Potential of the Geoweb

Two years ago, Paul Rademacher merged data from craigslist and google maps to create housingmaps.com. Originally a hacker, he has since been employed by google. Google now allows everybody to fill their maps with information such as coordinates or addresses, and about 4 million people have already put such "personalised" or "mashed-up" maps on their homepages. What is interesting about this page and the success of googleearth is that location has become more important on the internet. Although space has often been thought to be of no relevance on the web, users are now discovering what is called the geoweb. More than 250 million people have downloaded googleearth, in addition to those using virtual earth by Microsoft. They all contribute to the data and produce their own maps. Openstreetmap is something of a geographical Wikipedia. There seem to be a lot of risks with geographical information that's been pieced together by pretty much anyone. Do I really want to trust that information when travelling or building a house? On the other hand, there is probably a lot of potential in gathering the local information of users. Once cell phone companies provide a service to users that makes their location known, they could for example be updated about the best pizza place in their proximity. Or, with regards to the popular social networking sites, be notified if an old friend happens to be in the same neighborhood. This provides huge potential for advertisers, but also bears the risk for the user to become too transparent and traceable.