Copenhagen's Mobile Phone Location Based Tours

Near Near Future has an amusing story about a Footsteps of Hans Christian Andersen tour in Copenhagen.

Tourists follow a route marked with 2000 white footsteps on the pavement. Then, at strategic points, they dial in with their mobile phones to listen to an audio narrative about the great man.

A nice idea and an example of many more we'll see cropping up all over the world.

What makes this funny though is that someone has remixed the tour by adding extra footsteps......into gay clubs. The great man was famously gay - a fact that is generally ignored by mainstream society. So the remixing is thought to be the work of the gay movement, showing a nice sense of humour at the same time.

However, it does also point to a potential problem with any physical marker/hyperlink, connecting people to digital information. The physical link can be sabotaged or altered by the unscrupulous or plain mischievous.

Supposing you "click" on Shakespeare's house for more information, but you're taken to say an adult site with Elizabethan wenches doing their stuff? Or even re-directed to a local Shakespeare souvenir shop?

That's why this type of project needs to be self-policing, using Wikipedia principles.

Comments

[Clara]

I also saw this on NNF and thought 'yay, more LBT (location-based tourism)!' =)

Glad to also see you've updated the comments system... I was going to ask you - have you read this white paper http://www.trueposition.com/lrc/PeopleTracking.pdf from TruePosition about people tracking? Just wondering what your thoughts were on that... while it's good in its acknowledgement of the lackluster uptake of LBS, do you really think people tracking is the killer app? (I think I know what you'll probably say to that... =P)