But take it on a simple level- you carry a device around which can sense where you are, and using foursquare (or its variants) you can “mark” your locations, see others that have been there. I put aside my criticism to last month as we learned from Beth Kanter how some museums were putting it to use (or see this strategy by a NY theater group and more ideas for museums), especially again, the notion of “listening” in social media.

So check this out- in two steps you can generate a google map of your foursquaring.

I had to try.

It works (click for larger view or see it in Google maps)

What it places in a bubble is simple- the name of the place and whatever notes you added. One might bend this as a field mapping project- check in diferent locations in a city, and comment on the architecture? Create a map-based story? I don’t know. I could save this as a MyMap and add more content to it (e.g. edit the bubbles with my photos? notes? field measurements?)

I see foursquare as used still a bit silly. It’s bad you can check into a place when you are not really in the vicinity (I did a back check in from Phoenix to a place I was on a previous trip). And now that you can check in anywhere, at airports you see locations like “Gate 39″, “Gate 38″, “In the Air”. I think I am mayor of a baggage claim, and I even joked about trying to be a mayor of a key place at the Phoenix Airport (I took some fictional liberty- Joe B is not mayor of a stall) (Neither am I) (But there is a Joe who is mayor of Ocotillo Sun, the bar in terminal 2).

This is the pitfall of judging an app, a tool, of the way you see it being used, and not looking a bit broader at the way it is not being used.

Look at what foursquare is offering for feeds – your history as RSS (subscribe to updates), KML (do stuff on maps), and ICS (do stuff with calendars):

The foursquare feeds system allows you to subscribe to RSS, KML and iCal feeds of your data. The feeds platform is still in development and is subject to change at any time (sorry!).

We’ve made the feeds available (using private token URLs) to make it easy for you to construct simple frontends like WordPress plugins and Dashboard widgets without having to use our regular API.

That smells of potential there.

And slap my palm on my head- I had no idea you could just past a KML feed into the search box of google maps and generate a map like this. Hmmmm. Hmmmmmmmmm. Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm.

One more.

A day or so ago, on scanning the flow of tweets, I saw this message from Roland Tanglao

Who knows why one tweet grabs your mouse as opposed to another? But with that I was fallen into a fun time of exploring the noticings site which taps into many of my interests- flickrs+daily photos+geolocation+a bit of gaming, with a simple premise “the game of noticing the world around you”

The elegant aspect of noticin.gs is that it has cleverly simple rules. Your goal is to notice details, objects, interesting things, lost items in your surroundings. Take a photo, post to flickr, geo-tag the location, and tag the photo “noticings”– the web site does all the rest. Every 24 hours, the site crawls flickr and awards points based in criteria like:

• Noticing something near someone else’s noticing.
• Noticing something.
• Your first noticing in a neighbourhood.
• Being first player to notice something in a neighbourhood.
• Noticing something every lunchtime for a working week.
• Noticing something every day for a week.
• Noticing something that’s been lost by someone.

plus the teaser

Of course, there may be hidden rules, which can only be discovered by earning them.

And it amps up the challenge by making scores public. I just started so only have 50 http://noticin.gs/players/cogdog

So for me, I saw a lot of ties of this and the noticing I do when finding my daily 2009/365 photo.

I wanted to share this back in twitter, and thanks Roland, and mentioned something about the parallels (me) of doing the daily 2009/365 photos. The joy of this crazy web is that we see things differently, for Roland, he sees one as self induglent and one as with others, in his case Your Mileage May Vary

I have to respect that, since Roland has long been one of the prolific flickr photo posters (he must have 9 gazillion pictures on flickr)– and he’s just a nice guy, too.

But I find that remark curious, as I see a lot of “indulging with others” happening in our 2009/365 space- people regularly comment (some as soon as I post), there is an active community -I don’t fell alone at all. This was the gist of my 2009 Northern Voice preso on Say/Blog it in Pictures – it is one of the most informal, unstructured, yet appropriately bounded in structure groups I’ve been in.

So i don’t agree with Roland at all– for me, MMDV- My Mileage Does Vary.

And all of this is besides the point- it is all about playing the noticings game- start noticing today! rack up some points.

And its part of the newly arranged area on flickr called the App Garden- a place to find those clever apps people outside of flickr create with the API- where noticin.gs has a nice corner garden spot