Last August, I gave a speech at Wikimania (a conference for passionate Wikipedists) in which I envisioned a Real World Wikipedia. The idea I was promoting was that we could annotate our real world environment with a kind of virtual graffiti, which we could access via our mobile phones.
The graffiti could be factual (Wikipedia style), perhaps describing famous residents of a house you were walking past, or commercial - a local restaurant promoting their dish of the day. Clearly, commercial messages would be controversial, but provided they could be pull-based, or at least only served with the user’s prior explicit permission, they would probably be acceptable to most of us.
The factual annotations would have to be populated by a Wikipedia style operation, with volunteers inputting the text and tagging the locations. A commercial operation would simply never be able to deploy enough information to make the idea interesting or useful.
This world is coming closer though. Steve Rubel points us to Wikimapia, which allows us to leave annotations on Google Maps. Bizarrely, when I looked at the UK, one of the only annotations so far is JK Rowling’s grandmother’s house.
So, assuming that this takes off and people start tagging places with information, all we need now is a way of accessing this with our mobiles in a usable and useful way. This isn’t without its challenges as when there aren’t many tags out there, it’ll get very boring if you have to pull the information down as you’ll be forever searching for stuff that isn’t there. On the opposite side of the coin, if there was suddenly quite a lot of information and your phone bleeped every time there was something to discover, it would start to be very annoying indeed.
However, I think that this is the beginning of something very powerful indeed. The real world is colliding with the digital one and it’ll have profound implications for the way we live and work.
Hello,
one of the ways to link physical objects to the virtual reality with mobile is this: http://www.semapedia.org/. To be honest I like the idea of linking “real” wiki to the physical world much more then the idea to rewrite the wiki for the map purposes. If someone now finds a way to connect Google Maps with wikipedia.org that would be something. Then all you need would be a mobile phone with GPS…
You might also want to take a look at this research project: http://p2d.ftw.at/! Regards, Ray
Sorry… disregard the ‘!’ - The URL is of course http://p2d.ftw.at/
Yep, love this idea. saw a similar idea in USA with the yellow arrow project. yellow arrows with unique identifiers appeared on shops and restaurants and users posted opinions which could be polled via SMS.
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.09/play.html?pg=3
I’m with Szymon. I wish that there was a clear standard for geocoding Wikipedia articles and elements of Wikipedia articles so that people could experiment more easily with them. It seems wasteful to start a whole new project just to get stuff on a map.
Platial ( http://www.platial.com ), the start up I work for, is accumulating a lot of waypoints. There’s no mobile yet, but our api is going to be published any day now.
It would be best if you could have one mobile service that combines information from geocoded wikipedia articles, Platial, and many other sources and you could tell your device what kinds of articles you’re interested in seeing.
For example, I want to take a walk around London and learn about architecture. So I tell my device to alert me whenever I’m in the vicinity of an article tagged “architecture, architect, or building.” Or I could walk around Chicago with alerts for “Frank Lloyd Wright” turned on.
Of course, I would then want the possiblity of contributing on the fly. What if a house’s location is incorrectly geocoded? I would want to send at least a flag to let the article’s author know, but better I would want to contribute and correct the article.
The Carnival is Here!!! Carnival of the Mobilists #30…
Greetings and welcome to the 30th edition of the Carnival of the Mobilists!!! First off, I would like say that I’m very honored to be hosting this week. Afew announcements before we begin. Just a reminder that the Carnival has…
Find more about the Yellow Arrow project here: http://changewaves.socialtechnologies.com/home/2006/5/16/annotating-reality-one-sticker-at-a-time.html
QR codes as used in Japan seem like a sensibe, unobtrusive way to mark things physically in such as way as to be machine readable (with a cameraphone), putting the choice of receiving information and context on the user. This means no annoying bleeps as you walk by any tagged object or location.
We’ve covered Yellow Arrow and the like quite a lot at MobHappy actually - starting nearly two years ago. http://mobhappy.com/blog1/2004/09/16/what-does-the-arrow-mean/
For more on this theme, use the search facility above for Yellow Arrow and you’ll find a dozen or so posts.
At Arborwiki http://www.arborwiki.org we’ve been doing a wiki for Ann Arbor, MI. One feature of it is a page for each street, annotated along the way with links to cross streets and to businesses and attractions.
I took a nice long walk from town to campus and opened up the page for the street I was walking on and took some notes along the way. The walking pace was about right to match the typing pace to capture some detail, and I’d get more detail if I walked it again.
The key is to get the architecture of the wiki to match the architecture of the world you are mobile in; that implies following footpaths or bus routes or highways (passengers only please!). Mobile phone browsing on that phone I have is relatively slow and the screen is relatively small so it helps to be pithy.