What's 3G got to do with 3G? Add in the location of the cell tower and your GPS-enabled phone can look in the right part of the sky for satellites, so it gets a fix more quickly and uses less power to do it. Online POIs are more up to date, you can get maps over the air rather than loading them in advance and calculating a route on a powerful server should be faster than doing it on your phone. That's the theory: on our last US trip we checked out Ask GPS and Nokia Maps in practice. My review on Tom's Hardware reminds me of sunny days in Las Vegas and driving through the Cascades looking for espresso huts, taxi drivers in New York and Cincinatti who didn't know where they were going - and how often I longed to throw the N95 out of the window... I did Google Maps, Windows Live Search Mobile and Yahoo Go 2 back in the summer but I need to revisit Google Maps now it has the excellent locate without GPS feature and I want to review CoPilot 7 on the O2 XDA Stella... handy that we have a road trip coming up then...

Two pieces up on Tom's Hardware today; mobile search and mapping tools and a notebook buying guide - so you could pick the notebook you want and get directions to go buy it ;-)

When you're on the move, do you want to search the Web the way you would on a PC, or rather look for what's around you? Sometimes you'll want to look up a Web page and read it, but often you want to know more where a movie is playing rather than who was in it, where to get good sushi rather than how to make it, and how long it will take to get to the theater after you've eaten. Read the rest of Simplifying Mobile Search...

Need a bigger screen? Thin and light or mobile workstation, basic budget or high-powered business features, Macs or tablet PCs; today we’re going to tell you how to choose the right notebook for whatever you need. We’re going to go through business, general-use, budget, gaming, ultra-portable, tablet and Mac laptops to show you what to look for and offer some suggestions. Pick the Perfect PC for You...

Last time we were driving around the US (Nevada/Arizona/California) we were using the Benefon TWIG as well as our old favourite, ALK CoPilot on a Windows Mobile smartphone to navigate, backed up by Microsoft Windows Live Mobile Search (or whatever the five mile long name actually is), with a touch of Yahoo Maps. It's not that I don't like CoPilot enough: in fact the only thing I like more is the new CoPilot 7, and that's compared to TomTom as well. It's that the rental didn't have any power to the lighter socket and we couldn't charge the Bluetooth GPS unit that we use with the phone. The TWIG was disappointing in many ways; the Teleatlas maps are very impressive, but you can only pick a point of interest by type and name, not location. At one point I was *this* close to navigating us to the MGM Grand in LA instead of the one in Las Vegas.... Benefon promises the next version will fix this and has some other interesting plans besides. But what you want from a GPS might be different from what I want personally; in which case, check out my guide to Choosing a Handheld GPS over at Gear Digest...

My EasyJet flight was better than expected; buying priority boarding and jockeying in the lounge meant I was about the third person on the plane so I nabbed the window exit row seat. A chap from TeleAtlas sat down in the aisle seat and we were deep in discussion about maps so quickly that no-one wanted to sit between us! They make 1500 edits a day to the US map database, they use little trucks with cameras that capture the height of bridges and the texture of buildings so one day your GPS will say turn left down the High Street between McDonalds and the brick building. And in one South American country where the roads are too narrow they put the cameras on the beer delivery trucks.

You can now buy scratchcards on EasyJet!

Barcelona is warm and sunny with blue skies and the evening parties range from geeking on the stand to geking above the stand to cava and jamon iberico at the rather trendy Sugar Club. Total for Monday; two airports, one car, three taxis, one metro...

I have to like a site that mocks the -r convention of Web 2.0 sites but I also really like being able to see who at a conferenec comes from where using Attendr. We're going to need a 'MyPlace' microformat for embedding the map view we want of ourselves in our profiles along with our geocode to plug straight into these kinds of sites instead of entering the information from scratch each time. How about having it as an InfoCard property, to give me control of where it gets used and for what...

Microsoft's big slogan for the Dynamics software is 'people-centered software'. I caught the TV ad for it the other night: many different people in different countries all getting up in the morning, grabbing breakfast and heading out for the day and all doing it that little bit differently. In fact I looked at the ad and thought 'this is good; Microsoft should have advertising like this'.

