Pleasurable Cities which investigates how cellphones and emerging technologies help create a dialog between citizens and their local community spaces.

When HP first approached me to create a project for the opening of the 8th International Digital Storytelling Festival in October, 2005, they were interested in seeing how digital storytellers would use this software and emerging technology to embed content in place. Two years later, the focus shifted to education, which means kids, which means games. Makes sense.

Not surprisingly, the conceptual prototypes of using games in an educational setting found solid footing with Henry Jenkins and Kurt Squire at MIT starting in 2001 with the Games to Teach project. This isn't a history of gaming in education, so I'll not feel obliged to run the gamut. The gamers among us know so much more that I, but I find it's becoming an integral part of mobile projects. The term Serious Games is in the vernacular, and we see games that teach, inform, and enlightened but are not necessarily in formal learning environments. They are being used to teach more traditional organizational change issues like Systems Thinking, Collaborative Learning, Leadership, and Professional Development. There are Games for Health being built for healthcare applications and to explore new ways to improve global healthcare. Games are also being designed to effect positive social change which is the social change/social issues branch of the Serious Games Initiative.

I see the merging of the two: mobile gaming but in a serious way, the goal being to better understand the place in which we live and the community spaces we inhabit. Maybe it's community oriented geo-caching or digital treasure hunting, maybe it's creating your own digital overlay on the physical spaces you inhabit, thereby sharing the embedded cultural knowledge we all have.

The second way to locate your device is how Apple is doing it. Late to the game and experimenting with workarounds, location-based applications found form at this year's MacWorld when Apple announced a software update for the iPhone that allows iPhoners to find their location via a system of triangulation of wifi access points and cell-towers. They made a licensing deal with Skyhook, a Boston start-up to use their positioning system. (Software is already available for most smart phones not gps-enabled through Navizon, a peer-to-peer wireless system.)

We are not yet to the point of embedding content in place, but locative media concepts have led Apple to the next step. Apple has filed for a patent that lets folks request Point A to Point B directions, thereby creating a neo-navigation system. The process is a little convoluted, but you request directions from Point A to Point B, that info is then sent to a "pod map" creator, something akin to a server which returns text based directions, puts it through speech recognition software, aligns it to map images, and then outputs a podcast.

While the patent and concept moves Apple a little closer to location-based features; it is without real "locative" innovation because the location data isn't real time. There is no auto-update to give a real time, approximation of your location. It is matching maps with voice, but only statically. These podcasts can't be much more than animated hard-copy directions because they are not based on the current location, and not delivered on the fly. They are static, stuck in time, and based on where you were, not where you are. What happens if a turn is missed? There is no recalculating. What happens if a street is closed? Can't figure out the best workaround route because there is no real-time location update available.

A researcher at Chrysler told me that navigational systems in cars have an 80%-20% rule, only it's more like 95%-5%. 95% of the time gps is used by 5% of the people, and the majority of those folks are salesmen, and on the road most of the time. 95% of the time we get into our car, we know how to get to where we are going, and don't need directions. This may be changing as features like "best route" and "congestion avoidance" are added, but still seems to ring true.

In the end, you learn what is being done with the technology, and then you ponder what could be done with the technology. Suggestions for what could be done: have driving tours of historic areas; customize theme music as you drive through certain neighborhoods (the Motor City pops to mind); newsworthy and located current events. If we can have navigation systems that deliver real-time directions (linking voice files to place and delivering it in real time), there's no good reason why we can't use the same system to deliver meaningful content - just change the content from "turn left in a half a mile on Avenue A," to, say, Martin Luther King's Speech at the Great March on Detroit in June 1963 (with his good friend the Reverend C.L. Franklin sitting with him on the platform and daughter Aretha's music in the background) and hear instead, "The only answer that we can give to that is that the motor's now cranked up and we're moving up the highway of freedom toward the city of equality and we can't afford to stop now because our nation has a date with destiny. We must keep moving."

Suppose this is how we used the technology?

Paul makes great point about who determines perspective. In my field of digital storytelling, we often talk about what I call "the fading glory of the third person editorial overlay." Just look at community-created content; it's a form whose hallmark is the lack of editorial overlay, which may or may not be appropriate, but often the lack of distance between the story and the storyteller (first-person vs. third-person) is what makes stories so profound. This lack of distance is especially relevant when cultural understanding play an intricate role in the story.

Video games that use real places as the gaming space are also referred to as Augmented Reality Games (ARG). These games are now finding their way into formal learning environments, at least as pilot projects. Acceptance is yet to come, but as we wait, I think we should leapfrog and head into the future we know is coming. I'd like to suggest we shepard the gaming environment from an online presence into a real world presence and develop place-based video games...and drag journalism kicking and screaming with it.

Here is a video of an Augmented Reality Game. Created by HP for their mscape software, this game combines the world of gadgets, gaming software, and location-technologies. This video is a little frenetic for my taste (it was created for a gamer's convention), but it is illustrative.

Folks at Harvard, MIT and UW-Madison have been developing place-based video games played on mobile devices since 2004. These games are not only built for mobile devices, but they also use gps or other locative technologies. The great minds in education and pedagogy (especially Dewey and Friere) would find it difficult to comprehend the lunacy that is the foundation of our secondary educational system, but I suspect they could easily imagine using video games and mobile devices for learning.

