there are notes in boxes that are empty

every room has an accessible history

every place has emotional attachments you can open and save

you can search for sadness in new york

people within a mile of each other who have never met stop what they are doing and organise spontaneously to help with some task or other.

in a strange town you knock on the door of someone you don't know and they give you sandwiches.

paths compete to offer themselves to you

life flows into inanimate objects

the trees hum advertising jingles

everything in the world, animate and inanimate, abstract and concrete, has thoughts attached

So runs the intriguing introduction to the Headmap Manifesto, a document conceptualising the integration of internet technology with GPS mapping and wide wireless networks.

The idea of cyberspace acting effectively as an additional dimension to real 3-dimensional space creates almost limitless possibilities, and the more one considers it the more it becomes seemingly inevitable that compelling applications of this sort will become part of our daily lives in the not-so-distant future.

Through such technology, context and information could be tagged to physical locations which can be filtered and browsed by the user at their discretion.

One can imagine public service information such as live public transport information, or information on traffic jams, sightseeing information on monuments or art exhibits.

Private networks could provide "friends only" info - notes left on recommended pubs or restaurants or messages left following a missed rendez-vous.

Those on the look-out for new friends or romance could leave a public profile open, stimulating communication between like-minded people who would otherwise pass without comment.

These ideas are just scratching the surface. As with the internet, the real killer-apps are beyond our conception at the moment and will be developed over time. I had an internet connection in the early days of the web but abandoned it due to a lack of imagination, both on my side and by that of those developing applications for the new medium. It was not long before cyberspace had developed to such a point that I was compelled to return. The possibilities of the medium made it just a matter of time.

Security is also bound to be an issue. Internet grooming could become real-life stalking in such a world. As with every new media a number of challenges will need to be overcome to ensure the largest amount of wheat with acceptably little chaff, but we will have to face these obstacles as we have with the current, tethered internet.

I close with the final paragraph from an article from the Social Issues Research Centre website, which does a good job of summarising the possibilities and risks.

The Headmap manifesto covers a bewildering range of possibilities made real by developments in location aware wireless internet technology. It also seeks to explore our understanding of architecture, social responsibility, public space and the limitations of a manufactured spatial environment. Location aware computing devices may not provide solutions to the many problems raised by the issue of human attitudes towards, and use of, physical space, not least the idea that we are all, often unknowingly, shaped by the built environments that surround us. Yet such devices offer a way of interpreting space which is radically new, and which throws up a myriad of beautiful possibilities. This comes alongside a myriad of banal and unpleasant possibilities, which is the necessary counterpart to any Utopian scheme. We can only hope that the more interesting aspects of the Headmap manifesto can become reality while maintaining an element of that original idealism, and that the enterprise of spatial computing avoids being entirely swallowed up by advertising and corporate use. As the authors of the manifesto would themselves put it:

"The Internet has already started leaking into the real world. Headmap argues that when it gets truly loose the world will be new again."