In an article in The Guardian today, Keegan talks about his research into mapping the history of London theatre. Many of the popular venues of Shakespeare's time no longer exist, and at inns and the like that do, there is rarely any sort of plaque or landmark.

Of course, if the Bard and Elizabethan theatre aren't really your bag, there are other apps - just like there are other guided tours - that offer insights into other authors' haunts. The aptly-titled, Literary London, for example, plots the places connects to a variety of famous authors: Charles Dickens, Aldous Huxley, Agatha Christie, Graham Greene and the Bloomsbury Set.

Neither of these apps are free. Shakespeare's London is $2.99 and Literary London $7.99. And neither of them have incorporated this wonderful technology of MegaReader, an augmented reality e-reader that lets you actually see through your iPhone as you read and walk. All of this seems to point to what seems to this literature geek, at least, as a huge market for some digital humanities types.

I mean, there's a bar in the town where I grew up where Ernest Hemingway was supposedly a regular, on the occasions he was in the region for hunting or fishing trips. There's no plaque in the Wonder Bar to commemorate it. Is there an app for that?

The addition of transit directions is just an initial release and will contain transit information for 11 U.S. cities, with "more to come" in the near future.

Microsoft has a bit of catching up to do in the realm of transit directions, as Google Maps offers the same directions - for buses, subways and trains - in more than 446 cities worldwide.

In its initial release, Bing Maps will offer transit directions for Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, Minneapolis, New Jersey, New York City, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Seattle, Washington DC, and Vancouver. By comparison, Google has transit maps for cities in the U.S., Canada, Central America, South America, Asia, Europe, Oceania and Africa.

Of course, Google has had a five year head start on transit directions, which originally launched as a Google Labs project in 2005 before becoming a full-fledged feature in late 2007. We're glad to see Bing finally get into transit directions and help to serve the more than 10.7 billion yearly public transit passengers it mentions.

As Sysomos co-founder Nilesh Bansal told us earlier this week, traditional analytics tools like Google Analytics tools help users get a good understanding of what a visitor is doing on your own site. This, however, doesn't tell you anything about the sites that influence your visitors and the actual value of these visitors for you business. After all, somebody who tends to visit auto blogs is far more likely to buy something from your auto parts site than somebody who doesn't show any interest in cars.

Sysomos wouldn't give us any details about how it tracks a user's behavior across the Internet. Bansal told us that the company doesn't use cookies and just places a small snippet of JavaScript code on the publisher's site. Thanks to the data Sysomos already has in its Heartbeat and MAP social media monitoring and analytics tools, the company can easily identify the ecosystem around a certain topic. How Sysomos can tell that one of your visitors also went your competitor's sites and read Autoblog earlier in the week remains Sysomos' secret, however.

For publishers and e-commerce sites, this also means that they can now keep a closer tap on their social media ROI. After tweaking Audience's scoring engine, marketers can now see exactly what the value of a given campaign on Twitter or the company's blog was. You can also see what blogs tend to bring the most valuable visitors to your site and then specifically target this audience.

We do have some lingering questions about how Sysomos can track a user's behavior across the Internet and the potential privacy implications of this, but there can't be any doubt that this will be a very popular tool among marketers, community managers and sales managers. Sysomos is currently testing Audience with a small group of beta testers and plans to open the service to all of its clients by the third quarter of 2010.

Sysomos already allowed its users to search and analyze Facebook fan pages and groups for the last few months through its MAP analytics tool. The company now also includes these updates in Heartbeat, Sysomos' social media monitoring tool. Sysomos' integration of the Open Graph API will surface all the activity that has been made public by a user, including status updates and public wall posts.

Thanks to Sysomos' new ability to analyze and search public Facebook updates, we were, for example, able to track the backlash against Facebook's "instant personalization." According to Sysomos, only about 15% of the public updates about this topic were positive.

Are Facebook Users Aware that their Updates Will Live a Second Life in Social Media Analytics Tools?

Sysomos, of course, only pulls in public updates, but we have to wonder if most Facebook users are aware that their updates will end up in the vast data repositories of firms like Sysomos and Radian6. Given the current backlash against what some users perceive as an invasion of their privacy by Facebook, it will be interesting to see how Facebook users will react to this.

