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*Nerd Alert* Geotagging

I recently got an iPhone through work. I know, I know. Welcome to 2007.

Well I'm thrilled with it. In fact, I can't believe I ever used another phone. I am ashamed and annoyed that I spent the last two years frustrated with technological excrement when I could've had a device as well-thought out and useful as an iPhone. Now, that's not to say it's perfect, but I like it and it serves a good purpose for now, until I can jump ahead of the curve and get Google's Nexus One.

One of the things that makes owning an iPhone so thrilling is the concept of geotagging. Geotagging is a technology/concept where content can be associated with a location. Photographs, editorial content, and personal messages between friends are all examples of things that are being geotagged nowadays.

The exponential growth of the internet and the information therein has made it exponentially more difficult to find information that's relevant to me and my immediate lifestyle. Thus the internet moving towards "local" is becoming far more important to the average person. Sites like Craigslist in the US (Blocket in Sweden) and Yelp are two strong examples of why local is key. It combines the virtual proximity of information on the internet with the physical proximity of your surroundings.

More recently some of the biggest communities on the internet have begun introducing geotagging. Flickr has had it for some time. Twitter introduced it in early 2009. Google Buzz is built around this concept. Bing built Twitter maps allow you to see what is happening (i.e. being tweeted about) in your immediate vicinity. Twitter maps on the iPhone through apps like Tweetie 2.0 allow you to see what's going on near you from where ever you are. Other applications like Foursquare and Gowalla are location-based and allow you to check in at bars or restaurants and to see which of your friends are nearby.

Facebook on the other hand arguably moved further away from this when they hosed the local networks. This will probably come back to bite them sooner rather than later.

Geotagging doesn't come without controversy. Many are arguing this is a breach of privacy. And I'd argue that you only give what you want to give. But it's the constant argument between information and privacy. That line gets blurred more and more.

I'm totally thrilled by this. The ability to shrink the internet again, to what's relevant to me, in terms of content and location has made it more appealing to me as a person who craves information and as a total geek who likes new toys.

My new Geo page has three maps, one that indicates where I am now, with the help of my iPhone and Google Latitude. The second is a Twitter map where I'm geographically charting my 140 character moments, and the third is a Flickr photo map wherein I take pictures with my iPhone and upload them from that location, thus plotting them.