This is a follow-up to the Skinnable World post -- a few hacks and papers are making their way through the blogosphere that seem worthy of mention:
First and most memeworthy seem to be those related to extending Google Maps to deeper functionality and greater potential for folksonomic markup (for much, much more on folksonomies, see Many-to-Many). Google Maps has added satellite images, which were marked up with personal narratives related to the spaces by the Flikr group Memory Maps, and then Craig's List apartment listings were scraped and integrated into Google Maps. Fun.
Now if all this data could be aggregated easily and legally, you could visit a new town, ask your PDA where to the best pizza is, then ask your PDA to find out who's selling any apartments next door to the pizza place, and then surf the local histories of those who have noted the pizza place where you're eating--ambient digital ambiance. You can do that now of course, it would just take a few clicks. The phenomenon of meatspace metadata tagging will surely be condensed into a much neater and snazzier tech conference buzzword. (Maybe two or three.)
If you're wondering what might happen when we all get magic markers to start Annotating the Planet (thanks, Jerry), check out thoughts from Doug Rushkoff or this from the Economist (paid sub). And then compare the futuristic musings to this investigation by Timo Arnall of "old school" meatspace markups (more & related from Anne Galloway) or to the international artistic spin put on the tagging medium by Nick Monfort and Scott Rettenberg. So is any of this as new as it seems?
Anyway, one question is: should the virtual worlds crew here feel disappointed by the Internet's fascination with real space? After all, isn't the whole point of the Net the collapse of physical space? That's what we've been pushing here: five people share a cafe in cyberspace while their bodies may be, for all they know (cue dramatic music)... on separate continents! We easily claim virtual worlds as Terra Nova, a new geography, based on the real, but offering new possibilities. Still, these old spatial habits die hard and remain rather significant. As David Post pointed out in Against Against Cyberanarchy, the question of the Internet as a separate place might be framed as a question of effects. My assertion would be that the effects of Internet activity in Singapore, are still felt, by and large, in Singapore. Until we find the working Babel fish, language alone, if law and geographic shards don't do the trick, will still make the global Internet a significantly local affair.
I suppose what the future heralds can't be the triumph of the local or the virtual -- it has to be a blending, where local spaces become more vibrant with information, but cyberspace retains its inherent (collapsed/virtually expanded) nature. In other words, one will need to know the way to San Jose to be there, but one will not need to be there to geosurf the community's digital skin.
