The Geo Factor offers a post-Thanksgiving appreciation to at least three major media outlets and one industry trade that tackled the subject of online maps yesterday and today. First, the Chicago Tribune addressed privacy concerns of consumers using GPS-enabled wireless devices such as cell phones. The article, It’s getting really hard to get lost discusses how a person could use such a capability to let a taxi find them by broadcasting their whereabouts via a cell phone. However, the article explains that wireless carriers are reluctant to introduce applications that transmit locations of people, fearing privacy backlash and litigation. Businesses, on the other hand, can justify such uses more readily and as with other GPS-based services, businesses will use them first and most.

Start-Ups Try to Plot A Complete Picture in The Washington Post discusses mash-ups that involve geographic information. The article discusses the relative ease of combining geographic online data with other data, such as that done by FortiusOne through its new GeoIQ platform. GeoIQ provides a way to combine and display data from multiple government sources on Google Maps – nothing remarkably new except instead of the typical points, GeoIQ uses what it calls heat maps. Heat maps show data attributes using a color range, similar to how a weather map shows temperature. Even InformationWeek covered the FortiusOne announcement with a color inset GeoIQ map. One interesting combination shown on the GeoIQ site is a risk application using multiple government data sets (e.g. transportation, earthquakes, weather, fire) to illustrate insurance risk.

Meanwhile, the Wall Street Journal article Location, Location, Location focuses on geotagging, the process of assigning latitude and longitude to any digital content. Many photo sites now provide the ability to associate photos with maps. While the article discusses the consumer excitement over this capability, the article, ironically, misses the tremendous business potential of geotagging. For example, utility companies could geotag photos of dispersed assets or travel firms could geotag photos of hotels and other destinations.

Regardless of the applications, it appears interest is high in tying location to digital content. According to the WSJ, Flickr users geotagged more than a million photos in the first 24 hours the feature was available. This may become another example of the masses building valuable Internet content that will have a multitude of potential uses for both consumers and businesses. While perhaps simplistic, coverage such as these articles helps raise awareness of the value of location.