GPS for Sport. Have Geocache, Will Travel
" 'N 40° 47.920 W 073° 57.384' marks the spot.
Actually, those coordinates mark just one of the thousands of special spots in a high-tech worldwide scavenger hunt known as geocaching.
The rules of the game are simple: Someone creates and hides a cache -- usually a weatherproof container holding a stash of inexpensive goodies -- and then posts coded clues and the cache's latitude and longitude coordinates on one of the many websites devoted to the sport.
Anyone can then attempt to find the cache.
"It's a game where you are the search engine," explained Jeremy Irish, who maintains a popular geocaching website.
In January 2001 there were just a few hundred caches in the world. There are now around 25,000 caches in 122 countries. Some are easy to find: Just plug the location coordinates into a global positioning system device and follow the trail.
But locating others requires a major investment of thought and physical effort....
Stone enjoys brain-busting caches like one he designed called "Graveyard Grumble." The navigational clues are birth and death dates on tombstones at the cemetery where the cache is hidden.
Player Nick Gerald, a website designer from New York, likes caches that lead him directly to the person who hid them." [Wired News]
Where has Wired been? I've been including geocaching in my presentations since 2000 (mostly to make the point that if you're a librarian sitting at a reference desk and you think you're going to just sit there and wait for people to come in to your building to ask you questions, then you haven't checked in with reality lately).
My favorite geocache trend is easily the traveling cache, in which an item (such as a Mr. Potato Head) travels across the country from cache to cache.
On a tangentially-related side note, ZDNet Anchordesk notes the use of kiosks for maps-on-demand printing:
"National Geographic has set up map kiosks in outdoor retailers like REI, where you can have customized maps printed onto waterproof paper in full color. This is a boon to people who don't like laminating the standard USGS topo maps or who happen to need an area that spans several maps. The special paper is also available for sale, allowing you to print maps (or other documents) at home."
It would be a stretch to call this book-publishing-on-demand, but maybe it's a baby step towards that end. I wonder how much it would cost to put one of these in a public library? [Jenny Levine: Tech Goddess]
8:50:50 AM 
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