Mapping; for business or for pleasure?

Over at MediaShift Idea Lab, Leslie Rule has been thinking about hyperlocal mapping.

Now personally I can't stand the term hyperlocal, a term that Wikipedia says "...is sometimes used to refer to news coverage of community-level events".

The notion of "community-level" is very confusing in a time when the word community has come to mean so much more than simply a group of people living in the same space.

Or maybe it's simply the 'hyper' prefix that I object to. Is it actually supposed to mean something or is this marketing jargon designed to make a boring old word such as 'local' seem more exciting and innovative?

Has anyone actually defined the difference in real terms between 'local' and 'hyperlocal'... and please don't get me started on 'ultralocal'?

Anyway, back to the post.

With the recent surge in crime mapping activity it's refreshing to hear a questioning voice on the usefulness of this exercise.

"...just placing a crime event on a map does not necessarily give us insight into the story. As the Beyond Broadcast panelist Lee Banville, Editor-in-Chief of the Online NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, noted simply mapping "doesn't necessarily tell a story, it introduces a story." Otherwise, he pointed out, a map can become a data dump."

I agree. One of the most telling moments of Where2.0 this year was hearing Adrian Holovaty of EveryBlock state that "One question i like to ask myself is, would my site succeed without maps?"

Leslie goes on to suggest that the answer lies in the increased use of a GIS to enable large amounts of data to be utilised.

"Graphical Information System (GIS) is connecting data to maps, but the difference is both in quantity and quality of data, as well as intention. The intent is for analysis, not a superficial look."

I'm less sure about this.

Does analysis carry more importance than a 'superficial look'? If we are talking about visitors to a website or users of a service then I would argue it shouldn't really matter whether they are there for serious analysis or enjoyable browsing.

At the very least there are more important things to consider such as the accuracy, relevancy and usability of the content, whatever its' purpose.

Adena at All Points Blog points out that:

"...it's hard (impossible) to know the intent of software. While I know some of the reasons some products were built or applications developed or implementations completed, that's about what people do with it."

So there must be a balance somewhere. Let's not all rush to put our content onto maps just because we can, and just because we happen to have content that contains location data.

But let's also remember that sometimes it can be quite enjoyable to see data or content on a map without it needing to tell any bigger story or providing any further insight.