Supersaturation in Neogeography

I have been a traveling extensively over the last couple of weeks, so I am a bit behind in my entries. Last week I was at the Location Intelligence (LI) Conference and the Web 2.0 Expo. I met Andrew Turner, who gave the most lucid and informative talk on Neogeography that I have ever heard at Web 2.0 Expo. He and Mikel Maron gave a longer workshop on the subject at LI (missed that one, but I was at the Expo with the AWS crowd). One of our guys attended and said that it was excellent as well.

We spent some time with these guys, moving back and forth between the conferences, and showed them the private beta of WeoGeo. What struck me about the conversations was how quickly we meshed on the subject of maps, Web 2.0 applications, and neogeography. What was really amazing was how many coincident lines of thought that we had in common. It was as if we were all tuned into the same psychic hotline. We were nearly completing sentences for each other.

We as a group came from vastly different locations and backgrounds and have never met each other. Yet we had such similar thoughts on the same subject that it strikes me as something to notice. Now it is clear that we were a self-selecting group, since we were attending both LI and Web 2.0 Expo; one would expect some amount of coordinated thoughts. It was so enjoyable just to sit and talk maps and neogeography that I didn’t pay much attention to the coordination of our thought.

What really caused me to focus on this “group” think from people who never met, was the post from Adena Schutzberg. Adena was tremendously busy at this conference. When she wasn’t leading a session, everyone wanted a piece of her time. I was one of the fortunate ones to get a couple minutes with her. The post she wrote about us (and me) was awesome. How she got this in that short of a period of time suggests to me (and amazes me) that she is tapped into the same hotline as the Andrew, Mikel, and I.

Which brings me to the title of this post – these incidences (as well as some others) suggest to me that our field – geography, mapping, neogeography, whatever you want to call it – may be approaching a point of supersaturation. This is the point in a chemical solution where the input of a very small seed causes the whole solution to change state and create something beautiful and solid, where before there was nothing but a slurry of potential. I think that neogeography may be in this state of supersaturation. I don’t know what will cause the crystallization of our field into something new and beautiful, but I look forward to that event.

I would really like to thank Adena, Mikel and Andrew for their wonderful posts. We will work very hard to achieve the potential that they have expressed for our ideas and WeoGeo.