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I've been to two really interesting and thought-provoking panels here at SXSWi. The first, How To Make the Most of Maps, was right up my alley. I've fiddled around with a little Google Maps hacking, but I learned about two sites that do all the hard parts for you: CommunityWalk and Wayfaring, which let you plug in photos, reviews, events, anything into a Google Map and make it your own personalized atlas. I plan to crunch the you-know-what out of both of them when I get home.
The theory of the panel is that there's a huge interest in displaying data geographically, and with the foundation of Google Maps, Google Earth, Yahoo Maps, Geotagging, and the ubiquity of GPS information, we'll soon be able to do amazing stuff with maps and the Web. (The best example was Dan Catt's: Imagine at a U2 concert, a disco ball falls on Bono and squishes him. Everyone takes pictures. Somewhere, a database notes a ton of pictures coming in tagged with the same lat/long coordinates. Instantly, everyone knows something's up!)
The second really good panel I saw was Digital Preservation and Blogs. The Web being the fluid thing that it is, there's a coordinated effort starting to save and archive as much of its history as possible. Carrie Bickner of the NY Public Library has started a campaign to archive and preserve as much of the Internet as possible, starting with five(ish) notable blogs, including kottke.org and the Church Music Association of America. The idea is to then branch out, and collect as much of the blog world as we can - in effect, collecting the photos and what passes for the personal papers of our generation.
Josh Greenberg has already led efforts to instantly collect all possible digital memory of the two most significant disasters of the Web era (9/11 and Katrina). It's a little morbid, but also very necessary; imagine if we had countless first-hand accounts of the San Francisco earthquake, or a Pepys-times-1000 history of the Great London Fire.
If I learned anything from the preservation panel, it's to back up everything as often as possible. Flickr and LiveJournal may not last forever, JPGs and HTML might someday be as obsolete as the laser-disc that a British company put together in the early 80's to forever document everyday life in England. 20 years later, there's no technology readily available that can still read it.
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