Slate has a piece by Brian Montopoli on city “blog maps” that have been created to map bloggers living and blogging in Washington DC, New York, and London. Here’s the basic premise:

Some industrious blogger posts a subway map of his or her city… and then organizes the city’s blogs by the stop to which they are closest. If residents want to explore their neighborhood blogosphere, they simply click the section of the city that strikes their fancy. The result: Local bloggers find each other, exchange e-mails, meet up for drinks, and then generally do the same things as neighbors who stumble upon each other in the real world.

But blog maps offer another benefit: an alternative city guide that enables a little point-and-click sightseeing….

So far as I can tell, these maps aren’t automatically generated: each of them has a link for people to add their blogs to a list (I think I’ll e-mail the creators to find out more about how their sites work), and geocoding isn’t exactly commonplace yet for blogs. In their current form, these are interesting science experiments, but not scalable.

But they are still very interesting, because they represent garage-coding attempts to tie together the physical world, local geography and culture, and digital information. It gets really exciting- and scalable, or P2Pable- when you start mixing in GIS information. There is a gigantic amount of geographical data that’s very well-coded (geographers are very fussy) and in machine-readable form. By geocoding blogs (or for even more precision, blog entries), you can pretty quickly build automatic associations between information and places.

It’s already pretty easy to geocode a blog: GeoURL can help you do it (and check out the cool maps while you’re there). Blog geocoding is what makes the lovely global blog map work (see this earlier post). It’s not yet quite as easy to do GIS metadata for blog entries (though that probably wouldn’t be too hard to do): there’s blogmapper, but getting it to work requires a level of technical facility that 99%+ of bloggers don’t have.

More to the point, there’s not a whole lot that you can do yet with entry-level GIS information. But why would it be worth it to associate blogs and blog entries with geographical coordinates? What’s the payoff?

You might think of GIS coordinates in a blog entry as being kind of like hyperlinks to the real world. (Steven Johnson, in this Discover article, calls them “real-world URLs,” or “a kind of 3-D version of the Internet, a hypertext Web spun out in real-world geography.”) The REAL payoff starts to come when you can read data associated with a place IN THAT PLACE. For example, if you’re in an unfamiliar place, you could fire up your wireless PDA, and find other people’s blogged reports on what’s nearby, what’s worth visiting, what to avoid. (I tried to spin that out a little in something I wrote in January; it’s in the extended essay.) You could leave notes for people in places- the digital equivalent of a message on the dorm bulletin board, but available only to a particular person or group. Someone has suggested suggests a hiking blog, “a big collaborative map that’d have information that no single map publisher can put out right now.” There are also commercial possibilities: a service in which you break up a city guide (or many volumes of reference works on a city, its history, museums, etc., along wiht some memoirs, old maps and photos, etc.) and have that information available in real time/real place.

But it’s not the ecommerce opportunities that are really exciting. My sense is that what drives these early experiments is a sense- an instinct, really- that geoblogging could be a great example of creating collective knowledge, a tangible example of how (as Dan Gillmor says) all of us can be smarter than each of us. Geoblogging would allow us to create immensely detailed records of places and events, without having to have a central editorial authority oversee that project: it would basically self-organize.

[from an e-mail I sent to a colleague, 17 January 2003]

Amazon.com and other retail sites already use review and recommendation systems to gather and redistribute customer-generated information about goods. It would be a simple matter to create such services for places rather than things, and allow patrons to write their own reviews. As more people carry wireless information devices, and move from voice-and-SMS cell phones to ones offering Web access, it will become easier for patrons to write these in real time, and to read them. (Michael Kinsley, in a put-down of online communities, famously said that he didn’t want the person at the next table cooking his meal. Maybe so, but it can still be useful to know if that person thought tonight’s roasted chicken with garlic pesto and polenta was dry.)

For writers and users, the result will be a cross between blogs, recommendation systems, and digital graffiti. Not only would this content be useful to other readers; it would be a way to leave a virtual mark upon a place, to commemorate its meaning in writers’ lives a way to preserve one’s experiences and contribute to the public culture, and a record of the social life of a place.

James Harkin has an interesting piece in today’s Guardian on the growing use of mobile phones for coordinated social activity, ranging from passing on word of celebrity sightings to warnings about SARS. (I find the Guardian never fails to interest me, even when I disagree with it. And they have had some terrific coverage of international news.)

