Broadband and Me

GPS and the Web

When Will We See Geeplogs? from "The Merging of GPS and the Web"

Cagle also talks about a new language to be submitted to the W3C, the GPSml markup language, which would be used to describe, routes between two locations. For more information about GPSml, you can visit this Chaeron Corporation webpage.
One means to encode routes is the GPSml markup language, to be submitted as a note to the W3C later this year. In this XML-based system, a GPSml document consists of one or more collections of three principal types: a waypoint, a route (a named collection of waypoints), or a track (which combines locations with a time coordinate).
One component of this waypoint would be an identifier which could be associated with a Uniform Resource Identifier (URI).
With such a URI, you could effectively assign to that location an application that will run when the location is referenced in some manner (you get within five feet of that node, for instance). This application could be a Web service, retrieving contextual information about the location.
Of course, this kind of information and services could potentially be used by marketers.
Even without knowing anything about you, a marketer could read the identifier being transmitted to Web services giving GPS information for the device and develop a profile showing [your shopping habits.]
Finally, Cagle thinks that we'll soon see geeplogs (short for GPS-logs) through the use of the RSS specification."

[These geeplogs will contain] public GPS contexts that can be queried about a given area. [They] will be the GPS equivalents to blogs, in which a person could narrate a specific tour with his or her relevant commentary, possibly with photographs or video feeds.

This sounds really cool. Being able to provide information tailored to a location or provide information on a route via mark up language.

From a marketing perspective it gives all sorts of possibilities to offer goods and services relevant to that space and person within that space. If you tie this into other web services perhaps you could suggest nearby stores which sell woolly hats when its snowing?

My personal desire for this idea is to be able to provide more detailled information about a locality especially its history (and to a lesser extent tourist type info). It would make some experiences much richer for me. (Not all - real life doesn't always need augmenting!) It could also provide interesting service when you are travelling too.