Location without the Map

From all of the presentations over the past 2 days, something struck me as a slight trend - people don't know if they need so many maps. There's an issue here that we're all just getting a little carried away by saying "location equals map". Well it doesn't, location can be pretty vague, to quite accurate.

I don't every look at a map on Dopplr, thought it deals with location. I don't actually need to see results on a map for most of my search results either, but with Google's new maps release it seems as though they're putting more and more content onto one.

I think maps are cool. What i'm not sure of is whether or not i like those pushpins full of content that doesn't actually need to be on a map. Some of the best examples of location-based content can be the simple ones that do things without worrying about visualising.

In the same vein, two presentations struck me as putting what we've learned in the past few years into really useful contexts, away from the usual "cool" stuff; Lisa Parks (University of California) proved how satellite imagery can be crucial to lives and moments of need for analysis. This deals with location but also over time - a record of how things were. Aimee Stewart (LifeMapper), on the other hand, showed some immense data analysis of species across the planet from natural history museums. Great stuff as it only deals with the location data when it needs to.

I'll fill up this blog with some detailed presentation topics next week.