The piece is obliquely critical of Smart Mobs, suggesting that the vision Howard Rheingold lays out is still kind of futuristic- but that mobile coordination is happening in the here and now, and activist groups should take full advantage of it.

The essay is taken from “Mobilisation: The growing public interest in mobile technology,” which is available as a PDF.

An acquaintance in Japan reports on her experience with cell phone repairs:

I only remember doing minor repairs once on one of our Japanese phones, and they did it on the spot.  So I am not sure… My sense is that people upgrade so often here that the upgrade usually happens before the need for a major repair.

So once again, it sounds like the repairs are localized. Why in the world don’t they do that here?

Update: Please note that while a couple friends have checked into this for me in their spare time, I don’t have any information about cell phone repair manuals, becoming a cell phone technician, etc..

PC Magazine has an interesting gallery of next-generation prototypes of OLED displays, electronic newspapers, PCs, etc.. Actually, it’s not so much "next-generation" as younger cousin: a lot of this stuff is just a couple years away from moving out of the laboratory and into commercial high-end products.

It would be interesting to do an historical study of these kinds of prototypes of the future, to see how often these designs turn into real things. I look at some of the items, like the electronic newspaper, and think "of course that’s coming." Others, like the futures workspace, strike me as on the right track, but not something that can be represented by a single big device, but rather an ecology of devices.

Presumably the existence of the prototypes serves as a kind of influencer on the eventual production of the commercial technologies, much as war game scenarios influence the way real wars are fought (read the latest New Yorker piece on Tommy Franks for an example of this; it’s not online, but TNY’s Web site does have an interview with the author, Peter Boyle). But how much influence do they have? People were talking about television and human space flight decades before either became a reality; more recently, the concept of cyberspace appeared a decade before the Web started climbing the S-curve. These imagined things can have some impact on the way we think about the technologies that eventually do appear.

I guess one of the questions to ask about these kinds of prototypes is, what purpose are they intended to serve? Are they supposed to be predictions, or are they supposed to be stimulants- not things that you might go and buy one day, but things that are supposed to get you thinking about the future? (To use a term of art in futurist circles, are they forecasts or scenarios?) Paul Saffo argues that there’s a whole category of things that you could call "conceptware," things that are impressive but never intended to get into the marketplace. Apple’s video of the "Knowledge Navigator" is the paradigmatic example, though the fact that its central figure is a professor- at Berkeley, no less- should be enough to clue you in to the fact that it’s describing an alternate universe.

[via Bill Cockayne]

My informant in Seoul has more on the question of cell phone repairs:

I managed to ask several of my friends about fixing cell phones…. Interestingly, all three of them had some sort of experience in fixing their cell phones. More interestingly, all of them got their phones back in half an hour. One had a wire connection problem with his battery; another had a broken LCD; the third had a non-pressable button problem. It seems that the Samsung service stations-located throughout the city, very convenient-keep most of the parts necessary to fix the abovementioned problems.

The diffusion of repair facilities throughout the city makes so much sense, given that with these phones you’re not making repairs the way you might to a car’s transmission, as you are replacing broken modules with working ones. As I was waiting at my cell phone store, it occured to me that they could have a bunch of parts in the store, and could probably handle a lot of simple repairs themselves. But the employees aren’t given any technical training (as one admitted to me).

Then, I called the service station myself to ask some phony questions. The operator was very nice: I could feel her professional concern about my inconveniences. (I told her I cannot press my buttons, and she said "That would be very inconvenient, since you can’t make any phone calls.") I asked her how long it will take to fix if I brought the machine to the station. Her reply was that although they would have to see the machine before making any estimations, in most cases I can get the machine back that very day. At most, it would take 3-4 days.

Those damned efficient Asians!

Update: Please note that while a couple friends have checked into this for me in their spare time, I don’t have any information about cell phone repair manuals, becoming a cell phone technician, etc..

Update yet again (28 October 2004): I still don’t have any information about cell phone repairs, nor can I point you to books on the subject, online schools to attend, or ANYTHING ELSE.

If people are leaving comments asking for help as a form of ironic humor, I now get the joke. Thank you. Thank you very much. Your trucker hat is in the mail.

