Insights Into The New "Tech Bloom"

Michael Meiser has incredibly lucid insights into the new "Tech Bloom". The rise of tagging and open source editing such as Wikis, Flickr point to the democratization of media. I've summarized some of his ideas below.

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Social is the word.

Welcome to the latest tech bloom, the next evolution, Web 2.0.x. We're soon to see what happens when democratization goes beyond Email and Blogs and Wikis to the rest of the media. The hallmark of this next evolution will be democratized media and Web 2.x starts with audio and video.

It's time to break mass communications out of the box and see what next happens when all the world has equal access. What happens when all the world has access to a project manager? How about an enterprise development manager? The best encyclopedias? The coolest, latest greatest tools? What happens when "amateurs" have access? ...they build even cooler shit.

The future of web based tools is in ubiquitous social collaboration and communication. The value is in their ubiquity. There is no purpose in having a word processor online or for that matter a to do list... unless.... unless it can go anywhere and do anything and collaborate with anyone. That is to say, unless it can go social.
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This is big.

Watching Google Maps Snowball

Update Friday Apr 22/05:

Track your GPS enabled vehicle live with this innovative Google Maps hack. For a few hundred dollars in parts, using Google Maps you can track a vehicle live. With an onboard webcam you can zoom right down to street level and look out of the vehicle. See the picture for how cool this is.

Original article follows:
The convergence of Google Maps, Flickr and Camera Phones as an infrastructure for new social software.

You can tell it's a killer app when people begin developing more applications around it and using it in ways the original developer never guessed. Let's take a short tour of what's shakin' with Google Maps.

Convergence: Flickr, Google Maps and Camera Phones

Shortly after the launch, Google Maps showed up on Flickr, many of them annotated.

As cheap, plentiful phone cams with GPS flood the market, we're going to see some interesting innovation. Thousands of shots from GPS enabled Phone cams, posted to Flickr will be accompanied with the longitude/lattitude co-ordinates.

Update Tuesday May 3: Well, it looks like "Geobloggers has already started doing this. Try this annotated Google Map over the Golden Gate Bridge. Then click the yellow baloon to see the picture from the ground.

From above the trees or rooftops of some spot you're interested in at Google Maps, get your latitude and longitude, go to Flickr, run a search on that. You will soon tap into ground level photos of that very spot as thousands of people fill in the last mile.

Convergence: Craigslist and Google Maps

Check out this site, which brings together Craigslist home listings with Google Maps. Find homes for sale or rent within a specific area, and do a virtual tour. Wait until the Real Estate vendors latch onto this.

Take A Swivel Chair Tour

Start with this page. See Graceland, Neverland, the Grand Canyon, Niagara Falls, MT. St. Helens and more from your desk.

What's Next?

Google Maps merged with recently released prisoner data, Wireless hotspots, nearest grassroots recommended restaurants, cash machines...

Wireless access, Google maps, and tagging will create sticky location-based fountains of useful knowledge.

This is one to watch. There's no telling what will spin off next.