Democratic Access

The emergence of the Internet has started a new age of information sharing. This new age is already challenging classic business and social conventions in the entertainment industry where e-commerce and file sharing are emerging as dominant factors in distributing music and video media content – and there’s no reason to think this trend can’t be applied to "location content" as well.

We use the term location content to highlight that information with a location element can be treated in the same flexible manner as images, music and video content on the Internet.

As we all know, Google, Yahoo and Microsoft have all started providing different kinds of location content to consumers and technical folks alike through mapping services, allowing a bit more "democratic" access to location-based content.

But I suppose the Google, Yahoo and Microsoft approach is to own as much data as money can buy. However, another approach is to facilitate the viewing and sharing of any location content available in the new Internet democracy, wherever (or whoever) it comes from.

Once new tools are available to view and share any location content, I think enhanced social networks will emerge; people will interact with each other while seamlessly using any location content to describe the places they are meaningful to them. Once this sharing starts, I think we'll find that we're all probably much more connected than we think.


This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative 2.5 License and is copyrighted (c) 2006 by The Carbon Project.