m-pulse on moblogging

The latest issue of my favorite surprisingly above-average corporate magazine, m-pulse, has a good piece on moblogging. The key grafs:

"I think the ability to correlate experience with place, and to share that correlated experience with others who either occupy the same space or may wish to in the future, is tremendous" [said Adam Greenfield, organizer of the 1st International Moblogging Conference (1mc)].

Rather than replacing traditional blogging, Greenfield suggests that the potential of moblogging lies in what it offers travelers - the ability to annotate cities, places, and spaces through moblogs.

Whereas traditional blogs are often filled with links to places on the Web, Greenfield posits that moblogs can be understood as "links to places, logs of interesting places visited in real life."

"When user-created content - restaurant reviews, heads-ups about particularly congenial or stimulating or dangerous places, what have you - is not merely publishable from mobile devices, but retrievable from them, it really does give the keys to the city," says Greenfield.

According to Greenfield, the potential of moblogging isn't something that can be ignored.

"When you consider that blogs have already changed the way we understand publishing, journalism, and the power of the individual voice, limited as they are to the relatively small audience with access to computers, and then extrapolate from that to the hundreds of millions of people already using some kind of mobile device - well, I think the impact will be nontrivial [ed: typical engineer
talk]."

[via Gene Becker and Relevanthistory]

World as a blog

This is quite something: The world as a blog. It's a tool that takes feed from weblogs.com (which collects information on recently-updated blogs), and maps it onto a map of the world. Another tiny step in the integration of bits and places.

I've been running across various attempts to mix geocoding with blog entries: NYC bloggers and blogmapper are two others. The interesting thing is that these all seem to be the efforts of individual programmers who decide to do something interesting with GPS data, mapping software, and XML, rather than big projects that require dozens of people at Microsoft or AOL. This is a sure sign that the barriers to entry in this area are low, and sooner or later, someone's going to do something that's incredibly compelling.

Indeed, I wouldn't be surprised if AOL were to include something like this in its rumored blogs software. It would be a great way to visualize the extent and activity of the AOL blogspace.

Cluster competition

This New Scientist piece is from their jobs section, hence some of the focus. Place discussion at the city, region, agglomeration, and community level.

Biotech by the bay
The Bay Area has a biotech pedigree stretching back three decades, and is home to the grandaddies of the industry. But will the region's freewheeling energy keep it ahead of its rivals? Philip Cohen investigates
http://www.newscientistjobs.com/biotech/sanfran.jsp

A CENTURY ago, San Francisco Bay was ripe with the fumes from stockyards, meat-packing plants and the steel mills that forged beams for the Golden Gate bridge. On the land where many of those industries once stood are now arranged neatly landscaped buildings and sophisticated research labs - the epicentre of arguably the world's oldest and most vital biotech industry.

According to the Bay Area Bioscience Center, which tracks the industry, 535 biomedical companies circle San Francisco Bay and around 300 more call the nearby Northern California region home. The Bay Area has the greatest number of biotech start-ups and established companies with over a hundred employees in the US, and it also ranks number one in attracting life sciences venture capital. It's ranked second for patents granted, behind New York, and third in money received from the US National Institutes of Health, trailing Boston and New York. It is easy to see why biotech's success in this area is the subject of worldwide envy. ...