Metalocative.com past a significant milestone - 500 entries. There seem to be more and more examples of time based features, projects and products so I've introduced a "Time-based" category.

On another note I've been attending many Meetups around the Bay area. Several things come to mind as I reflect on my experiences in those events. First is that social studies/designers are nearly absent from the scene. Perhaps the reason is that all problems or ideas are seen as simply needing technical/machine based solutions. Furthermore, most of the participants are already sold on the ideas proposed, so the only thing left is deciding on which technology to use and which VC to talk to. One developer told me that friends of his just create tools and features and put them out in the world to see what will become of them. No wonder there is so much tech noise in the world.

Interculturalism was in the news recently and not for its positive potential. There’s been a spree of purse snatchings in San Jose, California. All of the victims are apparently Vietnamese women. Their cultural propensity to transact exclusively in cash and not report incidents to the police seemed to have made them perfect targets. Where interculturalism comes is in the identities of the purse-snatchers. The few already arrested culprits are Latinos. There’s been a long cultural understanding and even expectation that non-Asians could not clearly discern between the various ethnicities within the Asian community. Both ethnic groups have sizable representation in San Jose, which apparently have lead to a very nuanced cultural understanding with malicious application. Read more about the story here.

A few days ago I’ve attended WhereCamp 08 which took place on the Google campus. It is a geo hacking/meeting of the locative community minds type of gathering. It has no clear agenda or aim other than providing a logistical support to the LBS developer community where free exchange of ideas and person to person interaction could take place. As a result a few interesting observations formed in my mind. The most prominent seemed to be that there is an obvious lack of voices of designers and social study experts. Much of the conversations revolve about code intricacies and battles of the standards. Numerous add hoc surveys of the audience validate this or that service, yet no one seem to account for the fact that the audience is already sold on most of the ideas proposed. Privately many of the key players admit that there is a problem and they would love to have more interaction and collaborations with designers. It seems it is a matter of picking the proper time, place and format.

On another note there was a much discussion about how various sites developed interesting features though do not own a truly dominating products. As a result those products are seen and used as features rather than products and they are consequently combined to create other products and even more elaborate features. I guess the burgeoning field of aggregator sites.

Lastly, despite some critical observations I found the event to be really worth attending for anyone with any interest in the locative space.

I've attended 2007 Where conference and found it very inspiring and informative. I could not attend last year's WhereCamp, so this year I'll do the reverse. 2008 WhereCamp is hosted by Google on May 17-18. It seems like it'll be a total geek fest. More info here: http://wherecamp.pbwiki.com/ and here http://wherecamp.crowdvine.com/. I have also discovered 2 more interesting gartering opportunities: a meetup group about geo technologies and social networking - http://web.meetup.com/49/ and a Social Gaming Summit taking place in San Fransisco on Friday, June 13th 2008. Great stuff.

Metalocative.com is nearing 500 posts.

Metalocative passed the 300 entry mark, as I continue to add entries from around the world covering a wide range of ideas and conceptual persuasion. The site traffic is continuously increasing and comes from places as far apart and as diverse as Holland, Indonesia, Israel, UK, the Americas and more. Also, I’ve introduced a new feature: Highlights. It is intended to editorialize particular entries, which combine locative technologies and concepts in a new and interesting way. All highlights are already entries in the main directory. I’ll be adding more Highlights as I identify intriguing entries.

I've been using Statisfied for some time and should say that it's very amusing to see my own tweetervision like experience with my site(s). The setup is a ultra easy and fast. Also Next Fest, Wired magazine extrafaganza of future technologies is comming to Los Angeles - 14- 15 September.