The first day of the Metaverse Roadmap Project is hurtling to its conclusion, and it's been a mixed bag of small group discussions and plenary lectures, all playing blind men around an elephant, groping out what the "metaverse" future could look like. Much of the discussion has been predicated on the concept of a metaverse as a separate place, akin to the original Neal Stephenson concept; I'm not so sure that works, in part because of the uncomfortable echoes of the decade-old concepts of how the Internet would evolve, and in part because of my own bias towards the intersection of location-related virtual information and physical space.

To that end, one of today's best presentations came from IFTF's Mike Liebhold, discussing the concept of the geospatial web, and how it could evolve. I won't try to describe it here, because Ethan Zuckerman has already done a masterful job of it: Michael Leibhold on building a tricorder - the geographic web. Ethan's semi-live-blogging the event; if you're interested in what's happening, hit his site, ...My Heart's in Accra.