Just noticed the Flickr Maps (via Plasticbag.org). This makes me very, very happy. When google maps and its many subsequent mash-ups began to appear, it brought to mind the often-quoted Borges & Casares short story Of Exactitude in Science:

…In that Empire, the craft of Cartography attained such Perfection that the Map of a Single province covered the space of an entire City, and the Map of the Empire itself an entire Province. In the course of Time, these Extensive maps were found somehow wanting, and so the College of Cartographers evolved a Map of the Empire that was of the same Scale as the Empire and that coincided with it point for point. Less attentive to the Study of Cartography, succeeding Generations came to judge a map of such Magnitude cumbersome, and, not without Irreverence, they abandoned it to the Rigours of sun and Rain. In the western Deserts, tattered Fragments of the Map are still to be found, Sheltering an occasional Beast or beggar; in the whole Nation, no other relic is left of the Discipline of Geography.

From Travels of Praiseworthy Men (1658) by J. A. Suarez Miranda

It turns out I wasn’t alone in thinking that, but there you go.

And now drag and droppable geotagging just feels like it takes us that bit closer to the all-encompassing map of the Empire, but one that’s the size of your computer screen. It’s a tantalising vision. We can map the world through digital layers of detail upon detail, a virtual walkthrough from the pre-existing satellite imagery of rooftops, to pictures of building façades, down to views through windows and into rooms, relentlessly manufactured and painstakingly re-created. The map of Science, of the College of Cartographers.

This is fine in itself, but the map I’m looking forward to is the one created by us, the ‘Beast or beggar’ who inherited that of the Cartographers’ vision: a map of the minutiae of life piled up like bric-a-brac in a secondhand store, grabbed moments that combine into visual poetry. Flickr groups can colonise areas like marauding tribes, virtual Ballardian gangs reclaiming their environments. As images stack up upon images, we’ll be able to peel back the layers by tag and by group to reveal new geographical portraits of our surroundings.

This is all a bit sketchy, random, and romantic. I’ll have to come back to this.

But in the meantime, I’m geotagging those images.