Mapping the world, Part 2

You heard it here first! I took a bit of what my British friends call "stick" a while back when I wrote (see here) about a scheme that seemed to me to hold real game-changer promise: the what3words.com project of mapping the entire planet into 3 x 3 meter square blocks of space and giving each a unique 3-letter "name" (or is it an "address"?):

So the Capitol Rotunda is in "shall.spider.bake"; the Empire State building in "heaves.wipes.clay"; the Camp Nou, home of the world's greatest soccer team, FC Barcelona, is at "comb.bombard.cooks"; the corner of Hollywood and Vine at "gently.fears.lives," etc. [You can play with their interactive map, which is surprisingly engaging, at the what3words website here.]

Along comes news (here) that Mongolia has now adopted the system and will use it for the government-run postal system - the first government to do so (though apparently a U.N. disaster relief agency has also been using the system for the purpose of directing humanitarian aid to disaster victims).

It's pretty interesting and pretty important. As I wrote back in January:

Hundreds of millions, and more likely several billion, of the world's people live in a world in which few or none of the places that are important in their lives - where they live, where they work, where they catch the bus, where their kids go to school, where they go for a drink or to watch the movies - has an "address," a unique and commonly understood designator indicating their actual physical location. Think of just the inhabitants of the slums and favelas in and around the great world mega-cities - Sao Paolo; Mexico City; Shanghai; Istanbul; Mumbai; Jakarta … and multiply that many times over.

And think … of how difficult (or impossible) it would be to get utility service or request an ambulance or report a crime or obtain public services or get a product delivered or start a business or open a school or call a meeting of your neighbors or find the voting booth you're supposed to go to … without the ability to refer to precisely where any of that is supposed to happen.

So I'm thinking this might be a little bit of good news - for the people of Mongolia, at least, and maybe beyond.

[Thanks to Byron Walker for the pointer.]