Mapping Hacks

A few days ago I blogged about the NPR show on the geospatial web amongst other things, mentioning that Julian Bleeker had appeared on it. But he didn’t; the show ran out of time before his voice could be heard. Apologies for introducing false information onto the internet; serves me right for talking about things i’ve only heard others talk about on IRC.

I asked Julian if he had any messages that he was fond of and that “Mapping Hacks” could help rebroadcast. He pointed me particularly to these notes he took during a recent talk that Mike Liebhold gave to his class at the University of Southern California: Service Ecologies and the Geospatial Web. As befits the protagonists, it presents a very far-forward looking view of “where all this may be ultimately heading”. The following commentary caught my eye:

What is interesting here? There’s a software ecology and an industry ecology and a bit of confusion amongst them. Or maybe it’s that the two “ecologies” don’t overlap in that the industry ecology does not open up their platforms to the software ecology. Walled garden problem.

I see this in a lot of of places i look. The idea that it’s possible to take an object or activity you enjoy, and adapt it or contribute to it, is nothing new to software developers. For years it’s been leaking into different domains that are very directly affected by software - music and video production especially. It seems like the principle is spreading out into more domains; this was something the organisers of Wsfii have been trying to show-and-tell. “Closed systems” with infrastructure inherited more or less intact from early industrial capitalism react, for the most part, by throwing up more walls, using patents and copyright more strenuosly to defend walled gardens of “accepted” practise.

Back to Julian Bleeker’s research blog, which i was pretty amazed by; he grounds the field of “mobile social software” in a reality of practise, and has a sharp eye for interesting things on the intersection of locative technology, media arts and urban planning; the entries have a lot of detail for their frequency, and most carry a thoughtful rationale as to why do i blog this?

I’ve always felt pretty ambivalent about the hype surrounding “mobile social software”: so many implementations are dependent on having the means to acquire the latest shiny device, usually sold at an unsustainable short-term loss which is recouped via the highest charges for data traffic that the market will bear. But the insights about service ecologies and the geospatial web definitely burst out of the West Coast bubble and project some of the lasting value in a field that can be very dominated by telco-funded, handwaving arts and academic research efforts.

cholmes’ recent commentary on why location matters and how the headmap manifesto helped click this into place for him, takes some of these thoughts a lot further: the potential of location to bring the internet out of the virtual and into reality, and to bring some of the ideas flourishing in it into reality as well.

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