But what I noticed on MapQuest this morning (checking out Leigh on Sea where my mum will probably move to) was what I think of as people-centered data. While the label that comes up when you hover the mouse is Zoom Level 3 the labels at the size of the zoom control show me that's actually the most detailed view I can get of this location as a place within a country, before I go down into region level. For the most detail at street level the icon is a person, for the least level at country view it's mountains (topographic data here I come). The icons get wider from top to bottom - a handy visual cue if I haven't spotted the plus and minus buttons - but it's the labels of Street, City, Region and Country that let me get information the way people think about it, not the way computers do. Like Today/Tomorrow/This Week/Next Week in Outlook 2007 or tags on a blog, it's data aggregated into a fuzzy structure rather than a strictly normalized data slice.

Wikipedia doesn't have maps on most articles, so http://www.placeopedia.com/ is a site where you can tag a place on the map and link it to a Wikipedia article. It doesn't find everywhere (Christchurch matches four places, none of which are in New Zealand or Sunderland) but it's an excellent way of locating places. It would be nice to cross-link with some of the photo-locating projects so you could read an article, find the place on the map and then see what it looks like.

Ever since sbisson ranted about the poor adoption of universal event formats, I've been keeping an eye out for calendar sites that list events and I've found a couple more. I don't think they're going to compete with Upcoming.org or Eventful because they're much more focussed.

zvents is very pale-blue-and-orange-with-white-space Web 2.0, similar to Eventful: I'm seeing this look a lot at the moment. Unlike , it only covers the Bay area. You can search by events, venues, tags, groups or people, and when you get the results you can switch the list to a map view or a calendar view. With a lot of results the map and main calendar view show you the number of results rather than the individual events, but you can get a 1 day, 3 day, 7 day and 30 day view as well. Here it's the guided tours that dominate rather than the bookstore events, but when you get down to individual events they're very well presented with maps, times, repeat events, similar events, other events at the same venue... More useful details than Eventful.

AllConferences has a hierarchical drill-down of categories and an advanced search, though you can only search by one condition and picking March 2006 without a date produces events from June 2004 as well. There are conferences going back to 2001 and those are what you see when you search by City; the general search box does a better job. Look here for commercial and academic conferences.

These sites tend to be better for finding a specific event on a specific day than browsing through the possibilities for a longer period of time. For that, I want to be able to start with a large pool of results and filter them. The best filtered view of search results I can think of - and it has deficiencies still - is the hotel map view in Expedia; you can zoom in on the map to refine the list of hotels, or remove hotels from the list to clear them from the map view. I'd like the same for events; let me zoom in to an area, or a category of events, or a smaller date range, or to a time range across several days (what's on every evening next week?). Let me remove all the sports events and everything that's recurring rather than a one-off and trim down from any day in March to just these 9 days. It's all about underlying hierarchies of logical units: know that a week is a logical unit of a month, know that Kirkland is within the greater Seattle area. Some of this you can do with a folksonomy, but a categorised hierarchy is going to help for geography, discrete units (today/tomorrow/this week/next week/this month/next month/this year) and distinguishing between broad tags (music) and specific tags (baroque). Organic tagging can define a problem space, but it doesn't structure it well.

Do we have these kind of detailed schemas for describing not just the obvious properties of events (date, time, venue, organiser etc) but also the range of values so we can build the filters?

It lists far fewer events than the other event sites I've come across, but the Webtowns section of the Seattle Pos- Intelligencer site has wonderfully specific information for all the districts of the Pugent Sound area from Algona to Yarrow Point. You get concerts, art shows, readings at the local library, cinema listings, restaurant reviews, census data, traffic camsrelevant news stories and a possted history of each area - all on the same page or as links when there's too much detail to show. You can add events to your calendar . Classified ads from each area too, to tick another Web-2.0-ecommerce box. This is one of the nicest local information sites I've found.

