Managed to sneak over to the YAPC::Europe conference yesterday. It was a strange experience being in a room with people who I previously only knew from teh internet, listening to them talking about online projects, while following up ideas using the wireless access: a bit like being in one of those holographic TVs that everyone was going to have in the future.
Jo Walsh's talk was the only one that really got my neurons firing - it triggered a lot of the thoughts I've been having recently about wifi, maps, RDF database exchanges, open access to publically-relevant information stores, metadata vocabularies, etc, etc. There seems to be an interesting move away from GPS as a locator, maybe due to the public service not being ready yet. Their stored data seems to be accessible through a variety of bots, but there's not so much information about how to input data at the moment. I'd like to describe a lot of the shops, cafes, restaurants and bars that fill the streets around here, but I have no way to transfer this from paper and ink into the online database (particularly as the only metadata I have available is the old-fashioned street address). A form (or even an OS X app) for entering data would be nice.