I must confess that I haven’t yet taken a very close look at Platial.com, a web site built on the Google Maps API (see previous entry), so it was only via this National Geographic News article about mashups that featured the site that I first became aware of a neologism that one of the site’s founders, Di-Ann Eisnor, has apparently coined: “neogeography,” which describes, I think, the merging of user data and experiences with online mapping technologies. Mashups, in other words — but “neogeography” sounds more respectable.

A quick check — for example, the “neogeography” tag at Technorati — suggests that the use of the term is beginning to spread, but it’s largely limited to Platial.com users, who are musing about what it means. Cult of the Internet:

So, the first obvious question is what the hell is a neogeography. Mmmm, Well, beats me. But the site lets anyone, even a nut like me, create maps marking their favorite places and telling the world all about them. I like anything that lets people like me share our insanity.

PlaceKraft, which compares it to psychogeography:

The term is sufficiently abstract to serve as a broad category of un/non-professional geographic practices (walking mapping, tagging, etc.). It would often be appropriate to replace a number of activities/projects currently denoted as psychogeographic, with neogeographic. Psychogeography could then be a narrower term evoking the implicit political ambitions of the Situationists.