Out here in the real world, I want the address, a map and directions as well, ideally from a GPS because I'd rather do my serendipitous exploring without the stress of getting lost and being late. In the digital world, I don't want directions: I want the address for the content I'm after. Show me, don't tell me. If there's a two-minute section in a video that covers what I want, I don't want all 93 minutes and the instruction to fast-forward 47 minutes and 15 seconds. I want the computer to do the scut work. If there's an event, I don't want to get sent to your calendar with instructions to scroll forward to March 20th, I want to go straight to the page. Don't point me at three weeks worth of discussions about the next project, link straight to the message where everyone agrees on the project spec. If I find what I want quickly then I'll have time to browse around and enjoy serendipity, but don't make me go through a maze if I don't want to.

To be able to give a user the address of the exact information they want means breaking down monolithic content like video streams and calendars and forum threads. And that means thinking about how things are indexed, and they they're presented. When Blinkx finds a video that matches what you're searching for it could send an offset to start the video playing at the right point - but content owners don't like that because they've put the ads that pay for their service at the beginning of the video. Too many groupware systems give you a link for the calendar, not a link for individual days or events in the calendar. And if a link to a forum comes up in a search you'll usually find yourself at the first post in the thread rather than the relevant post - the whole thread has been indexed rather than the individual posts.

What's the logical addressable unit of content? It's going to vary depending on the content type, but as a consumer I'm going to want more granularity than the producer expects. Often, there's a fragment of information that's exciting or interesting that I want to share rather than pointing someone at a whole work; I'm hoping they'll find the whole thing interesting, but it's the snippet I think will catch them. The smart content provider will see value in letting me push people to the interesting bit in the hope they'll want to see more rather than forcing people to sit through all of it. Addressability might look like losing control - actually it's giving both publisher and visitor finer grained control.

I find tag clouds a bit irritating because I want to use tags to navigate and while the size tells me what's interesting, most common isn't often my measure of interestingness (side question: what's the real abstract noun for that?); I especially dislike dynamic ones that wiggle the tags to size when I hover over them because I like predictable interface behaviour; I build muscle memories for how to run common commands and non-deterministic interface behaviour messes with that. Metadata about metadata? Useful but you can present it better.

I love treemaps; they're such an elegant representation of both the information itself and the value of the information. A couple of weeks ago I mentioned Netscan - the Microsoft Research tool that creates treemaps of Usenet groups. Looking for a nice graphical display of disk space information I found the free WinStatDir which linked to a history of treemaps that revealed they were developed to show disk usage patterns! And that linked to the rather lovely newsmap which could easily be the only way I'll ever want to read news again: the output of Google News as a treemap. Now if only I could pipe the feed of my choice into it: I'd like to use this as an interface for BBC News or CNet or The Onion...

"never mind the dotted quad, it's the thread that binds the Net together." For years I've been saying of online success that people come for content and stay for community. I've just had a long and fascinating conversation* with Marc Smith of the Microsoft Research Community Technologies Group, nominally about the SNARF email triage tool and actually about the value and finite availability of attention, the value of interaction and current steps in detecting, visualising and using human relationships digitally. Ironically, talking about a tool that helps you with triage turned into a conversation that's sent me off in a lot of interesting new directions. I want to go to the Smithsonian folk music archive and find the songs from the first generation with choruses about how much people hate their cold, draughty, won’t-start-keeps-stopping, slow, dreadful, won't last wonderful new cars.

Marc is behind Netscan - software that measures and maps social spaces like Usenet; they're planning to turn it into a community reputation tool that could work for any threaded social space. Picturing Usenet - an article from the group in the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication - has lots more visualisations and identifies various online personality types: questioners, answer people, trolls, locals, cynics, conversationalists... The treemaps that they produce apply to any hierarchical information - like the classic sales territories so many people track in Excel - so the Microsoft Treemapper with Excel Add-In they've made available could be handy.

