There are some very cool things being done that relate GPS and blogs. But GPS and the like alone are not the answer to bringing locational data to moblogging. I first mentioned the idea of "Location Bookmarks" on Joi Ito's blog (you'll see there I did not coin the term) and the idea was discussed at the bloggers meetup.

We need a way to map the virtual space of moblogging to meat space in a more meaningful way then XY coordinates. What's most meaningful to me is places where people meet. This means restaurants, libraries, schools, whatever. I suggest a cellphone accessible webpage with a list of bookmarks of "My Favorite Places". When you do a moblog, you can quickly select from a drop-down list where you currently are. You share your favorite places amongst your friends, and you can add a new location simply and quickly straight from your cellphone.

Each place can be annotated with data later, like GPS coordinates, street address, and even information like "This place sells 350en ramen for Thursday lunch". Another implication is that Locations can have sub-blogs attached to them. This means when Locations are shared across different groups of users, users who have been going to the same place can actually "find" each other on the blog.

It's my experience that sending GPS coordinates from your cellphone is really really slow. And with the density of "meeting spaces" often found in Japan, even if you could use GPS coordinates to do a lookup match against a huge database of meeting space XY coordinates, there's still the matter of "Am I in the Shakey's Pizza on the first floor, or the Starbucks on the second floor?"

Location bookmarks are more appealing to me. They rely on people to define what's meaningful to them. And if they have the ability to be distributed (IE not just centric to one person, or one group) they have potential connect people in a new way.
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Shock and amazement, seven people showed up at the Tokyo Blogger meetup last night. That really caught me off guard. It was really great because this time we talked a LOT more about blogging. My thanks to everyone for showing up, but especially Stuart Woodward and Tony Laszlo for asking good questions and guiding the discussion towards blogging. I appreciate it guys. All meetings of geeks hold the inherent danger of spiraling out of control into a "cool case mods" discussion, and we dodged the bullet! Good job.
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