Influx

Much of the last week’s buzz on the web has been around Google Maps,which for the first time, combined a map search service with a satellite image.

Suddenly, we could sit at our computers and search around America. Within hours, sites had emerged that took you on tours to familiar locations and quickly, the news was all about The White House being off limits.

This week’s latest fad illustrates that we long for connection to place. People were using Google Maps to locate their home, their old schools and the places they grew up. The computer and Google had suddenly closed the distance gap; we could simultaneously be both remote and close.

Increasingly, we will use the web to connect us to these physical worlds. Already, a few websites are emerging that allow us to tag or reference places in the physical world and connect them to the web.

One such service is Blockies who describe their concept as:

You need a camera phone, and a Blockies sticker. Each sticker has a unique code on it, so any place you put a Blockies sticker gets tagged with that code. Whenever you send pictures to Blockies.com from your camera phone, you put the code in a message to nyc@blockies.com, and we link your picture to that location. It’s like posting a Polaroid on a street corner.

Yellow Arrow is another place based tagging service.

These two services help those to get more out of the physical world. In a sense, they encourage people to go deeper and discover the physical space around them.

Aside from Google Maps, the web architecture and environment for the most part is based on functionality and convenience. There are few truly interactive and impressive environments, if they do exist, they tend to follow the traditional broadcast model; where you press play and watch.

Ten years ago, that’s where we all thought we were heading, but we pulled back as e-commerce demanded efficiency, not experience.

Brands now have the opportunity to get more experiential.

We are not talking about events, instead developing ideas that connect real places, maybe brands could be our tour guides to environments much like Soundwalk walking tours. This involves brands taking us back to their homes and telling us their interesting stories.

Let’s take Levi’s as an example. This could work on a couple of levels:

1. A web based guide to the places that reflect Levi’s history. A tour you could travel on physically and in the virtual world. It would be the thousands of places that have played a role in developing Levi’s story. People could even add their own allowing for the Levi’s story to be continued.

2. Then there are full immersion and interactive experience. Think video game space. No one would want to play the Levi’s Gold Rush Game for 20 hours. However, if IN an appropriate game, you got game credits for playing a role in a 5-minute interactive story, relating to the Gold Rush, that might be acceptable.

This experience has the potential to be incredibly rich and extremely emotional
see EA’s Godfather.

Imagine if there were other players online, all playing different roles, to bring the period and the brand story to life.

Brands have an opportunity to connect us to their stories of place, either by using technology to link us to the physical world, or by creating unique interactive experiential places where their stories can be told.