Delicious GIS

I wanted to find out what was currently of most interest to those using GIS. This got me thinking, how can I do this without adding a poll to my blog and in a way that would be most representative. After a little research and a little thought I went to the delicious website, typed in GIS and I was actually quite surprised by the results.

Delicious is a bookmarking web site where you can save your bookmark to websites of interest to you and access them from anywhere where you can access the web. A great idea especially if you float around from place to place. But thats not the end of it, delicious as a result are able to turn this on its head and it is possible to use such information to provide information like what is the most bookmarked site.

Currently at the top is OpenStreetMap, which in retrospect shouldn't be a great surprise with it being one of the highlights as far as background mapping goes of this year. But it did surprise me, I somewhat blindly believed that it would be something like support.esri.com which, for anyone who has delved in ArcObjects will know, is probably one of your most commonly visited sites when trying to debug ArcObjects. From here this got me thinking, delicious not only simply collate the number of common bookmarks they can also tell you a lot about a person like what our hobbies and interests might be, and maybe even delve deeper into what sort of films we like and dislike - something google has built its empire on with those content specific ads. This is the world of collective intelligence.

So what can GIS do to help with this you might say but just think for a moment, we already use it to help for example supermarkets understand their market place. They can tell you what you bought and when you bought it and many will not be surprised to know that this information is used as a supermarkets character reference about what you like and dislike and by using your address information they are able to build up a complete picture of the market around each of their stores and what attracts their customers.

Extending this further into the likes of location mapping and location based services, if advertisers could tell where you went they could also place ads in locations where people that might be interested in their product are more likely to see it. As smart mobiles become mainstream advertisers will be able to show you adverts that are location specific like the chinese across the road that has a two for one offer on today. Scary prospect?