Sadly there is comfort in expectation, and I know that everytime I enter a Starbucks, Whole Foods, Cosi, or Subway there is something there that will suit me. But the recommendations on Yelp encourage me to hunt out the local, independent joints that I would otherwise never come across. That’s what happened to me last week in New York – the temptation was to head to the always dependable Whole Foods salad bar again. Instead I followed some recommendations from local strangers and discovered a truly incredible teahouse a few frozen blocks away. Information has been good for my serendipity.

The following is a quote from our 1000 Finds Geocoin.

When we started geocaching we saw it as an outdoor,
hi-tec, something to do.
We never expected the time spent together.
We never expected the hiking.
We never expected seeing new places so close to home.
And most of all:
We never expected the friends we have made.

John, iSpy sounds wonderful. I’ll look forward to checking that out.

Kristen, I propose “easter eggs on the web” as our next conversation topic, and hope we get the chance to talk again soon.

Hereby tapping you as the Easter Egg Hider of the Web, and our conversation made me think further about the importance of precision in devices in the new offline.

Thing about geocaching is that it *seems* at first blush like a solitary activity (kind of like the geek-in-the-basement stereotype that we had to explode), but your examples show expeditions in pairs (and the surprise appearance of that Zen CacheMaster, of course).

I grow wary of thinking about a service like Foursquare only as a database or even a fancy wiki. My favorite place I was mayor of for most of the summer was the Brooklyn Flea, which is a roving event–should there be one static listing with the most current address? multiple listings, one for each location? So far, the users have made multiple listings, but I want my mayoral capital to carry with. Fascinated with how we’ll solve for these (for another long conversation)…

The first time I played with the LAYAR browser, I thought a geocache waypoints layer would be a really cool addition for augmented reality navigation. I”ve also played with an iPhone app called iSpy which is somewhat similar to goecaching except that a photo is taken, geotagged, and published through the app. Then finders navigate to the location and take a photo which matches the original.

Although I haven’t tried geohashing I’ve solved and found a lot of very difficult “puzzle” geocaches (where one has to solve a puzzle of some sort to obtain the coordinates), including one in Mass. that I solved from, then was the second person to find while traveling through on a vacation.