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According to a recent issue of The Economist, the next new web is the geoweb – a web of coordinates and connections between the network cloud above and the earth below. William Gibson, a science fiction writer who's been covering the future for so long that he actually coined the term cyberspace (Neuromancer, 1984) to describe and imagine the emerging Internet, seems to think so too.

Gibson is damned good at trend-spotting – a generation after Neuromancer, he's still got one of the keenest eyes for the zeitgeist -- capturing and recombining extreme sport practices, tech and media trends, immersive gaming, the memes of convergence culture, and the absurd excesses of the global advertising and entertainment industry -- in a fabulous drift-net of words.

Gibson's latest fiction, Spook Country, focuses on locative media – digital phantasms and 3D installations that exist in a virtual medium tied to place. He weaves a nuanced, thoughtfully textured look at the grid-like realm defined by GPS – and the places where it intersects with culture, commerce, and the global economy, legit and illicit.

In Spook Country, Gibson's science fiction is carefully situated in the present --- a present in which "intelligence... is advertising turned inside out;" in which skilled geowankers are in demand by virtual reality artists, nameless governmental security agencies, international brand magnates, fictitious magazine publishers, well-heeled digital art curators, rogue soldiers of fortune, and shadowy agents of undisclosed identity and citizenship, who don't always know their own employers.

In the opening chapter, Hollis Henry, former lead singer of nineties band the Curfew, has taken a writing assignment for a mysterious European magazine called node. node hasn't launched yet, but Hollis is in LA to learn about location-based art, including a vivid, virtual memorial of the death of River Phoenix, experienced through a special VR helmet, and geolocated to the precise spot on the sidewalk where he collapsed outside the Viper Room.

Gibson's characters have some of the elusive iconic quality of Second Life avatars. They have just enough depth to be engaging, enough authenticity to be utterly believable and unattainably cool. They inhabit a jumpy, fashion-conscious, highly designed plot that might not stand up to really close scrutiny.

Spook Country was on the mind of many attendees at the Wired NextFest earlier this fall, where the future was on display at the Los Angeles Convention Center in a collection of luminous pod-like pavilions, focused on future trends in exploration, transportation, communications. The digitization of the geospatial realm and the visual mapping of our life and times seems to be everywhere this season -- like Dilbert discovering ZoneTag and defining the next wave of online world-building.

What does it mean when our wild blue planet becomes a grid where everyone's coordinates can be known and instantly shared? What happens when you can superimpose and geolocate the past? What does it mean when every shipping container has a story to tell? And why would a magazine publisher decide to use a cloak of invisibility for his launch strategy?

Gibson's storytelling weaves a spell of intrigue that transcends geography and its past limitations and leads us gently into a spooky future with a upbeat ending.

Popularity: 7% [?]

TagMaps is a toolkit that gives you new ways to visualize text on geographic maps. TagMaps can be used to communicate key characteristics of location-based data in an easy-to-understand interface. Check out the sample applications, where we use Flickr tags on a map to build a world exploration tool.

Who built it

• Marc Davis
• Mor Naaman
• Rahul Nair

What people are saying

TagMaps - Mapping and Photo Visualization, Design Demo, Max Kiesler
"Whenever I'm getting ready to travel somewhere I spend an inordinate amount of time looking at images and maps of the location. I usually go to about 4 of my favorite sites for photos and 5 different mapping sites to get ready for the trip. TagMaps lets you do both at the same time and much more."

TagMaps makes geo-tagging useful, Webware, Josh Lowensohn
"TagMaps is a project with a lot of promise. It has the casual, exploratory feel you get from Google Maps, but it also mixes in a dash of visual appeal with the Flickr shots. I could easily see this becoming a mobile-phone app or surfacing on blogs and social-networking profiles."
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TagMaps Toolkit, 7.5th Floor, Fabien Girardin
"Based on their first experiment to Visualizing the Crowd’s “Mental Map” Using Flickr Geotagged Images, Yahoo! Research Berkeley has now introduced their TagMaps toolkit..."

New callback function in TagMaps, Yahoo! Developer Network blog, Shane Ahern
"So, today, we are releasing an update to the embeddable TagMaps badge. Using the updated module, you can implement a JavaScript callback function on the page where you have embedded TagMaps. On that page, then, you can create any service you can think of that takes advantage of knowing what tag the user is interested in, and where in the world it is located."

Popularity: 15% [?]

The world is a big place. There are thousands of maps out there that provide unique details about any given destination. MapMixer is a new site that combines those maps with Yahoo! Maps to give you a better view of the world.

It's easy to mix your own map. Upload an image of your map, use our layering tool to align it with Yahoo! Maps and we'll do the rest! Your map will have all the features of Yahoo! Maps (zooming, panning). You can also syndicate it on your own site or blog.

Who built it

• Adam Chang
• Nimit Maru

What people are saying

Launch: Merge Your Map on Yahoo Maps with MapMixer, Lifehacker, Gina Trapani
"Really neat tool for folks who don't want to have to draw a whole new map when they've got one already—just scan and upload to MapMixer and you've got it online."

Yahoo Launches 2 New Hacks - Interview with Bradley Horowitz from Yahoo, Read/WriteWeb, Sean Ammirati
"The user simply finds a couple intersection points on both the map and his/her image and then the system automatically morphs them together. In our interview, Bradley explained the process as being 'like a big sheet of rubber, the map is kind of stretched and rotated, and then applied to the Yahoo Map.'"

Yahoo MapMixer: The easiest way to add an overlay, Ogle Earth, Stefan Geens
"MapMixer lets you do three things that Google's tools don't... I can't help wishing that maps made with Yahoo MapMixer were exportable as a KMZ file today, so I could use this tool to create overlays I can show in a KML-savvy client of my choice."

Popularity: 14% [?]