PlaceOpedia (spotted by Carlo at The Guardian) is a way of linking Location to Wikipedia, the open source encyclopedia.

It’s interesting as it combines a number of different trends (I nearly used the meme word there).

- It’s a low-cost mashup of two different, websites/services - Wikipedia and Google Maps.
- Like Wikipedia, content is generated collaboratively by the readers and users.
- It’s linking digital information to the real world, which is what Location Based Services is all about, in my view.

Last month I presented the idea to the Wikimania conference of using a location-enabled phone to access Wikipedia information about place where you were physically. Examples might be information on local buildings, residents or even property prices. One of the missing pieces of this puzzle would be to find editors to do the linking - the other being deciding what technology is best suited for it.

It seems to me that PlaceOpedia solves the first problem (assuming enough people contribute). So all we need now is an agreement about the technology - no trivial task admittedly.

The first choice seems to be if the solution is best to be a physical link that you can see (like ShotCode or SemaCode) or a virtual link that your phone sees (like Siemens’ Digital Graffiti). Ultimately, the latter type of concept will prevail - we can’t put barcode-type stickers all over the planet. But the barcode route does have the double purpose of alerting people to its presence and thus marketing the idea and encouraging the download of the appropriate mobile phone software.

But one thing is for sure. This is something that’s rapidly moving out of the concept stage into deployment. An idea whose time has come.