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A blog by Fabien Girardin used for his Ph.D. thesis on collaboration in the context of mobile and ubiquitous environments

A point of interest for the Geoinclinated.

It would see Yahoo increasing its visibility to Orange’s mobile users and attractiveness to search advertisers, as well as providing a better opportunity to sell location-based services.

Google, which has already struck deals with T-Mobile and Vodafone, told The Times earlier this year that the firm’s mobile division will soon become its biggest driver of new business.

Usability is a notorious issue on mobiles, but Google says is testing “dozens” of new search-related products to be used solely on mobiles and PDAs.

collecting and finding stuff seems to be a recurent pattern in game-design; both in video games but also in pervasive games in which collection has been used to make people wander around in the physical environment (promising potential virtues like… meeting new people or discovering new places; unfortunately this failed but that’s another story). The reason why I am blogging this is that I am always wondering about how to go beyond collecting (I’m tired of collective treasure hunts in location-based games), there must be a more original paradigm.

To get back to the notion of annotating space -- I would argue that people will annotate space much like they annotate the web, or annotate their photos... More in a notebook sense, a journaling sense. The annotations are explicitly *not* "meant for other people" -- they're meant for yourself, they only have to make sense for yourself, and if others stumble across them, great, fine.

I'm surprised by how many people will provide book reviews on Amazon, movie reviews on IMDB, restaurant reviews on Citysearch, etc. These people are using reviews as a way to both share with a larger community and to do some journaling for themselves. It's similar to traditional blogging. A friend of mine and I started a website a couple months ago to allow people to describe places in San Francisco using blog-like entries, maps, tags, and photos. Initially, we thought that people would use the site primarily to criticize or review places but instead the posts have largely migrated towards journaling, as you suggest here.

New Augmented Space and its Memory The concepts of place, proximity and distance are going to be substantially rewritten by the locative media evolutions.

But some say the flood of information becoming available through mobile phones and other means is not always such a good thing. "I worry that people attribute too deep a meaning to raw information," said Danah Boyd, who researches social media at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. "An increased flow of information should not be confused with a deeper bond." Boyd stressed that this also applied to other social media that gather large amounts of personal information, like blogs or digital photo accounts. "The situation these technologies create is similar to what happens with Angelina Jolie or another celebrity," Boyd said. "Just because I know a lot about a person does not mean they will help me on a tough day." An added risk for the location-announcing services is that people might find themselves unable to break away from following friends or old lovers, Boyd added. "The problem is that people really, really love stalking," Boyd said. "When you have just ended a relationship, it is not necessarily healthy to follow the exact location of your ex- lover minute-by-minute on your phone."