“Reinventing 911″:http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.12/warning.html?pg=1&topic=warning&topic_set, over at “Wired”:http://www.wired.com/, is a great look into how some the emergency response networks have been re-engineered to leverage the “network effect”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_effect in distributing information:

bq. To understand the true nature of warnings, it helps to see them not as single events, like an air-raid siren, but rather as swarms of messages racing through overlapping social networks, like the buzz of gossip.

It’s the intergration of location information that makes this system really interesting…

bq. The model is simple and elegant, and because warnings can be tagged with geographical coordinates, users can customize their cell phones, pagers, BlackBerries, or other devices to get only those relevant to their precise locale.

So you have all this information out there buzzing around. Individuals can choose to recieve only the information relevant to them. In this case it’s alerts for their specific area but that could also include specific types of alerts, priority alerts, etc.

This system was created for emergency services so it’s the global view that they’re interested in and that translates into something like this…

A little before 6 pm on this ordinary Saturday evening, there is a hit-and-run in the city’s western suburbs. A moment later, a silent alarm goes off in a building near downtown. At 6:03, there’s trouble with a drunk on the north side, and at almost the same time there’s a report of a disturbance at a Home Depot. Three quiet minutes go by, and then at 6:07 comes news of another hit-and-run.

From a room on the 10th floor of the old Heathman Hotel downtown, I follow the action as it scrolls across the screen of my laptop, little exclamation points popping up on a detailed satellite photo of the town. Each alert is attached to a short bit of text. I can zoom out, watching multiple traumas light up across the whole metropolitan area of 1.7 million people, or zoom in, finding nearly silent places where nothing that requires attention from the police happens for a long time. The resolution is so good, I can pick out individual buildings.

But imagine the system was not limited to public safety information and that it was open to everyone. People could share all kinds of information, all linked to a specific place. They also choose what kind of information they would like to recieve.

Thats where all the buzzword technologies like _social software_, _location aware_, _semantic web_ come into play. Those technologies will help people filter and find information of interest and relevance to them. And the promise is that it will all be done automagically.

The article gives us a glimpse of a what a Location Aware world would look like.