Comments on: Could foursquare empower people to break commercial advantage? http://citizensheep.com/blog/2009/11/24/could-foursquare-empower-people-to-break-commercial-advantage/ Michael Grimes lives in Birmingham (UK). This is his blog about anything that he fancies. Wed, 18 Apr 2012 15:50:19 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.3.2 By: Michael http://citizensheep.com/blog/2009/11/24/could-foursquare-empower-people-to-break-commercial-advantage/comment-page-1/#comment-11890 Michael Wed, 02 Dec 2009 11:23:13 +0000 http://citizensheep.com/blog/?p=1990#comment-11890 <p>PS: I didn't mean to suggest you were saying that we <em>should </em>wait for a better solution!</p> PS: I didn’t mean to suggest you were saying that we should wait for a better solution!

]]> By: Michael http://citizensheep.com/blog/2009/11/24/could-foursquare-empower-people-to-break-commercial-advantage/comment-page-1/#comment-11889 Michael Wed, 02 Dec 2009 11:21:52 +0000 http://citizensheep.com/blog/?p=1990#comment-11889 <p>Adrian, I agree completely. But I do think we should be encouraging the use of these tools to leave this sort of information, rather than waiting for a better solution.</p> Adrian, I agree completely. But I do think we should be encouraging the use of these tools to leave this sort of information, rather than waiting for a better solution.

]]> By: Adrian Short http://citizensheep.com/blog/2009/11/24/could-foursquare-empower-people-to-break-commercial-advantage/comment-page-1/#comment-11883 Adrian Short Wed, 02 Dec 2009 10:33:13 +0000 http://citizensheep.com/blog/?p=1990#comment-11883 While it might be a temporary solution and thus better than nothing, ultimately we want to move beyond proprietary services for urban annotation or any other type of content. It's really just a content + metadata + search problem. Your content about a place could be a blog post, tweet, Facebook status update, photo, Boo, or whatever. The metadata needs to record the location and have the semantic that the content is <em>about</em> the place, not simply recorded/posted <em>in</em> the place. After that it's just a case of having appropriate search tools that will pull up all the content tagged at that location. <a href="http://blog.twitter.com/2009/11/think-globally-tweet-locally.html" rel="nofollow">Twitter's new geolocation API</a> is a step forward and works with Foursquare and other location-based services. An alternative approach that doesn't rely on accurately determining the user's location is to give every thing a unique ID (possibly a URI), make that ID readable visually and/or with a barcode/RFID and allow people to use that ID as metadata for content. eg. this post is about http://things.demo/brindleyplace-atm While it might be a temporary solution and thus better than nothing, ultimately we want to move beyond proprietary services for urban annotation or any other type of content.

It’s really just a content + metadata + search problem.

Your content about a place could be a blog post, tweet, Facebook status update, photo, Boo, or whatever.
The metadata needs to record the location and have the semantic that the content is about the place, not simply recorded/posted in the place.

After that it’s just a case of having appropriate search tools that will pull up all the content tagged at that location. Twitter’s new geolocation API is a step forward and works with Foursquare and other location-based services.

An alternative approach that doesn’t rely on accurately determining the user’s location is to give every thing a unique ID (possibly a URI), make that ID readable visually and/or with a barcode/RFID and allow people to use that ID as metadata for content.

eg. this post is about http://things.demo/brindleyplace-atm

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