Dom beat me to it on this one, but I had this on the brew in the background, so thought I might as well post a couple of thoughts…

The number of individal pieces of electronic equipment needed to document a walk is surprising. GPS unit, digital camera, phone, audio recorder… we juggled more than one of these each at any given time while we walked the lake.

Geocoding images is currently a difficult process - you take a photo, note the GPS coordinates, and then somehow take a note or recording that will allow you to manually connect the two pieces of data later.

The development of integrated GPS enabled cameras, where live location coordinates are saved as EXIF data with each shot can’t be far off. When this technology hits mobile phones in particular, the possibilities for collaberative mapping and location based communications will be huge. In a way, perhaps many group mapping initiatives of today are laying the foundations for that time when folkmapping projects can potentially draw upon a network of users of millions.

Unobtrusive data gathering, realtime data input, and a discernable return on the investment of contributing data would all come much more easily if the hardware was in place.

In the meantime, see below an example the ingenious homebrew possibilities from the ANTIPODE/2 project.

Elastic bands: powering the mapping technology of the future.

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