Cooperative Innovation

Google is an infrastructure provider on the infobahn.  Googlemaps, their most recent major freeway, is becoming instantly filling with travelers. 

This new infrastructure has allowed innovation smartmobbing by providing a flexible framework for coders to make widely available applications based on simple data overlays.  There's hundreds of them now.  People mapping everything from speed cameras to buses to cheap gas to personal wifi access to traffic to the best place to be trampled by a bull.

Since most things happen someplace, you can map it.  If you have a lot of things that happen in a lot of places, you can map them.  Then patterns emerge.  People like patterns.

Geographic Information Systems have been around since the 1960s.  As desktop computing has become more powerful, so has GIS.  Web based GIS has basically come in two major flavor's ESRI's ArcIMS (which our San Francisco site uses) and the University of Minnesota's Open Source MapServer.  ArcIMS is highly cost prohibitive for innovators, with a minimum out of pocket cost of $10,000.  MapServer, until recently, wasn't ready to handle the data challenges like the ESRI products.

But even if you chose either of these options, you still have to find data.  That's GoogleMaps biggest contribution.  You don't have to think about the maps, just the data and how to display it.  Maps are expensive to obtain and maintain.  The world is a dynamic place that changes all the time.

This has created an environment where much of the "hows" of a GIS application are taken care of and innovators can focus on the "whats".  This has led to a creative, distributed and uncoordinated burst of innovation and invention.

But this is innovation and invention using the grace of Google as a platform.  Certain questions arise:

1. How many maps can google serve for free?
2. What happens when killer apps rely on free services for mission critical applications?
3. How responsible for map veracity will Google be perceived to be - this is different from what their EULA might say
4. Is this ride contingent on high Google stock prices and oblique income streams?

Like the rest of us, I'm enjoying the ride.  Watching the world get swept up in mapping things.  We'll see where this goes.