New Scientist has an article about people using GPS devices to create their own maps. According to the article the rationale - it least in Europe - is the price of otherwise available maps. To save a couple of pennies (Euro) the people behind the trend spend hour upon hour traversing the local network of streets to produce the homemade maps.

I have to admit that I am among the apparently few who haven't become addicted to flick, so perhaps I have a problem when it comes innovative ways of spending time, but the mapping activity ranks among the most foolish things I have heard recently. Perhaps a few Scotsmen would go (walk) this far to save money, but still...

That was at least my immediate reaction until my eyes caught up with the fact that the article featured IFTF describing the trend as the beginning of a geospatial web. With the IFTF "endorsement" I felt I had to give the idea a second chance.

It didn't make much more sense on second thought either, there has to be simpler ways to put the local coffee bar on a map, but then movies such as "Sliding Doors", "Short cuts" and "Magnolia" came to my mind. Imagine if we all gave up some of our right to privacy and produced and shared dynamical private maps. Not just maps of the local neighbourhood, but maps containing information about when we had been where. Pretty straightforward. It would no longer be left to Hollywood to speculate in what would have happened, if I had taken another route to the office this morning - or if I had been 10 minutes late. On the map sharing server (Mapr?) some pattern recognition routine would allow me to see, who I would have met in that case. It would even be possible to perform match making among persons travelling in my foot steps but at different times. People I may otherwise never have met would suddenly leave anonymity. As in the movies our lifes would begin to converge.

In this case I think that I would buy myself a GPS, opening the door to a fascinating kind of parallel worlds. But my map of London would still be the one I can get free of charge at the airport.