Search Solutions 2009

I recently attended the Search Solutions 2009 one day conference. For an excellent summary of a very interesting day take a look at Karen's recent blog post

For me, 'a star of the show' was Dave Mountain's enthralling discussion, "Location-Based Services: Positioning, Geocontent and Location-Aware Applications". Dave looked at location based services, their current uses and future possibilities. One aspect, which sparked heated debate over coffee, was the very real security implications of having your position pinpointed to a couple of metres. Location Based Services will I think continue to grow and meld together with social applications such as Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, e-commerce and mobile devices. We will increasingly know where the nearest coffee shop is to our location in terms of direct route, time taken to get there etc. Add to this the possibility that everyone else will know where you are in real time and what you're doing and you have a world of many information and privacy challenges. I wonder whether we'll end up with people paying a surcharge to cloak themselves from all this information gathering?

If you want to know more about the world of Geocontent and Location Aware Applications Dave Mountain is a great person to talk to.

Ian

This post was previously posted on Taxonomy Watch