I could find my way around but it took me a while to get used to the scale - I had walked much further than I thought. I was happy using the technology on the street - a couple of people looked, but I think most people are now familiar with the sight of people with various pieces of mobile technology. 'Physically' I felt quite happy with it, which surprised me - I don't like having to carry lots round, but it was small and light and I could imagine carrying it around with me.
It changed my experience of my environment - without consciously trying, I became much more aware of things around me. I enjoyed being able to share my experiences - normally, such passing thoughts would be forgotten or would seem insignificant by the time I had someone to share them with, but they make sense within the context of the environment. My content was affected by an awareness of people reading them in the future - it was different to if it was just a personal device. As well as the official accountabilities of not writing anything offensive, there were much more subtle accountabilities to future readers - writing something that is sufficiently interesting and relevant.

I enjoyed the experience enormously. My mind is racing with ideas for how the technology can be used in my own research.
I did the trial with a friend, we found it was a very absorbing social experience - a collaborative effort not at all isolating. We got very enthusiastic about what we wanted to record so we were a bit frustrated by having the system crash. We went out to Russell Square and wanted to look at other people's material but coudn't access it.

The locations covered by thetrial are very rich in memories and experiences for me as I work in Bloomsbury - my office in inside the area covered and I 'use' the area for many different things. I think teh whole experience would be very different for an area that I have never visited.

I can see that it would give new dimensions for experiencing locations. In the past I have travelled a lot on my own, it would have been good to be able to connect to human experiences of some of the places - a beyond the guide book sort of thing. It would also be a way of reinforcing my own memories of little things from places I have been to - when these experiences are not with others there isn';t such an easy way of revisiting them - you have no one you can say 'do you remember when ..' to.

in no particular order:

the map was (necessarily) very small, so getting from one place to another could be time consuming, and needed a bit of guesswork (we forgot to take a laminated map so were restricted to what appeared on the screen of the ipaq).

we made one thread from about 5 pockets, and that worked pretty well. We'd like to have been able to see other people's threads more easily, but the machine crashed too often, so we saw only two other contributions. So we didn't really get any tips or hints from other people's contributions, but that wasn't a problem as we'd already decided what sort of thread we wanted to create, which was our personal story of meeting up again after a long time which all happened in this area about a year ago. We'd have done a lot more if we'd had more time.

using the technology on the street wasn't a problem as such. The machines are small and once you get the hang of using a stylus (I hadn't used one before) it was fine.

feels pioneering, a bit like early flight experiments (including the crashes) but some sense of potential

actually being present on the street, with the device .. it acted as a sort of catalyst for conjuring memories. and accessing others memories. preety cool

technically, i would have dropped the wireless thing. sync user data back at headquarters, and do all the authoring and data access just locally on the device.

also instead of tagging things to ordinance survey objects, would want to tag to exact lat/lon -- like tell me about how this particular tree looked 50 years ago.\

authoring content in public is an interesting activity but you do feel conspicious standing still typing your stuff in. In London you have to be concerned if some dude is gonna pinch your expensive iPaq.

The map was a useful idea but way too slow in the trial. I alsol got lost and couldn't find where I was

I really enjoyed following other peoples content and learning about their experiences in the same locality

It was easy to make a thread and I started one called simon says. I was a bit conscious of the pd100 on the street in the pouring rain and also a tad dissappointed that I couldnt add images or sound like the pnone...the pockets I found were going somewhere but were either too personal or just comments of cafe life. I didnt follow any threads myself.

very interesting idea, unfortunately the rain impaired our progress and i couldn't access the network. i would have liked to have created my own threads, probably based on streams of consciousness.

interesting to access other people's comments, though many seemed self conscious. why? despite anonymity...perhaps due to lack of familiarity with technology..... or process, or size and personal nature of the hand held device.

let me know about further versions, including mixed media and more simultaneous users

I had all kinds of imaginings in anticipation of this trial, that reflected some of my ambivalence about feeding the Matrix; dreaming of stalking policemen, tagging surveillance cameras, documenting conversations with museum guards, generally observing the squidgey human detail in the systems of governance.

