...And so it is with many of the Web 2.0 applications that has everyone tweeting, blogging or eBaying at the Moon. It had better be a darn good investment of your time or it will eat away your work hours not to mention your home life. I find that since the advent of the Internet browser that never before has our ability to communicate and connect with people been as rich or as potentially draining on our time. From social nets to Google Earth, we can see and talk to the world but there must be a balance between the time we spend in front of the computer screen versus getting out and meeting someone in person. This is why I can't wait to hop on a plane to Hyderabad next week to attend the Map World Forum and engage other geospatial professionals from a different continent (I don't usually look forward to 26 hours of travel in an aluminum silver tube). And while I'll be geotagging my photos of the event (as I did two years ago) the greater investment of my time will be the face-to-face meetings. That really will enrich my life.

(Read further only if you want to know how geotagging works on the BB Storm...it wasn't a straightforward or intuitive process) The Blackberry Storm comes with a thin client Flickr app that is supposed to tag the photos with the "Where I am" location. Except that for the Storm, it doesn't work in the way it is supposed to. I had enabled GPS in the setup and knew it was working properly because every other app like BB maps, Google Maps and VZ Navigator were working fine. And, in the Camera app, I had enabled geotagging of the photos. Still, when I tried to upload to Flickr, the application told me that it could not find my location. There had to be a way. And so, even though in the Camera app setup I told it to geotag photos, there was a mishandling of communication between the GPS and the app. By trial and error, I knew that you had to manually enable the GPS for the BB Storm Maps app. I also recognized that in the Camera app, there was a satellite icon in the lower right corner of the menu that was supposed to be enabled to capture the lat/long. When the icon was "red" the GPS was off; white, and it was "on." The GPS icon in the BB Maps app had a similar icon and shows the number of satellites that it finds so I kept that app engaged while I switched to the Camera app. Sure enough, the icon turned "white." I snapped a test photo and then tried to upload directly to Flickr. Still, when I told the BB Flickr app to locate "Where I am" it told me it could not find my location. I uploaded anyway. When I went to Flickr online, and displayed my recently uploaded test photo, all of the tags from the snapshot were uploaded correctly including lat/long. Flickr immediately recognized the geotag and place it on the map. It was an "ah-ha" moment.