First we started to explore, then quickly we needed to figure out where we were and we've been building increasing numbers ever more sophisticated maps, guide books and other sources of location based information ever since. The extension of this location based information to mobile Internet enabled devices is the obvious next step and potentially huge market. Just think of all the location based data people pay for:

• Mapping probably the biggest market segment, and the first which we'll see device convergence. Look to see the traditional GPS hardware/software become applications for the current and next generation devices.
• Reviews A common feature of newspapers, local and region
• Business Directories again, think of the big yellow book of business for every area. It's one of the most common things to look for in an area.
• Travel Guides More than just reviews, travel guides also provide us with areas of interest and all of that is very useful in an up to date online service

All of this is pretty obvious and most of it exists now. The problem up to now has been the walled garden approach taken by the mobile phone companies. They had the ability to determine position, but wanted to charge for it. Unfortunately for us consumers, charging for that data has meant that for the most part services would need to turn a profit for every single request, from the start or they'd be very expensive to develop and very quickly. Mobile data has recently become very cheap and new devices with integrated ability to determine their location is having a profound impact on the mobile landscape. They're allowing us to build services which instead of answering the question: where is my nearest X, will let us explore the area around us. Mapping the wealth of knowledge on the internet to physical locations and allowing us to actually input data when we're most likely to want to - when we're actually there. From experience, when I'm out there the data I want most is about out there.

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Location based services, another area where there is certainly a case to be made for someone to make it suck less and probably a number of successful application to build on it.

Why it sucks

Location services suck because it's inherently hard to map the collection of information on the Internet to physical locations. Most of it just wont map because it's not about something physical. It's obvious, but true - most of the Internet isn't about a place, or a thing that is likely to stay in one place. This post for example, or this blog's homepage - neither are about anything specific. My house isn't It's hard to map because language is imprecise, physical location isn't. When you're looking for a nearby restaurant a blog post with a review of a restaurant in London probably won't give you an address and probably won't even link to a site that will. It's become the job of search to try and link the post, a very difficult job - was the post about London, England; London in Ontario or one of the dozens of other Londons around the world. At best the search engine might be able to link the name with another URL that contains an address - but there are no guarantees the name is unique or the address is right. Sending letters for physical addresses with an activation code is one approach Google has tried, I'm not sure how successful it's been though - I haven't noticed locations search has stopped sucking, so I assume it's not the silver bullet.

Sucking less

How to go about fixing it? If I knew the answer I'd be coding the solution right now and wouldn't be sitting her writing and thinking about it. The rise of location aware internet devices It's inevitable, the rise of the iPhone, Andriod phones and other location away devices with Internet connections mean people are going to want to consume location based resources. Though they're not the first phones on the market to do any of this, they're game changing because they're the first platforms that make it easy to consume and more importantly produce location based content. The other key ingredient these platforms offer is a browser, not just a cut down browser - a real browser, with tabs and javascript and all the trimmings! Like any good problem, this one can be solved with metadata! We've got the consumers with their million plus iPhones, we've got the producers who all want to start geo tagging. The problem is how do we link the two and how do we make it easy? We've got a few standards for location tagging document, but no clear forerunner.

Suddenly it doesn't suck anymore

Services for producers and users to announce and tie information to physical locations is going to be the catalyst that really makes local search and local information portals of all kinds take off. It won't be long until someone comes along with a killer solution.

I have a real problem with bookmarks. Actually I have a few problems with bookmarks: There are too many, they're a mess, they don't make any sense and I can't search them. Basically they're a good idea, really badly implemented. I have a list of bookmarks, I try to keep them organised but there are hundreds every few months I have to go through and throw some away. The clutter in my bookmarks also leads to bad habits. If it's something I want to read later, I drag a link to my desktop or I put it in a read later folder. These quickly grow out of hand. Then I start getting protective and avoid saving links, dooming myself to searching for them again. Lately, using Google Reader I've come up against another problem - I'm building a whole new set of bookmarks in the form of starred items, except these are completely separate from the rest of my browsing but I keep doing it because it's easy and I can search them. When it comes down to it my problem is basically simple, I can't ever find anything again! It's even worse if it's something I've found via searches because it might be weeks or months later I try to find the page again and it's likely that the Google's index will have changed in that time. So my searching for something I've seen gets harder. Bookmarking the page doesn't usually make it easier, there is no frame of reference. Unless I've set the title to something useful a lot of the time I find it hard to find things again because lot of the time with hundreds to go through, or I've cleaned it out and it doesn't exist anymore anyway. I've tried delicious and other similar tools, and I like them, tagging my links makes them infinitely more searchable. But it doesn't go quite far enough - it still has a feeling of permanence and exclusivity to it when I tag something and I don't always want to share everything I tag. The other problem with social bookmarking and tagging sites is they provide a tag for me, but no context. So days, weeks or months later unless I've tagged the site well I may or may not be able to find it. I thought I saw a site that indexed the links from delicious, but I seem to have lost it and can't find it again(You see what I mean!). What I really want to see is a site that lets me star or bookmark a page or RSS feed and I want it to index my little corner of the web.