Potholes and the Geo Web

We have a very cool new site design that's slowly rolling out this week at outside.in (along with an entirely new database architecture and other back-end refinements), and given that it's almost exactly a year since we launched the original prototype, I thought it was about time I tried to write out some of my thinking about the geographic web as it has evolved over that time. So I've written a little essay called "The Pothole Paradox: Why Building The Geographic Web Is Hard, and Why It's Worth Doing":

The idea of requiring geographic metadata for information might strike some people as excessive, but I suspect in a few years we will look back at the first decade of the web and be amazed that we went for so long without it. Think about it this way: both email and the Web depend on standardized location information embedded in every document -- we call them email and Web "addresses" for a reason. It's a virtual location, of course, but without that universally recognized location data, the last fifteen years of online innovation would have never happened.

We are also increasingly standardizing metadata for time. One of the things that is not commonly said about the blogging revolution is that it has introduced machine-readable time stamps for billions of web pages. One of the things that made Blogger such a breakthrough product was not that it made it easy to put up a web page and publish your thoughts -- home page building tools had been doing that for years -- but rather the fact that it let you publish a reverse chronological list of your thoughts.

So we have widely adopted metadata for virtual location and for time. We just haven't made the same breakthrough for real-world location. This has resulted in a strange imbalance in the way we interact with information on our screens, and in our expectations about what should be readily available to us.

Anyhow, there's a lot there, so check it out and let me know what you think!

Comments

[PD Smith]

Hi Steven - outside.in is a wonderful concept! Is there any chance it will spread beyond the US. It would be great to see it here in the UK...

[Rob Lusardi]

I'm not sure it really is that strange that this hasn't happened yet. Blogging hasn't been around all that long, let alone tagging. Email clients and OS's still haven't embraced tagging (I know it's there in OS X, but it's not easy). So, at least to me, it's not too surprising that "real-world location" tagging hasn't caught on yet. On top of it being new, I see two other possible obstacles (or, maybe "mental blocks" is a better phrase - at least for me). First, what do you do with posts that don't relate to any one location. Take your post above, for example - does it make sense to tag it as "Brooklyn"? Second, I still feel a disconnect between talking about the real within the virtual. It's easy for me to talk with my neighbors about local stuff, but seems strange talking about that on my personal blog (not that anyone reads it anyway). And this is from someone that has been writing a neighborhood-specific blog for the last year and a half. This is my own hang up that I need to overcome, but I'm sure I'm not alone.

BTW: the new design looks great, I'll have to ping Cory about it also ...

[Okapi]

Story inconsistent w/ the thesis from "Everything Bad is Good for You":

"(...)Americans — particularly young Americans — appear to be reading less for fun, and as that happens, their reading test scores are declining(...)"

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/19/arts/19nea.html?em&ex=1195707600&en=19c57bbd70b9bb6a&ei=5087%0A

[Idoia]

Hi again (i am the spanish publisher working on the translation of the Ghost Map, we met in Barcelona..) just found this on the web http://www.panoramio.com/ it is a spanish company that has been bought recently by google. It remind me of something you said about the geographic web... The Translation is ready, if you want i would love to send you a copy as soon as it is printed.
Bests,
Idoia

[roger]

It looks like a pretty quality project. It would be interesting to see who's blogging in my area. I'll see if we can get the moderators at http://www.politicsforumpoliticalworld.com/ to see if they can implement this link as well. Thanks! :)