Unfortunately I was thwarted by the tech- my impatience may have contributed to the device's catatonic lack of responsiveness- I tend to need to learn by making mistakes, this early version would need a more deliberate learner. When I was unable to author a pocket I thought I'd sit down in a cafe and look at other people's threads. This didn't work either but having a go at this on the laptop, I can imagine that a method of filtering by author would create some very valuable content- for just hanging out and wandering.

It's a wet December afternoon, and getting dark. I wish I could have uploaded some of the photos I've just taken... something about the orange street lights made the sky go an unusual and unnatural blue.
There are quibbles. iPaqs aren't really (waterproof) outdoor devices in the way that a GPS receiver is, and it's raining. Most tedious is that the client device doesn't know where it is. This is a criticism of the trial, not of the concept, since the concept is for spatially aware devices.
Why is this important? Because even as a geography-aware map-using person, I found it quite tedious to work out where I was so I could tell the Flash client. Partly this is a consequence of the tiny format, partly of the very small map scale, and partly of the slow client, which discourages panning.
These are operational issues. The idea remains very powerful and intriguing, and whether the technology works now is secondary. It is easy to imagine applications, but also easy to exaggerate the time people have available to use devices on the move. Remember what happened in 1999 to the companies that wanted us to spend our lives online.
Quite apart from the issue of whether people would use it (and how), there is the question of what incentives there might be to provide this service. Without financial or public interest incentives, it won't be sustainable, because running systems costs money.
On a less mundane level, it will be fascinating to see what virtual geographies might emerge, overlaid on our cities, and whether, like the geographies we have in our heads and trace in our journeys, they gradually eclipse the physical ones from which they spring.

i was hampered by time..time to wait for data to update and time to type things in...

I couldnt follow a thread because I couldnt identify uniques ones easily..back and forth between the same titles..

The mapwas clear but not easy to identify where you were.

There were lots of threads about shops...not so iinterested in that.

I was happy in the street because I went out with someone else - it was dark - wouldnt be too comnfortable on my own..and inputting text is difficult.. sound and pictures would be great and immediate.

Well, making therads or pockets was pretty easy. No real problems, although the overall system was quite slow, which was a little frustrating. Obvioiusly, typing everything in using a pen interface isn't the best way to caputure information (you also feel quite vunerable standing in the middle of london tapping away at a small PC), using voice, images and movies would be great enhancement or alternative.

I would have really liked to be able to follow other people threads. I really enjoyed reading other peoples annotations, however I could imaging searching for relevant POVs may be vaulable. For example tourists may want to only be presented with places of interest, etc

Anyway got to go.
Bye.

Needless to say, I've had a lot of thoughts about this since I did it 2 days ago, and since having a chat with Giles.

The mark of a great idea is that it encourages divergent thinking, so that after a while you end up with more problems and challenges and possibilities, not less.

Giles is keen to stress that what they are developing is an open source technology (and an ethnographic study of how people might approach and use it), not a product. That's a more sophisticated approach than what I brought along. This means UT doesn't have to succeed as a distinct solution, just as an experiment. Despite the system difficulties, I think it's conclusions all round. Well done, guys.

My thoughts about position-aware devices and virtual geographies finally collided. There is no reason why you should author or use information only where you are, for two reasons: you might want to roam virtually where you're going physically to be, or where you've been; and the online geography you are navigating ultimately does not have to resemble the physical world.

This doesn't mean position-aware devices are a bad thing (from the point of view of this study), just unnecessary for some applications.

Finally, with my background in rural GIS, I began to wonder how this might work in rural areas where WiFi is a non-starter. An immediate step would be to drop the address database and use a simple co-ordinate system... my impression on using the system was that the addresses were an unnecessary constraint in the urban study anyway, except, presumably, to provide a unique ID to which to join the content. GSM coverage is often available in rural areas, but I am not sure what GPRS range is like. I know there are GSM (i.e. vague) position-specific services being used commercially in Denmark.

Any thoughts?