Category: Technology

As a regular listener to Steve Gillmors’ Gillmor Gang podcast, I have become familiar with the concept of Attention, which is now entering the technology mainstream with a good writeup in MIT’s Technology Review

Attention as a concept is a realisation that with the massive increase in content on the internet, both professional and “consumer” generated, what we as users chose as sources of useful information actually has value.

What a community of knowledgeable individuals has an interested in, their combined attention has enormous value for other users – who need to know the current “in-thing”. This attention is also of interest to the marketing and advertising industries which are driving the economy of Web 2.0, having much more value that the simplistic view of page views as a measure of eyeballs!

To see attention at work just look at the ‘Hot Tags” at a site like Technorati, which to a certain extent express the combined attention of the blogging community. Likewise you purchase history at itunes, amazon etc, your shared bookmarks at del.icio.us are also manifestations of your attention.

There is a growing concern that such attention information, because of its value, needs protection and the development of the Attention Trust to raise awareness of the issue is very timely.

So where does this discussion interact with the world of geospatial information, well…

Did you realise how much information the developers of Geographic Exploration Systems and web mapping applications have the ability to collect, based on how you interact with their systems?

They know which parts of the planet you virtually visit with the most frequency, when you produce mapping of a particular area, and where you then next produce mapping for, they know where you are from IP location processing and potentially much more if you have registered to use their systems.

I wonder what the value to a marketing company would be to know the most popular searched location for IT workers in Denver, or after looking a maps of Las Vegas Strip the next location visited by the majority of users was ….

Remember your attention has value !!

Written and submitted from home, using my home 802.11 network.

My wife Lisa, loves the Channel 4 TV programme Location, Location, Location in which Phil and Kirstie our friendly property experts, try to find a new house for a member of the general public who think they know what they want, but almost always don’t have enough money.

I mention this, as today I attended the Location Intelligence Conference, and was on a panel discussing “For how long will spatial data be free” – the short answer is that is isn’t now and it never will be!! – more on this in a later post…

Anyway Phil and Kirstie come into this because I was amazed at the number of mash-ups presented which were ‘Real Estate” applications, clearly the first real mash-up of Google Maps and Craigs List was groundbreaking, but over a year later I was looking for a bit more innovation.

Maybe this is a reflection of where the money is, the excellent theme of the conference is profiting from Location Intelligence Technology, and clearly there is a real market here which can be addressed by tools build using Microsoft Live Local technology for example. But in many ways the mash-up session felt like a similar session 10 years ago, when the same applications were developed using the first generation of desktop GIS, the technology has changed but the commercial markets are the same ?

Eye Candy remains important, and the best audience response was reserved for the wonderful “Pirate map” interface developed using the Yahoo Flash api.

An interesting question was posed at the final Q&A session of the day, and was left unsurprisingly unanswered… When will there be a standard mapping api adopted by all the portal vendors so that an application developed using google local, would work with MapQuest and Microsoft ?

Written and submitted from the Parc 55 Hotel, San Francisco, using the hotels broadband connection.