For example, on Helio's Fin phone, you can automatically tag your pictures with G.P.S. coordinates (geotagging), so you can organize them by location while you travel. The Fin phone (helio.com, $129 with service plan) supports geotagging of photos, so that when you get home your photos are already a neatly organized record of where you have been. Fin also supports a Buddy Beacon function, which lets you broadcast your location to friends on Helio's service so they can always find you.

In a relatively short time, Geograph has covered Britain and Ireland in an enormous quilt of digital images, but the most impressive thing is that each have been snapped by amateur photographers keen to contribute to the new practice of "geotagging". What geotagging does is marry the art of photography with the precise science of digital cartography. In practical terms, all this really means is stamping digital images with the same grid references used by mapmakers, making them easy for others to locate on the internet.

According to Tiernan Ray, an industry analyst at Technologic Partners, "GeoTagging is a fascinating idea. Every company that has a home page could be GeoTagged, and a database of GeoTagged sites could be created. If this concept spreads quickly, it would create a more meaningful intersection between Web users and Web content."