2008 The Year of the Neogeographer

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The last few months have proved interesting with a few professionals in the industry getting increasingly unsettled by the rise of the Neogeographer and with it a huge increase in information along with a general decrease in overall accuracy.

We are all for it to be honest and the forthcoming Digital Urban book provides a series of tutorials on how to use the best tools out there for the very purpose of Neogeography. The focus on accuracy has always perturbed us, surely its all about a sense of location and place, if the icon or information is a few metres off then to be honest who cares? If you need sub centimetre accuracy go down the Ordnance Survey, or other official map provider route, if you want massive amounts of geoinformation that allow a picture of a place to be developed then its all down to the people, Web 2.0 and ultimately Neogeography.

With this comes a prediction that 2008 will see a wealth of new tools allowing street level data capture and 3D modelling at low cost. Microsofts Photosynth is on the horizon and new software that takes images from Flickr to build 3D models is under development. Cameras and GPS tracking sticks are continuing to fall in price with software to geolocate images becoming increasingly easy to use.

Embedded below is a review of the forthcoming ATP Photofinder:



You can read the full review and find out more details on the Photofinder from here.

Also on the increasingly essential YouTube tobaiswac has placed a movie based on his walk from Wilshire Blvd in Downtown Los Angeles to the Pacific Ocean:



Covering 16 miles tobais took 1 photo every 10 steps providing an actually quite useful data archive of his route. If this had been linked to a gps it would of provided a simple yet effective street level tour, perhaps the next Open Street Map type project could be street level photography, after all who needs all those expensive vans and street capturing systems from the likes of Google and Microsoft (?).

2008 is the year of Neogeography and we cant wait, GIS and mapping in general has been too complicated for too long, it is at last coming to the masses and if that means some points are not quite in the right place, so be it, its not the end of the world is it.