Location Awareness & Open Tagging

Was delighted about a couple of things today — one cool and one enlightening — that I wanted to share with you. Two more examples of the energy and excitement that is continuing to build as the dots are being connected all over the place with the internet acting as catalyst:

• Plazes: I’ve been a big fan of presence awareness for some time, though see the benefits of being invisibly located (on my cell phone or Blackberry and people think I’m at my desk…when I’m at Starbucks or elsewhere) but I also see the benefits of having my trust network be able to locate me in addition to having access to my presence. Here’s what it says on the Plaze beta site…a new location awareness service:
  Plazes is a grassroot approach to location-aware interaction, using the local network you are connected to as location reference. Plazes allows you to share your location with the people you know and to discover people and plazes around you. It’s the navigation system for your social life and it’s absolutely free.

• Stowe Boyd at Corante who had a *very* articulate post about Open Tagging. Since I’m a huge fan of open source everything (software, formats, courseware, business models, now tagging) I really enjoyed how he actually was able to say what I’d attempted to in my huge rambling post here on July 14th.

I thought this sentence was the essence of Stowe Boyd’s proposal on Open Tags “For the open tag model I propose that Technorati-like services request
an RSS feed from users that they, in effect, would subscribe to.” Why the essence?  I ended my July 14th post (where I was talking about how “Apple doesn’t know me”) with these two thoughts that about sum up my thoughts about tags and where they should “live”:

Here are two thoughts….

• What if there was an online repository of pre-done tags by the manufacturer of a product or deliverer of a service? Or, a place where a person or organization could complete a “Tagging Form” at some place like “TagCentral.com” that would have possible fields to be filled in for a tag? I could envision a tag for a Nikon D70 RFQ that had every attribute of the camera and — as tags were added — the D70 tag would automatically proliferate to *every* place that tag resides around the Web

• Identity Management and directory services have a lot of issues to be solved before there is agreement amongst everyone in the community. Still, I would love to have a Reference ID alias representing Steve Borsch that would allow me to own and manage my identity and profile while providing a complete “interest and/or RFQ profile” of tagged products, services, information, audio/video content and more that would live within one central directory and be available to advertisers and sellers to ping me and make me offers. Apple could use a directory like this to send custom offers to “me”, to power users, newbies, iPodders and any other slice-n-dices of individuals.