Computers have the ability to slice, dice, drill and map so much data from the information we store of them and the monolithic way so much information is presented is a real waste. After playing with the colour categories and To-Do tags in Outlook 12 and the visualisation of conditional formatting in Excel 12, I'm rather hoping that 2006 could be the year of data visualisation. Marc mentioned the ClearContext Inbox Manager as a way of getting Outlook 12-style goodness now, and I notice it works with ActiveWords which I must make time to play with (I got distracted by being able to use shortcuts in the Windows Search deskbar to get verbs - so I can type lj or flickr and a username to jump straight to someone on either service).

I'm now looking forward to the two new versions of SNARF we'll get this year and the new features planned for them... luckily for me, some of the things I thought it would be neat to see (like tagging people who matter to me irrespective of the statistics of our email exchanges) are already on the list.

*best parts of my job, the conversations

**SNARF and the Treemapper have their own pages but they're also on http://research.microsoft.com/research/downloads/default.aspx -another of those interesting places to browse through. GroupBar is available there (a tool for grouping and managing windows for large desktops), as is the Search Result Clustering Toolbar for grouping search results into topics...

Google maps knows where the Space Needle is. Windows Live Local puts it four streets away from the tower at 203 6th Avenue North because that's the street address for the business. It also places the Seattle Center Space Needle about 300 yards to one side of the actual structure; that's the nearest building so it's probably where the official 400 Broad Street address actually is. I wonder if the exposure of mapping ites will make businesses think more about getting their address data right so customers can find them. The aerial view also labels the Space Needle structure (twice in fact; it does the same for both sides of the memorial stadium). That's a lot more information, and it's accurately represented, and the tools for seeing the bird's eye view, putting the details of the address in a pop-up box on the map and creating pushpins are easier to work with than the minimalist Google information in the search results (for me at least). The aerial view even has arrows for the direction of one-way streets.

And my usual complaint about Windows Live: all US all the time. If I search for London Eye, I get an eye clinic in Kentucky - and an advert for the South Bank. OneCare Live doesn't show up to anyone outside the US. I have no idea when non US applications will get to try Windows Live Mail. Guys: the Internet crosses national boundaries. The Internet business model isn't the only thing that matters here.

Not as often as I ought to, I remember to check out the Microsoft Sandbox for toys that aren't released as products but have versions you can play around with. Netscan is a way of exploring Usenet groups to see what's new, what's popular and where you could go to discuss a particular subject - which I like because it's nice to see Usenet is still going. after all, you met such nice people there! But what I like most is this tree map showing the newsgroup hierarchy, sized by posting volume and colour-coded by increase and decrease in volume. There are historical snapshots so you can go back and see that in October 2000 people where talking about more and more things more and more every month. I'd like to see the maps animated to show the change over time ;-)

After the friends map, the places map ;-)

Mary & Simon's travels is a first pass at mapping where Simon and I have been on our travels. It's a free Web site but much more primitive than I want: you can only add five places at a time, you have to know Zip codes fro the US and the list of countries is limited - although kudos to Zee for adding France and New Zealand within five minutes of me mailing to ask about them.

I have a list of other tools to check out for ways to build Google maps without writing code, or often needing a Google Maps API key. Some look too specialised, the most interesting is a Windows program in Japanese only (I don't know any Japanese or I'd offer to translate the menus). But I'm narrowing down what I want. A way to enter several data sets and turn them on and off from a legend by the map (Mary & Simon together, either Mary or Simon, just Mary, just Simon, visited in a particular year). Adding number of visits would be the next thing, to change the intensity of the colour from pale (1 visit) to solid (practically live there).

Take a look at this map of Market Street, San Francisco and look out into the bay.

I'm sure you can spot the copyright notices on other maps, but they show up so much better in the water ;-)

I'd like an 'eyedropper' style tool so I can click to select a location and drag the lat/long onto one of my photos to geocode it with the location information.

EDIT My friend David suggests trying the LazyWeb trackback, though I don't know if this works with LiveJournal. http://www.lazyweb.org/. If not, anyone with blogging software that does do functional trackbacks to LazyWeb is welcome to repost this ;-)