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| Subject: | GISList: Interesting and highly relevant article in Economist.com |
| Date: |
03/27/2003 09:30:01 AM |
| From: |
Anthony Quartararo |
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This was sent to me today, thought it would be of interest to the list
members at large:
"THE REVENGE OF GEOGRAPHY=20
It was naive to imagine that the global reach of the internet would make
geography irrelevant. Wireline and wireless technologies have bound the
virtual and physical worlds closer than ever
IN THE early days of the internet boom, there was much talk of the "death of
distance". The emergence of a global digital network, it seemed, would put
an end to mundane physical or geographical constraints. There was some truth
in this. E-mail made it cheap and easy to stay in constant touch with
people, whether they lived around the corner or on the other side of the
globe. Companies could communicate with customers and employees no matter
where they were. And like-minded individuals who shared a common interest
could get together online from all round the world.
Actually, geography is far from dead. Although it is often helpful to think
of the internet as a parallel digital universe, or an omnipresent "cloud",
its users live in the real world where limitations of geography still apply.
And these limitations extend online. Finding information relevant to a
particular place, or the location associated with a specific piece of
information, is not always easy. This has caused a surge of innovation, as
new technologies have developed to link places on the internet with places
in the real world--stitching together the supposedly separate virtual and
physical worlds.
The first step in this process was to map the internet's physical
infrastructure, and in particular the locations of the end-points on its
edges, where users are connected. A number of companies, including Quova[1],
Digital Envoy[2], NetGeo[3] and InfoSplit[4], offer "geolocation services"
that enable websites to determine the physical locations of individual
users. This is done using a database that links internet protocol (IP)
addresses of users' computers to specific countries, cities or even
postcodes. Groups of IP addresses are assigned to particular universities,
companies or other organisations, which often have known locations:
providers of internet access allocate specific IP addresses to customers in
particular regions. When you visit a website that uses geolocation
technology, your IP address is relayed to the geolocation provider's server.
It looks up where you are and passes the information back to the website,
which can then modify its content accordingly.
Once your location is known, existing demographic databases, which have
been honed over the years to reveal what kinds of people live where, can be
brought into play. Targeted advertising is the most obvious application for
geolocation, but it has many other uses.
It can help, for example, to determine the right language in which to
present a multilingual website. Or e-commerce vendors and auction houses can
use geolocation to prevent the sale of goods that are illegal in certain
countries. Online casinos can stop users from countries where online
gambling has been outlawed from gaining access. Rights-management policies
for music or video broadcasts, which tend to be based on geographical
markets, can also be enforced. The pharmaceutical and financial-services
industries, both of which are subject to strict national regulation, can be
confident that, when offering goods and services for sale online, they are
staying within the law. So much for the borderless internet and the death of
distance.
Geolocation finds the physical location corresponding to an internet
address, but it can also be used to do the reverse: to find the
internet-access point nearest to a particular location. The necessity of
doing this arises from the growing popularity of 802.11b or Wi-Fi
technology, which provides wireless internet access to suitably equipped
laptops within 100 metres or so of a small base-station, or "hotspot". Many
of the thousands of hotspots around the world are deliberately made
available to anybody who happens to be passing. Others are run by operators
who charge a fee for access in hotels, airports and other places. One
operator, T-Mobile, is installing Wi-Fi base-stations in thousands of
Starbucks coffee shops in several countries.
But how can you determine if Wi-Fi coverage is available in a particular
area--or, if not, the location of the nearest hotspot? A number of websites,
such as wifinder.com[5] and 80211hotspots.com[6], have sprung up that act as
global directories of Wi-Fi base-stations. Type in a postcode or street
address, and you can see where they are. In some cities, Wi-Fi enthusiasts
have produced maps showing hotspot locations.
This has been taken to its logical extreme by researchers at the University
of Kansas (at www.ittc.ku.edu/wlan[7]). First, they drive around a
particular neighbourhood with a laptop, looking for Wi-Fi coverage and
monitoring the signal's strength. Ne
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