Emotional Geography is a concept I’ve had for a web-based application that allows people to create customized maps with highlighted points of personal interest. The user types in a series of addresses, associates an event with each address (graduated from high school/ had first kiss /got married/ etc.), and clicks “submit”.
Basically it’s a configurable, visually interesting version of a Yahoo! Maps with the hotels highlighted. If you can program all of the hotels near a given point with an icon/ hover-for-more-info next to it, it seems an easy thing to plot up to, say, 10 addresses in a given geographic range with user-entered descriptions hovering over an appropriate icon (diploma/ lips/ wedding bells).
The underlying idea is that people have different “emotional geographies” for different times of their life (bus route to high school/ first neighborhood out of college/ places where you took your first love) and different sets of people (where I got stoned with the Burnouts/ where we trained & raced cross-country/ clients of my first ad firm).
These emo geos are usually tightly spaced and hold special places in our mind’s eye, and can evoke floods of memory as much as an “our song” coming on the radio. So if you could easily plot these places, and describe them in your own way, and share them with others, that could serve as a central/ tangential community for others to add their own emo geos that glance against yours on the time/ space continuum.
Just an idea. What do you think? Does something like this exist already? Can you make the application? Lemme know.