One last update (5 November 2004): As charmed as I am by the fact that this post has turned into a little forum on cell phone repairs, I’m turning off the comments. Apologies to any and all who find their incomes adversely affected by this move, but what can I say- get your own damn blog.

As I type (at 10:52 PM PST), a friendly guy from Roto-Rooter is starting World War III in our plumbing. At least that’s what it sounds like. We’ve got some kind of plumbing thing that requires the plumber CLIMBING ONTO THE ROOF, with a giant snake-like device that you operate using some of the same skills they teach in pro wrestling school. Pictures later.

Unfortunately I don’t have audio capability, otherwise you’d hear a sound akin to a house getting a cavity drilled.

But compared to my experience with getting my cell phone repaired, this is a walk in the park. I’ve had to send my cell phone in for service three times; each time it’s taken longer to get it back; and each time the experience has grown more frustrating. This actually had bad implications for the future.

At the longest, it’s taken three months to get back a phone. This time, I took the phone (a Nokia 3395) in because the battery wasn’t charging; I got a loaner that basically is a Sumerian brick with a keypad and battery; and was told that they’d call when the phone came back. That was a month ago.

Today I went in to check, since I’ve lost my faith in the ability of people who work in cell phone stores to actually MAKE phone calls. (I don’t like to speak ill of anyone, but the guys at my local cell phone store aren’t exactly just working there so they’ll have extra spending money for their Rhodes Scholarships. Two of them ignored me for several minutes while the surfed the Web in search of cheap rentals in Hawaii.)

It turns out that my cell phone provider (who shall remain anonymous because they have many lawyers) has outsourced repairs to a shop in Minnesota; said shop reported back at the beginning of the month that they diagnosed the problem as water damage, and therefore weren’t going to fix it. My friendly cell phone rep assured me that they would have called once the phone got back to their store. Fortunately, I’ve been paying for insurance on the phone (I have kids, after all), and so it turns out I was able to call them and walk out of the store with a new phone (minus a deductible). So it’s kind of a happy ending.

It would be easy to blame the bad experience on the fact that the dudes I was dealing with demonstrated an almost Zen-like detachment from their jobs (it was almost calming to see how little they engaged with the world of their customers). But there’s clearly a deep systemic problem here. A cell phone repair isn’t something that requires lots of precision machine work and soldering: you pop open the unit, swap out a circuit board, close it up, and move on. The actual diagnosis/repair/testing cycle probably takes 5-10 minutes (anyone who repairs cell phones and has better numbers, please feel free to comment).

Nonetheless, for whatever reasons it takes months for phones to move through the local store-telco-repair shop ecology. And from talking to other people in the store, it seems that my experience isn’t unusual: other, less persistent people have waited for 4-6 months for their phones, and showing up in person to plead for news of their repairs- like going to the prefecture’s office for a visa to leave Casablanca- now seems to be the norm.

This matters because bad repair service could inhibit the growth of the kind of always-on, pervasive, ubiquitous computing and communications that lots of futurists (and more than a few electronics and cell phone companies) see as just over the horizon. Many people already develop deep, personal relationships with their cell phones; I feel naked if I leave the house without mine. As we invest more in customizing them, and acquire phones that have a larger and larger number of features, bad service is going to feel more and more wrenching, and those loaner phones- which are always old returns- will be more and more unsatisfactory.

What we’re going to need is a repair regime that consists of two steps: 1) take phone (or other device) into store; 2) immediately get new one. This will require either a much better system.

There is another possibility, though: change cell phone contracts to make regular upgrading more attractive. That seems to be how it works in Korea. A friend of mine who’s from Seoul reports:

Koreans tend to change cell phones quite frequently. Especially among the younger generations, owning updated models of cell phones is a matter of personal "show-off." The models are changing so frequently that this actually is possible. The phones that I see on the street nowadays were unimaginable only 6 months ago, in terms of size, design, and function. I think it is a norm to change it every 1-2 years.

[Smack palm against forehead] Of course! The repair system could be as bad there as it is here, but if you consider an accident with your phone a great opportunity to upgrade, then it’s not a problem.

I’ve got a couple e-mails out to friends in Japan, and will report what I hear back. But I’m sure the dynamic is similar.

The plumber has left, and it sounds like some digging up of our front yard, and repairs to our main plumbing line, are immanent in my future. Better get some more writing gigs lined up….