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OK, so it’s not exactly new. GPS has been help­ing peo­ple dis­cover where they are, where they are going and where they made a wrong turn for some time. But really, that was just the start.

For one thing, GPS has now emerged from the car/boat, got way smaller and become portable. I run most days (hard to believe if you know what I look like) and use a Garmin Fore­run­ner to tell me how fast I’m going (not fast enough), how far (not far enough) and how many calo­ries I’ve burnt (just enough for a guilt-free break­fast). It wasn’t so long ago I was reliant on a piece of string, a map and a stop­watch to plan and track my runs (BTW check out Map­MyRun for a nice Google Maps-based app for work­ing out your run in advance).

Ear­lier this week, Flickr announced its new (non-GPS) geo­t­ag­ging fea­ture. This allows you to tag a photo with its loca­tion (using a mash up with Yahoo Maps). On their blog, they say they expected to hit a mil­lion geo­t­agged pho­tos in the first month. They actu­ally hit 1.2m in the first 24 hours. Of course, geo­t­ag­ging relies on the user telling Flickr where the photo was taken (which, admit­tedly, is pretty easy). But what if it was sim­pler than that?

Which brings me back to GPS.

Ear­lier this month, Sony announced the GPS-CS1.

This is basi­cally a clip-on GPS receiver for pho­tog­ra­phers. Attach it to your belt and it’ll record where you go on your pho­tog­ra­phy trips. Then, when you upload pho­tos from your cam­era, you can sync them with data from the GPS unit and, using a Google Maps-based app, show when and pre­cisely where you took each photo. Very clever indeed. (And this is just the start – with Flickr releas­ing the API for their geo­t­ag­ging, expect to see some inter­est­ing hacks in the very near future. Also check out Zoomr for a photo shar­ing site that already uses geo­t­ag­ging and which might be the nat­ural exten­sion of the Sony system.)

For us in mar­ket­ing, GPS-based activ­ity is an intrigu­ing prospect. This could be (as is already hap­pen­ing) dig­i­tal bus-sides show­ing con­tex­tual mes­sages based on loca­tion. Or it could be around facil­i­tat­ing user com­mu­ni­ties – find oth­ers like you, near you. It could be around geo­caching–style trea­sure hunts or a whole host of things no one has thought of yet.

This could get very interesting.

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