I was reading Inside AdWords: Use Google Maps to target your customers about Google letting advertisers geo-target AdWords campaigns using address and distance radius.
This is a great feature by itself. But it is something more. It’s one more step to consolidate Internet’s “virtual” reality with real world’s “actual” reality. It means that you can put Internet ads “on this street”. On the other hand, you can use tools (Google Analytics is one of them) that can show you “how many people on this area read your blog”.
Imagine this. You turn on your laptop, you get in your car and as you drive across the country you connect to different wifi hotspots. Each time, you reload the same web page that contains ads from Google. Then you realize that depending on where you are, the ads change. Much like the view from your window. In a way, through your browser you see something that “belongs” to the location you are in, just like the mountain on the horizon, or this funny building across the street. The Internet becomes part of the scenery.
Think of it for a minute. The moment you geo-tag a piece of information (be that a photo, a blog-post, a video or audio recording, or whatever kind of media) you link it to an actual location. Right now, we are usually able to find the location associated with a geo-tagged piece of information. Soon, given the right tools like mobile Internet and smart location-based services and apps, we will be able to access this information (literally) “on the spot” -see or hear or read it just like you would see the sunset, hear the noise from a nearby factory or read the sign across the street.