The maps created by the company are geo-coded to the real world, allowing you to see their exact location as pins on a map in relation to other area landmarks and infrastructure like roads and parking lots. You can search for a particular indoor map using the included search box (for example, "IKEA") or, once the map is loaded, search within the app for a particular section (for example, in IKEA you could search for "desks").

Another great feature about Micello's application is that the maps are cached for offline use. That's useful for those wanting to save maps of their favorite spots for when they're without a connection - in fact, Micello offers a "favorites" feature that does just that. Plus, it makes sense considering that cell phone reception is often poor to nonexistent when inside large structures. Without a signal, you could be out of luck if it wasn't for this feature. Frequent fliers will also appreciate the app's offline capabilities since they'll be able to scope out the route to their next connection before the captain announces the use of portable gadgets is once again permitted.

Future Plans

For now, Micello is working on building out their map database but they soon plan to integrate other sorts of information within their application, too. Down the road, you'll be able to see data like flight information when you're in an airport map or a conference agenda when you're browsing a map of a convention center. This is where Micello's business model comes into play - the company could charge businesses and other organizations wanting to annotate their listings with additional information.

While Micello is only available as an iPhone application for now, the company plans on offering versions for other mobile applications in the future as well as a Facebook application. Those interested in trying the new service can download the mobile app from here (iTunes link).

Update! Micello tells up they have another 500 malls in the works now and will be adding 50 more today. In total, the 750+ locations will cover a lot of U.S. and some of Puerto Rico. Airports will be next - they'll launch Las Vegas by the weekend and then another 25 in next 2-3 weeks.

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PicTranslator: PicTranslator allows users to take a photo of a menu or signage for instant translation. For $1 you're given a chance to see basic translations, listen to pronunciations and try your hand at communicating in the language of love.

2. Tell Me Where: Based out of Paris, this service allows users to find nearby places in more than 15 categories including fashion, parking, tourism and restaurant-related picks. The iPhone app allows users to connect to their Facebook accounts and view places recommended by your friends. Users can also upload their photos and experiences using the app.

3. Metro Paris: This service allows users to navigate the Paris metro as well as the bus line with ease. Using your phone's GPS, the service allows you to view your closest metro stations and offers real-time alerts on line interruptions. In late August, ReadWriteWeb covered this service's augmented reality release. It is the first known augmented reality app to appear in the App Store.

4. Spotify: If you plan on being in Europe beyond the conference dates, you might want to signup for Spotify premium. The iPhone application offers users real-time file syncing and the ability to cache offline music playlists for use on the metro and other non-wifi enabled areas of the city.

5. Currency Converter: If you haven't gotten used to converting currency, this application calculates the cost of all your rich and sumptuous meals.

This year's Le Web is dedicated to highlighting Europe's best and brightest real-time web companies. For a primer on the real-time web, you may want to check out ReadWriteWeb's latest report The Real-Time Web and its Future

One great feature of this release is the fact that users can track their travels via a GPS device and save the results as a KML file to be viewed in the application at a later time. The example given is a look at the route taken to climb a mountain; however, the same tool can be used to track marathons, sailing regatas, road trips and basic travel. For information on how to convert GPS data into Google Earth, users can visit Google's KML Support Section. If you haven't already downloaded the application, you can do so here.

Said BART website manager Timothy Moore, "We hope this partnership will encourage users to check out different stations and neighborhoods, and will show people who aren't already BART riders some of the great things to do that are easy to get to on transit."

Despite the fact that a number of BART-related Foursquare tips are going to document urine stains and public drunkenness, the reality is that absolutely anything beats driving the US-101 during rush hour traffic. BART check-ins are likely to encourage tired drivers to get out of their car and into a greener and less frustrating alternative. Those interested in official BART tips can visit the transit authority's profile page at foursquare.com/user/SFBART.

Maybe the real question to ask is actually: What can't MAP do? MAP gives its users the ability to research any topic on blogs, social media sites, and in traditional news media reports.

MAP can, for example, tell you that the largest number of Twitter users who wrote about the Palm Pre come from California and Great Britain, as well as who the most authoritative Twitter users who tend to tweet about the Pre are (MAP assigns a score from 1 to 10 to every Twitter user, based on the number of followers, replies, retweets, etc.). Of course, you can then also compare these results with results from a query for 'iPhone,' for example.

