Social Geotagging

Social Geotagging is all about exploring human interactions that merge multiple streams of data with place and locatablity. Not simply Geotagging which is a more structured and somewhat static approach but the layering of  experience, relationships, art, culture and business over a moving tapestry of landscape both physical and human.

There are three core areas which we will initially address:

• Explore the provision of location based content both commercial and community based
• Discuss how users can best share information, create community, and generally push the boundaries within and around a geo-spatial context
• Investigate the rules and schema's required to define, develop and connect meeting and social networking tools

Like the PC enabled the information revolution, Social Geotagging is possible due to the increasing availably of GPS capable devices and the increasing maturity of the online environment as evidenced by the increasing numbers of online location projects and applications such as geocaching and Flickr.

On a purely practical level there are more mechanisms available for users to locate themselves and it is now clear that the market place is poised to achieve a critical mass in the availability of GPS enabled consumer devices. As Nokia alone expects to sell 35 Million GPS Phones in 2008, the iPhone is now GPS enabled and Google's Android is just around the corner.

Matthew King