I participated in a panel discussion at Spot On Locative Media seminar to talk about location in internet and mobile services. Participants in addition to me were Mika Raento – my ex-Jaiku fellow and one of the most experienced persons in the world in this topic, Kevin Anderson – a freelance nomadic journalist with a lot of practical experience of using location data in journalism, Mikko Hämäläinen – one of the founders of Grey Area, a gaming company developing Shadow Cities, an upcoming location based MMO for iPhone.
I think we were able to share a couple of valuable insights based on our real experiences of designing location-based services. Topics include automatic location tracking vs check-in models, curated vs user generated content, how should location data surface in a newspaper sites, instant customization based on location etc. As always when people are talking about location-based services, the discussion side-tracked to the important but a bit dull topic of privacy, but all in all, I think it’s worth of watching if you are interested in the topic.
A video of the panel discussion is now available Finnish Broadcasting Company’s (YLE) web service YLE Areena. The event was organized by YLE and you can see that in the video quality, although audio volume is a bit too low.
You can view the video here, the panel starts around 1:36.
Thanks again for being on the panel. I’m re-listening to it to check upon if anything has progressed during this past year. I have the impression that news media has used maps extensively and Ushahidi has gotten quite a bit of attention in the public. What do you think?
Yes, I think use of interactive and real-time maps has become more common even in one year. E.g. during London riots, there were several maps and services to report incidents.