Urban Tapestries

I recently got interested in 'geo-annotation', may be something to do with my love for maps. There's GoogleMaps (maps with annotations) and stuff like mappr (photos mapped on a map), but what I really find interesting is a project that has been going on for a while called Urban Tapestries, "an experimental software platform for knowledge mapping and sharing – public authoring. It combines mobile and internet technologies with geographic information systems to allow people to build relationships between places and to associate stories, information, pictures, sounds and videos with them [....] creating opportunities for an "anthropology of ourselves" – adopting and adapting new and emerging technologies for creating and sharing everyday knowledge and experience; building up organic, collective memories that trace and embellish different kinds of relationships across places, time and communities."

Quite a mouthful, but the idea is that you can geotag a place based on your actual presence at that location, telling your story about that location, perhaps upload a picture, thus building a rich 'tapestry' of personal stories related to locations. Once you have a critical mass of content, you can imagine all kinds of 'trails' through the content and online 'public' support at a particular location.

You can approach this by doing stuff like My Childhood in Googlemaps but it is not as neat as Urban Tapestries, because the direct authoring from the location is missing.