It’s something I’ve been going on about for a long time, but as an exercise in explaining it quickly I entered it as a proposal in MySociety’s Call for Proposals 2009. Here’s what I wrote:

Describe your idea:

A new delicious tagging plugin that also harnesses the power of location services — so that it bookmarks where people find things interesting.

It could use triple tags to simply add a geo-attention “point” to each item bookmarked.

This tagging could then be used by anyone to see where bookmarks were interesting.

What problem does it solve?:

All attempts to collate and distribute local information are stymied by the fact that placing most information “on a map” is complex (council decisions, govt dept decisions affect discreet boundaried areas, news either has a “spot” and fade in influence or something more esoteric). People don’t do it, or the tech isn’t there for them to.

Coming at it from the other angle would give a sort of heatmap of influence which could prove useful for all sorts of projects — particularly those interested in local news and democracy.

Does that sound worthwhile? Please comment on the MySociety page.