One aspect that often gets lost in the "gaming," discussion is the fun and the openness to new situations that gaming allows. It's easier to accept different ideas, to role-play, to create worlds that allow different options and to reflect on those options with a more open mind. The gaming space in the real world is open, it can be developed, an ecology can be built. This makes learning experiential and has the potential for deeper understanding.

A recent article, Mobile Phone, not PC, Bridges Digital Gap by Mark Dean, Vice-President of the IBM Almaden Research Center and the man who is as much responsible for IBM PC as anyone, says he is "confident that the PC age is drawing to a close. Connectivity trumps processing power in this new era." While he spoke specifically of Africa (mobile phone growth has gone from 10 million in 200 million in the last 4 years), I can't help believe connectivity will also equal, if not trump, processing power here. Even here, the next generation is demanding innovative ways to deliver information that is contextual and moves with them. And if they aren't, well, they will be. I'd lay cash on the grave of McCluhan that gps-enabled devices will start determining content any day now. And it won't just be the content, or the delivery mechanism, it will be how much of that content is located and is participatory.

Such is great news for those of us who believe that connecting content to place is a form of geo-culture that will reinvigorate the places we inhabit, the information we gather and share, and the stories we tell.

Drug dealers and international espionage rings, yes, but we need to recognize that ubiquitous networks allow pervasive surveillance of us all using any number of sensor devices and readers, but primarily gps and blue-tooth. No way to stem the tide, but we do need to be aware of the how our concept of privacy is changing and the degree to which we can, and are, under surveillance, and by whom. Acknowledging that it is being done and having a basic understanding of how (so that we can thwart if we so choose) should be required. Not surprisingly, the conceptual artists are the first folks asking the questions and exploring possible answers by creating somewhat wild projects. So, here's: Loca: Set To Discoverable, an arts-based group project on grass-roots, pervasive surveillance which seeks to expose the disconnect between people and the trails of digital identities they leave behind.

Loca asks how people respond to being tracked and observed. How ready are they to observe others? Who is the user, and how? Do we get fear of surveillance, disinterest, scopophobia or scopophilia? What happens in-between physical, embodied space and the digital space of abstract data?









Film produced by Drew Hemment. Loca is an artist-led project on grass-roots, pervasive surveillance by John Evans (UK/Finland), Drew Hemment (UK), Theo Humphries (UK), Mike Raento (Finland). The premier full presentation of Loca: Set To Discoverable at ISEA2006 and ZeroOne in August 2006 combined art installation, software engineering, activism, pervasive design, hardware hacking, SMS poetry, sticker art and ambient performance.

Recent discussions in locative media at the Center for Locative Media around the next-step need for categorizing and contextualizing locative media. As I mentioned before, locative media got its start in the art world. Avant-garde and conceptual artists, grasping early the potential that new and emerging technologies enabled, wanted to use the landscape as a material and to embed content in place. With art leading the way through brilliantly conceived projects, it wasn't long before the less artistic but equally community-minded jumped into the frey. Well, yes, here I am believing that locative media can engender civic-engagement, can reconnect people to their community, and, ultimately, and most importantly, revolutionize the way we educate and inform through mlearning.

In practice and in theory, categories blend and we get a hybrid version that might eventually be woven into some sort of ecology of locative media theory and practice.

Geo-annotation refers to marking physical spaces via embedded messages, usually short and information based. When contextualizing locative media within a civic engagement framework, this is often the default lens. We ask: Does information embedded in place substantially effect individual behavior toward that place?

Spatial or place-based narratives are longer, more nuanced, often more personal. These narratives have their beginnings in the theory and the practice of the flâneurs and the situationists, are semiotic in nature, often take information and add a reflective component, adding meaning to information.

Augmented reality, (we're using piece of a larger definition for our context), focuses its eye on the technology, giving a decided nod to the devices that we use, especially the melding of gps units and PDAs/smartphones. We hear phrases like "the place is the interface." (I guess I get it.) The process follows this syllogistic path: if we can overlay information on place, then we can overlay vast amounts of information on palce, then we can network these vast amounts of information, then we'll really have something. Although what that something is, I'm not yet sure.

Not yet knowing, and moving ahead anyway, well, that's the idea.

Like locative media, location-based games take place outside. Due to this connection to the physical world, exploring how locative-based games and locative media can inform each other should be fruitful. How can online engagement contribute to a deeper off-line experience. Or, as we used to say, can it contribute to a deeper engagement with the "real world." We've started to look at the theories and theorists around space, place, and fun.

We do know that the opportunity to use the street as an environment so engaged gamers and enlivened gaming that gaming become (pick your favorite adjective) pervasive, immersive, or ubiquitous. But, if we look back, there is the history...nothing emerges fully formed on the half-shell. Geocaching was one of the first and most successful location-based games. At last count, there are 480,000 registered geocaches in 222 countries on all seven continents. But even geocaching has its
roots in the earlier outdoor game letterboxing, traced to Dartmoor, England and popular during the 1850s. Letterboxing was a strange mixture of orienteering and puzzling, more akin to exploration than to the current mobile multi-player locative games (MMPLG), where the focus is on adding real-life environment in the game play. The point of MMPLGs is not to change the dynamic nature of online gaming, but to put that frenetic energy into the physical world. Locative media has a stronger connection to geocaching and letterboxing than it does to MMPLGs - more philosophical, more geographical, and more reflective.

Still figuring out how to implement the best of both in locative projects.