Pat McDevitt, TeleAtlas. Navigating the Future: Mapping in the Long Tail

All navigation is local.  Where is RELATIVE.  It seems the big companies don't map smaller, localized "where".  Why not?  They're hit based, it's too expensive to map the niches.  Pat explained it as hit based vs. niche based mapping.  Who's who in the mapping playground:

• Hit based: TeleAtlas, NavTech, UK Ordnance Survey
• Niche Based: Platial, Open StreetMap, Loopt

The niche based mapping effort is being done by...you guessed it...YOU.  How is this happening?  It's all part of the map creation long tail.

The Long Tail of Map Creation

1. Create your own content. 
2. Compile verify and normalize 3rd party data.
3. Develop enabling tools and do more of #2. 
4. Filter user and community content.

The enabling and compiling steps allow micro-interest mapping.  That means my 70 year old Dad could add content that is relevant to him thanks to steps 2 and 3.  So, where is long tail going?

In the long tail, filtering technologies will be very important in the future.  This brought up the whole Paleogeography v. Neogeography debate (man...I hate those two words...but that's another topic for another post). Really, the debate is about collaboration or competition in creating map data/content.  I think it should be collaborative and so did Pat.  He showed a great quadrant figure to describe how can all work together (read as: Can't we all just get along?).  In Pat's words, Paleo should focus on protocol based visible and verifiable data.  Neo focuses on low protocol low visible/verifiable.  Low protocol/high verifiable/visible data will be created through customer feedback to paleo companies.  If all of these areas come together, paleo and neo can come together and produce really great, unique content and geography for a very long tail in the map creation playground.  I'm not sure I entirely agree with this assessment, but it's a good start. 

POST SCRIPT: I really wanted to do a post on Jeremy Bartley's talk on ESRI's ArcGIS 9.3 but he totally got robbed.  He got 5 minutes and barely got a demo in. He talked quickly (very quickly) about ESRI's REST and JavaScript API's, showed a quick demo of Google Maps and VE integrations....and he was off the stage.  I felt really bad for him.  If you go the ESRI User Conference this year or the Dev Summit next year, connect with Jeremy.  He's a great guy and has some awesome ideas.