This video gives a good, quick, overview of what the Sysomos tools can do. Usually these promotional videos tend to be a bit exaggerated, but in our experience, MAP and Heartbeat fully live up to their promises.

But MAP is not just a tool for analyzing tweets. It can also quickly give us a history of when and how often a Wikipedia article was edited, or what the most popular forum posts and YouTube videos about the any given topic were in the last 30 days.

For PR firms, another interesting function is MAP's ability to create a list of the most authoritative blogs (and blog posts) about any given subject. This way, a firm can quickly create a list of blogs to contact about an upcoming launch of a rival phone, for example (for the Pre, by the way, MAP identified CNET and Engadget as the top blogs). Once a firm has identified these blogs, MAP can also provide a detailed analysis of the topics these blogs tend to write about, how many posts per month they publish (almost 1000 per month for Engadget) as well as a list of blogs that tend to link to this blog's content.

On the technical side, Sysomos is obviously doing some very interesting semantic analysis, which, among other things, allows the software to create very cool 'BuzzGraphs' that display the key search term in relation to the most often used terms around it (here is one for 'Conan,' for example). MAP can also do sentiment analyses, which will be really helpful for PR firms who want to track the result of a campaign, for example. Given that MAP users can filter results by time, demographic, or language, the tools allow for some very detailed analysis.

Both MAP and Heartbeat are surfing the current wave of enthusiasm for the real-time web, and MAP's crawlers index an enormous number of blog posts, forum posts, news reports, and tweets every hour. One interesting aspect of Sysomos' backend is also that the company keeps a complete cache of tweets, blog posts, and news reports on its own servers, so that it never has to rely on the availability of Twitter's API, for example. Amazingly, Sysomos also manages to effectively filter out blog spam, which is not an easy feat.

Monitoring the Heartbeat

If MAP is for PR firms and maybe even news organizations who want to be able to analyze the reaction from social media sources about a given topic, Heartbeat is the companion product that firms would probably set up for their clients to use, as its focus is on monitoring specific terms in real-time. Besides giving users an overview of the most recent posts that included a specific keyword (usually a brand name in this context), Heartbeat also tracks data about sentiment, demographics (age, gender, location), and the language they wrote in.

Heartbeat, which comes in a standard and pro version, doesn't feature all the in-depth analysis tools that MAP offers, though both products are based on the same platform. Instead, Heartbeat provides users with an easy to use dashboard, where they can track new blog posts and tweets about a product, for example. Here, users can then also tag specific blog posts and tweets (Heartbeat also automatically assigns tags to every item), and assign a follow-up to other users. The standard version supports up to 5 users, while there are no limitations on the number of users in the pro version.

Intelligence for Social Media

MAP and Heartbeat are highly complex products, and we only got to touch upon a small sub-set of their features (Sysomos also offers Firefox extensions, for example). We weren't able to get a lot of information about the pricing for both products, but Sysomos told us that they work individually with every one of their clients to create the right package for them. However, barring any financial stumbling blocks, we would highly recommend both MAP and Heartbeat to any PR firm that needs a tool to research, monitor, and manage social media campaigns. The more we used these tools, the more we also felt that they could be highly useful for news organizations as well.

While Heartbeat is easy enough to use, MAP is clearly not meant to be used by casual users. It's one of those tools where one can jump in and start doing some basic analysis pretty quickly, but to really get the most out of it, a training session with Sysomos' staff or a detailed look at the excellent introductory screencast and other documentation is definitely necessary. Sysomos' co-founder and CEO, Nick Koudas, gave us an almost 1 1/2 hour long demo of these two products a while ago, and even this was only enough to touch upon the basic features of the products. It is important to remember, though, that neither of these products are geared towards casual users.

Don't Despair: Free Version Coming Soon

When we talked to the Sysomos team last month, they told us that they are also working on a free, consumer-oriented product that should launch later this year. Even if this free tool only includes a fraction of MAP's or Heartbeat's abilities, we can't wait to get our hands on them, because the dataset that these tools would be built upon is unlike anything Sysomos' competitors currently offer.