Neogeography and the Palimpsests of Place: Web 2.0 and the Construction of a Virtual Earth

My article accepted to the Journal of Economic and Social Geography (Tijdschrift voor Economische en Sociale Geografie) entitled "Neogeography and the Palimpsests of Place: Web 2.0 and the Construction of a Virtual Earth" has just been published online. The print version should appear in volume 101 or 102 of the journal early next year. A pre-publication version is available at the following link, and feel free to email me for the final version of the article. The abstract is as follows:

Places have always been palimpsests. The contemporary is constantly being constructed upon the foundations of the old. Yet only recently has place begun to take on an entirely new dimension. Millions of places are being represented in cyberspace by a labor force of hundreds of thousands of writers, cartographers, and artists. This article traces the history and geography of virtual places. The virtual Earth is not a simple mirror of its physical counterpart, but is instead characterized by both black holes of information and hubs of rich description and detail. The tens of millions of places represented virtually are part of a worldwide engineering project that is unprecedented in scale or scope and made possible by contemporary Web 2.0 technologies. The virtual Earth that has been constructed is more than just a collection of digital maps, images, and articles that have been uploaded into Web 2.0 cyberspaces; it is instead a fluid and malleable alternate dimension that both influences and is influenced by the physical world.

Talk: Ethical Consumption and the Online Peer Production of Transparency

I will be giving a talk to the School of Geography and the Environment at the University of Oxford on Nov 10. The talk is titled "Ethical Consumption and the Online Peer Production of Transparency." More details here.

The Google Barcode Doodle: A Harbinger of the Internet of Things?

In celebration of the 57th anniversary of the first bar code patent, Google have altered their homepage to feature a barcode instead of the familiar Google logo. This temporary redisgn (or Doodle) is actually a fairly common occurrence: past doodles have featured crop circles, Michael Jackson, Samuel Morse, Nikola Tesla, and a range of other people and things. Previous Doodles have always played with the letters that make up 'Google,' The letters have been rearranged, reshaped, and sometimes even reordered. But with enough imagination would still always form the word 'Google.'

However, today, we get vertical black lines. These lines are easily encodable using Code 128 (a standard way of encoding ASCII character strings into bar code), but absolutely meaningless to a human being without a bar code scanner. It seems that today's Google Doodle is somewhat more meaningful than the 57th anniversary of a bar code patent (who celebrates a 57th birthday anyway?). The Doodle is a harbinger of the coming Internet of Things and a machine-readable world (a topic I've previously blogged about in detail). Google is undoubtedly ready for an Internet in which it not only indexes much of the material (i.e. non-virtual) world, but also allows code to perform searches. Before long, our ovens might be Googling for recipes and cars might be Googling for mechanics, and searches performed through Google's ASCII interface could become a small part of the work that their algorithms are carrying out.

GPS Real-World Gaming in Hybrid Space

A real-time, multiplayer, GPS game for mobiles is being played out in the real-world. The game, played by groups of four or five people, uses a one kilometer radius around any point on Earth to delineate spatial extents in which three or four chasers try to capture one runner. Each one of the players is tracked via a GPS phone and their coordinates are mashed onto a map that they can all see. The only twist that that the runner is always allowed to view the map, whilst the chasers only have access to the map every six minutes. The game is a fascinating way to roll elements of the physical and virtual together into an adrenaline-pumped experience.

What's next? Fast Foot Challenge is essentially a high-tech version of tag. But, more complex games combining the physical and virtual worlds are already starting to appear. A variety of shoot-em-ups in which the mobile phone is used as a gun have been designed, and it seems only a matter of time until we start seeing a lot more of the Earth and our daily lived environments being used as a setting for interactive games. Let's just hope we don't ever see Grand Theft Auto ported over into real cars in the real world.