With the rise of geographic-interest via map mashups, mobile location, and geotags, there is now a slew of sites rising up to start aggregating and collecting all the of the localized information and news.

PlaceBlogger is apparently just about to start. It’s an aggregation of localized blogs. Blogs with posts about specific locations, like the neighborhood or suburb rather than just a larger metro area - dubbed hyperlocal. You can see a mockup here. It’s like a Yahoo frontpage, but centered around neighborhoods or areas of interest. (via Susan Mernit

Another site is outside.in (read the announcement and some thoughts here) which is already released and has data. At first it wasn’t quite apparent how to start contributing to the site or marking up locations. They refer to the GMAP format, but I’m not sure what that really means.

All of these sites and tools are really exciting. This is the purpose behind tools I’ve been working on like GeoPress and Mapufacture. I hope these other local-news aggregators also use and support broader, open formats that we can all share and play along together.

Also check out LocoBlog, which is a mobile-phone blogging application and site as well.

Mobile GIS is becoming more interesting and easy to get into. Yesterday Navicore released their navigation software for the Nokia 770.

Maemo Mapper is a free and open-source mapping application, designed from the ground-up for the Nokia 770. However, a large caveat is that it uses GoogleMaps in what is probably a violation of the terms of service (realtime navigation and downloading), not to mention annoying in that you have to “pre-drive” your route to cache the appropriate GoogleMap tiles.

GPSDrive now supports OpenStreetMap for downloading free maps.

I’ve gotten slightly involved in the new GeoClue project - an effort to provide an easy “location service” backend for devices. The location on the device may be served up by GPS, WiFi, GeoIP, Mobile Cell/GSM, or even just the user clicking on a map or entering an address. Then, an application can subscribe to the location service and get updated with the current location of the user/device and use it as appropriate.

At FOSS4G I attended a BOF (Birds of a Feather - people interested in the same stuff) on Mobile GIS. The software and technology all exist, it just needs some coordinated efforts to define the use cases, interfaces, and approaches. However, one solution won’t fit everyone. There are users who want to do “real GIS” in the field and there are users who want to do “neogeography” to say, find the nearest coffee shop on their mobile.

Plazes released a Mobile Plazer. They are using cell-tower geolocation, similar to GSMLoc. It will be interesting to see how they handle many locations belonging to a single Celltower location, as well as cell-towers being carrier specific.

They address the issue in their FAQ:

After setting a Plaze the first time (e.g. by entering an address), it was necessary to enter an address again the next time I started the application at the same location. Why?

A newly discovered Plaze is bound to the GSM cell tower your mobile was connected to. The areas of cell towers overlap, so sometimes your mobile is connected to a different tower at the same location. Simply enter an address an set the Plaze a second time, then Plazes knows both cell towers and it will work better next time.

This is really cool. Geolocation by mobile without a GPS system is key to Location-Based technologies to take off and be generally accepted. Plazes is leading the edge of the community-based geolocated networks. Now time to build some services on top of their framework.

- via Henri Bergius

TrollTech announced an ‘open’ phone, called the Greenphone. It runs Linux (QTopia Phone Edition specifically)

It is a full-featured GPRS/GSM phone:

• dual-core 312MHz XScale processor
• 64MB Ram, and a mini-SD flash slot
• 1.3 megapixel camera
• Bluetooth
• WiFi networking

Looking at the success Nokia has had with exposing various developer interfaces to their mobile phones and N770 tablet (Maemo), I think there is a huge market for an “openphone”. When I first heard of the O’Reilly Telephony Conference, I pictured people sitting around with their antiquated telephones, talking about switchboards and the like. I guess it’s a lot cooler scene than that.

Additionally, hopefully Open-hardware like mobile phones and tablets will kick the closed-minded carriers into realizing they’re slowly strangling themselves by keeping everything closed and begin to work with the huge, untapped, hobbyist and developer community.

The Gartner Hype Report has some interesting analysis of where various technologies currently lie along the hype curve.

Particularly interesting to me is the analysis of LBS.

Location-aware technologies should hit maturity in less than two years. Location-aware technology is the use of GPS (global positioning system), assisted GPS (A-GPS), Enhanced Observed Time Difference (EOTD), enhanced GPS (E-GPS), and other technologies in the cellular network and handset to locate a mobile user.

Location-aware applications will hit mainsteam adoption in the next two to five years.

Nextel phones in the US already have exposed the location API to developers. Lots of other devices are using them now for finding friends or getting info on various locations.

Interesting, they also state that maintstream adoption of the semantic web is five to ten years away. I’m surprised that they predict so far out with the growing support for Microformats and other semantic technologies that are being used by Yahoo, Technorati, and search engines such as Swoogle which require content to already exist in order to have something to search. See the article Geospatial Semantic Web Blog: Pinging the Semantic Web for some more discussion on how to spread the use of the semantic web using ping services