If I owned BrightKite, I would make it an (the!) information resource for the annotated world. In fact, that’s where the real gold is. The marketplace of information this tool can provide is where the magic lies.

If I owned BrightKite, I would sell information access into Yelp, and I would build bridges to Google Maps. I would encourage the use of BrightKite for everything from geocaching to shopping to group gatherings. What better way to empower flash mobs?

Why this application? Why not? Should Google buy BrightKite as the ultimate UI for annotating their maps?

I’m watching you, BrightKite. I’m thinking long and hard about how this application can do more for businesses, for nonprofits, for humans in need of guidance through a secret world. I’m seeing linkages to several applications, to several other data stores in need of shaping.

And I’m challenging you to think of other ways that information untethered from the web as we think of it could serve us. Did you not realize this as yet another part of the post media world? Is this not the web cast free of our office spaces?

Don’t you dare start by envisioning marketing opportunities messing up this information flow. Instead, think of what would exist beyond marketing, in the marketplace itself. What would come first? How could we educate? What would history lessons look like through a mobile browser? How will we take the tattered web back to the larger screens, and then back again, in ways that add to it all?

What say you?

Jon Udell is one of my favorite smart people in computing technology. His podcasts with IT Conversations are top shelf (if you’re in tech, the whole series is great, but Jon stands out and helps me suffer through missing Daniel Steinberg’s “Distributing the Future” podcast). But I digress.

This is tech talk, but Jon helps us think about it in plain English. Check it out, because it should influence your thoughts about social software, web presence, and the power of a people-centric web.

Read the full article here

BONUS round: read this piece by Om Malik about the new iPhone’s GPS features and how it enables location-based services (LBS). Mix and match from Jon’s piece and Om’s piece, and if I had venture money, I’d put a BOATLOAD down on something in between.