Monday, March 13, 2006

The Virtual Life 2.0
Mashups: Tracking Packages, Tracking Life 

Toilet locations on the London Underground.


Thinking about last week's google maps for educators blog while a guy on the radio explores the new dynamic model for mashups (old: mixing content; new: mixing tools and data to create dynamic content) gets the brain going despite slight illness.

Radio guy's example -- mapping craigslist apartments against Google Maps -- leads to an evening drifting through other examples, from Mashup Camp 2006 crowd fave Podbop (choose a city, learn what bands are playing in town that day) to the vast volume of 1.0 mashups on YouTube (video) and HypeMachine (music).

Family Watchdog lets you map homes and photos of sex offenders. Even Warner Music has gotten into the act, releasing new Fort Minor single audio elements for remix in a desperate grab for popularity and sales.

Which, in turn, leads to a daydream about mashups I wish existed.

You know, like Groundhog Day mashed with the Matrix. A combination of google maps with the current location of all my old girlfriends (with disease vector models to follow, once the demand for realpartners among teenagers transcends MySpace). Mixing virtual blueprints with RFID tags on all your stuff, so you really can have that googlehouse you always wanted.

Turns out much of this can been done, if you're willing to put in the time. Introducing Platial, a social atlas space/tool which helps you build and share "location-based" stories and information online. I found it looking for some examples of mashups to contextualize my own list; currently, it includes gems from the historical (women who changed the world) to the subjective (weird things that happened to me). No surprise: it's via lifehacker, recommended in his own right, and not just for his google maps taglist.

Of course, you do have to know the information you want to plot. Guess the Ex-Girlfriend mapping tool will have to wait.

In the meantime, there's always isolatr, the new antisocial networking tool for those who have had quite enough of the socialweb.

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• Also Reading: map mashup clearinghouse GoogleMapsMania; wry popcult metanoise at panopticist.
  
  
• Listening to: Petra Haden, God Only Knows.

posted by boyhowdy | 7:26 PM |

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