IT Conversations: Tim O'Reilly - O'Reilly Radar - just listened to this from ITconversations.com. Tim O'Reilly was talking about the possibilty of using social software driven contributions on mapping services. For example Microsoft research is developing a system to let people contribute photos to map locations. This got me thinking about a story Dave Snowden told about narrowly escaping mugging in New York. He was using this to illustrate the difference between information and knowledge, using a map and a taxi driver as examples. Long story short he used a map to figure out how to get somewhere more quickly using the tube and a short cut across 42nd Street. As a gang of muggers approached a police car picked him up and told him he shouldn't be there, especially dressed in a tux and carrying a laptop bag. Any New Yorker, let alone any taxi driver would have had the knowledge to tell him not to take that route, but the map didn't say 'here be muggers'. With the ability for large groups to annotate and describe map locations wikipaedia style, the map actually could.

The other highlight of the speech was an anecdote about a service in cambodia where a small number of people drive a route daily through remote villages picking up email without stopping from user's wireless networks.