The South China Morning Post reported today that China has finally surpassed the US as the world's biggest Web market by users. Last year, China added 73 million new users, taking their total to 210 million. What is really interesting is what lies behind the numbers.

The article references data by Pearl Research that found that Baidu's lead over Google had a lot to do with its strength in entertainment and youth functions rather than simply relevant and precise search. It's a fact little appreciated outside of the East. In China, the Internet is mainly used for entertainment and on Baidu, copyright concerns aside, it is very easy to search and download MP3 tracks. A different Web indeed.

I was stopping in Hong Kong for a few days en route to the US, and decided to check out Zaha Hadid's futuristic art installation for Chanel. It was superlative. I've been interested in watching the trend of luxury brand collaborating with contemporary artists for a while. TheMobile Art Container concept takes it a step further.

You are ushered into the flowing contours of the container and given a Creative Zen MP3 player to wear around your neck. A svelte voice guides you through the exhibition with a continuous ambient pulse of music. As I walked around, it occurred to me that this is a foretaste of the kinds of layered content experiences that will be possible mobile broadband becomes ubiquitous. Its also an example of the kind of immersive interventions that luxury brands will increasingly undertake, as they move from just projecting an image of an ideal reality, to reshaping reality for their devotees.

There's been a lot of fuss lately about Facebook's lack of data portability and its poor handling of consumer privacy on its Beacon program. Two total red herrings in my opinion. Facebook's real problem is that they have to get the act together on commercialising the core social media activity that takes place on their own platform.

Case in point is the poor execution of Facebook pages - the so called profiles designed for brands. For some unknown reason, the product designers at the world's most valuable social network have decided to cripple the functionality of pages relative to Facebook groups. So while you can invite your entire network to join a group, tag photos and videos, and virally drive membership on the latter - the former will leave you out in the cold. Facebook pages does have great statistics tools its true. Pity they only measure how the service is relative to the other more social parts of the platform. Myspace for all of its flaws at least figured out early on that the best way for brands to engage with consumers is for them to be able to act like one.

There’s something big happening in the mapping space. All the indicators are there – significant M&A activity, a dramatic rise in the number of GPS enabled devices and exponential growth in geotagged content. Don’t be fooled. This is not Geography 2.0. Its something much more interesting.

For anyone in the location business, its deal time. In the last year, Nokia bought digital map company NAVTEQ for $8.1 billion, TomTom took out Tele Atlas for $2.8 billion, and there have been a dozen other smaller transactions. There are two forces driving this. Mobile players are waking up to the potential of personal navigation. And secondly, car navigation manufacturers have seen the opportunity to consolidate and scale their products into a broader web connected platform.

And what is that platform? Well, for starters - its more than just Google Earth. Like everyone else, I played with Google Earth for five minutes when it launched. I looked up my house, the Pyramids and the Eiffel Tower – and then I didn’t touch it again for ages. That is, until recently. You see the power of Google Earth was never really the cool satellite images at all. It was the ability to add extra layers of content. And its only lately that geotagged content has started to reach a critical mass.

2008 will be the year of location enabled devices.

According to iSuppli, there will be 250 million GPS-enabled phones shipping per annum by 2010 alone. Add to that GPS enabled cameras, cars, computers and other portable devices. The more consumers create content marked with location data the more what we know of as the Internet will begin to acquire a physical context. It’s what people are already calling the Geoweb.

New GPS units like Dash will not only show you directions but give you an overlay of reviews, rating, hyperlocal news and other web content. Mobile applications like Socialight will display notes that other people have left when you walk into a space they have been in previously. And many of us will start using personal location broadcast platforms like Dopplr, Plazes, Loki and the upcoming Fireagle from Yahoo to not only share what we are doing, but where we are going.

On my last trip to Tokyo I was fortunate to meet some of the researchers at the Sony Computer Science Laboratory. They were pondering an interesting question. Most of us generate a huge amount of digital content without even realising it. Photos, messages, music you listened to, places you went to. So how do you identify what’s important so that you can archive your memories?

The Sony researchers came up with an interesting solution to this problem. With a route tracking application they observed where a person went everyday. By separating the ordinary (going to work or the supermarket) from the memorable (holidays, a walk in the park, a day trip to another city) - you could create automatic content albums based on significant days.

This, to me, is a great example of what the Geoweb really stands for. Not just clever GPS car navigation units or 3D spinning globes, but a mesh of the real world with the organising logic of the web.  In truth, the more that our physical environment is mapped to online data platforms, the more the former will start to resemble the latter.

The webification of the world.