The Next Big Thing: Tagging and the Mobile Web

Marion Jensen is thinking about “the next big thing,” and finds “location” as the answer:

“You can access information about a location, but it’s still at your desk. The real revolution will come when this information can be accessed completely and easily from a mobile device, while you’re at that location.”

“The next big thing is to organize, tag, and link information to a specific location. Think of the last time you were at a national park. It’s a very good possibility that the only information you had about the park fit on a tri-fold paper that you picked up at the visitor’s station. In the information age, how is this acceptable?”

“Instead, imagine visiting the park where hundreds of visitors have linked information to specific locations. You have the architect of the visitor’s center who tells you the history of the building. As you move around the park you access information provided by geologists, geographers, botanists, biologists, environmental scientists, conservationists, hiking enthusiasts, bikers, etc. etc. etc. The information is useful because it’s relevant to the location. And it becomes manageable in the same way that the 10s of millions of pictures on flickr have become manageable, through tagging.”

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