The Geospatial Web and the new topography of writing

Spatial metaphors are common with the web, as they are with writing. However, Mike Liebold of O'Reilly discusses some of the emerging possibilities of the geospatial web. Essentially, the geospatial web suggests tying together a wide range of data with maps and with real time information about user location. Liebold writes

we can see the beginning shapes of a true geospatial web, inhabited by spatially tagged hypermedia as well as digital map geodata. Google Maps is just one more layer among all the invisible cartographic attributes and user annotations on every centimeter of a place and attached to every physical thing, visible and useful, in context, on low-cost, easy-to-use mobile devices. In a recent email, Nat Torkington, organizer of the upcoming Where 2.0 conference, said it this way: "Everything is somewhere. Whether you're talking about assets, people, phone calls, pets, earthquakes, fire sales, bank robberies, or famous gravestones, they all have a location attached. And everything we touch in our lives, from groceries to digital photos, could have a location. From these locations we could learn a lot more about ourselves and build new economies."

Liebold focuses on the technical challenges surrounding this project. However, this got me thinking more about my own work and the way in which a geospatial web might alter new media rhetoric. Typically we have thought of the web as anonymous and global. Though we know that there is a physical location for a server somewhere, that doesn't really matter to the user. Now however we are talking about a topographical web, a concentration on specific, local information that people will seek out based on physical proximity.

Writing for a local readership raises different rhetorical issues than writing for a global one. We might be looking at a whole new set of uses for the web and whole new way of presenting information for a new kind of audience.