Click on an image here to see a very low-tech proof of a concept: turning SMS messages into news flow. With the help of people from several companies, including Mitre, 2SMS.com and Google, we've created a small demonstration of how citizen journalists could create location- and time-based data that might be useful in any number of ways.
The idea, in this case, was part of a scenario involving a major disaster. We assumed people would be telling each other what was happening in their communities and neighborhoods, and that if they could post such information straight into maps they'd have better information to work with.
So we sent SMS text messages to a gateway phone number, converted the results into a format that Google Earth could understand and ended up with a map layer showing SMS postings. With GPS-equipped mobile phones this would be trivial. Ours aren't, so we asked senders to make the message body start with the San Diego street address, followed by two semicolons, with the rest of the message body comprising the actual information being sent from the location. (Note: it was stupid of me to use semicolons as a way of separating the message from the location; just try to find the semicolon on the average mobile phone.)
We're working on other things like this with camera phones, and with blogs. But it's good to see that the overall idea can work so easily. I hope to experiment with this in other settings, soon.