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.

Manufacturers forget that time and again consumers will happily trade resolution and quality for convenience and flexibility. Hence cassette tapes over high fidelity vinyl records, MP3 over CDs, and increasingly - web downloads over DVD. Take a closer look at the Macbook Air. There's no optical drive. The prediction is that audiences will increasingly stream or download wirelessly what they want to watch. Media companies should take note. By the time the studios have finished working out who's going to win the  physical media format war, they may discover it was a Pyrrhic victory after all.   

Popularity is one thing. How to make money from it is another. Its a question I often find myself discussing with my media clients. Merchandising, made possible by mass viral awareness, might be one such avenue.

It's a sign that the virtual is becoming mainstream when the worst aspects of reality begin to manifest. In this case - a sub prime worthy credit crunch in Second Life, forcing the benevolent dictators at Linden Labs to take a stronger hand on regulating banking in the game. But as I found out yesterday, real world irritations are not just limited to finance scams.

After a long hiatus, I teleported onto a block of land I had bought on Dreamland some time ago. Dreamland is a managed sim owned by virtual real estate mogul Anshe Chung. Anshe had sold it to me personally, back in the days before she had achieved front cover of Time magazine fame and liked to joke around with her clients in her dry ironic way. Realising I had left this prime island plot empty for too long I opened my building inventory and dropped a structure in place.

My neighbors, used to an unimpeded view of the simulated sunset were not amused. A barrage of abusive in game messages quickly followed, including one from an administrator who protested that my futuristic modernist structure was a violation of 'island living' zoning regulations. In other words, not faux Moroccan. My protest that my new home was in the spirit of Brasilia's Oscar Niemeyer fell on deaf eyes. So much for playing at Howard Roark. It seems that the future of virtual living is still well and truly in the Rococo style.

I've been reading some fascinating books lately on the science of networks and complexity. In particular 'Six Degrees' by Duncan Watts, and 'Linked' by Albert-Laszlo Barabasi. Both Watts and Barabasi have been active in many revolutionary studies and research papers that have changed the way we think about networks and their impact on society.

Network science is of great interest to me, as in researching my own book Futuretainment i've been studying how the interconnectivity of consumers is changing the media and entertainment industries.

Barabasi's book traces the history of thinking in Networks, from the static random network graphs of Erdos and Renyi, to our understanding today of dynamic systems like the Web or Facebook. It makes for dense but interesting reading. In his words, 'Nodes always compete for connections because links represent survival in an interconnected world'.