Even though everyone in the tech world has been checking in with Foursquare and Gowalla for what seems like forever, does anyone outside of our bubble know what our darling location applications are, and what they do?

via Reality Check – Nearly No One Knows What A “Foursquare” Is.

After reading this article at thenextweb.com, I started thinking about conversations I’ve had with teachers this past summer. I feel safe saying that educators represent a middle ground of tech know how and nearly all that I spoke to about location based services gave me that deer in the headlights look. Similar to reactions over Twitter (I don’t get it!), I dive further into the social aspects of the service and get a mild, “That’s cool!” reaction. Then I move into the data mining aspect of it and discuss how these companies can provide immense amount of data for a geographic region based on user generated input (Repeat the deer in headlights look).

So what can we do about this? I suppose not much more than keep using it and keep sharing interest mash-ups that come from people interested in location services. One of my favorites allows Foursquare data to be visualized in Google  Earth. I’ve been working some possible ways to present Foursquare to others in meaningful ways that will impact our society. But I have to admit, I have not used any other services (aside from Buzz). So which services should I compare and why?

Now that I have killed all traffic to my website from a 16 month hiatus, I am attempting to develop my personal learning network to include blogging along with Twitter, Delicious, and Skype. I’m working on this blog post from WordPress for the iPad. So far so good. I do wish I could add links from within the editor, but I’ll have to look into that later. For now I’ll just post this single entry and add a photo of the WP dash.

After getting my hands on this new HP netbook, I am already trying to find a way to migrate to the ‘cloud.’ With a desktop computer, a 15″ Dell Latitude, an HP netbook, and a home computer include 500 GB NAS drive, I have plenty of copies of my data. I have so many copies that I don’t know which one to use. I turn to the cloud, a virtual environment, using the web to store documents and work.

There is a big problem with this. Any know what that might be? Connectivity. Without internet access, I would be totally parallized. So I have now run into other areas for me to explore – VNCs, Remote Access, and the use of web based storage. I’m currently using Google Docs for presentations, spreadsheets, documents, (and now Forms too). Picasa stores my photos, my iPod stores my music (not cloud computing). So where do I go from here?

Using my iPod touch to post to wp blog. The app store is slick