"Location" was one of the buzzwords of 2010, but arguably some of the most interesting developments weren't how people checked in via Foursquare and the like. Rather, they were the ways in which people used mobile phones and mapping to report other things. The most notable example of this is crisis-mapping platform Ushahidi, which enables people to contribute reports during crisis situations either via SMS or the Internet. This real-time data is used for mapping and visualizations in the service of humanitarian response efforts. And to that end, Ushahidi has been described as "check-ins with a purpose."

According to Ushahidi, "check-in" - the sort of action more readily associated with location-based networking apps - via its platform has really been "only a metaphor." But that's changing now that Ushahidi is launching a new tool, Crowdmap:CI, that will make noting your location (and making location notes) easier.

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Ushahidi launched Crowdmap in the middle of last year. Crowdmap is a easy-to-install, hosted version of Ushahidi - the equivalent of WordPress.com blogs for Wordpress, perhaps.

The new tool Crowdmap:CI (or Crowdmap Checkins) will function on both Ushahidi and Crowdmap and will allow users to create ad-hoc check-in communities, complete with mobile apps and web portals. Crowdmap:CI is designed to further simplify the creation of annotated location points. As Jon Gosier writes in the blog post announcing the new product, "Sometimes users just want to drop quick notes that represent data points allowing them to enter details later. For instance: the locations of wells while touring a rural village, or potholes around a metropolitan city, or simply dropping pins while on a vacation for the memories of where to return to. Crowdmap:CI is an attempt to make this data entry process quicker, allowing users to focus on location first, and everything else later."

Why use Ushahidi and not Foursquare or Gowalla to check in?

Crowdmap:CI will allow you to keep your check-ins and notes private and give you control over who can see your data. You can deploy the service within a crisis and/or particular group, so data you share doesn't necessarily have to go to others.

The points that the different users within a group make can be viewed individually or within one map. This will be useful, for example, if individuals have different mapping assignments.

The beta version of the Crowdmap:CI app is available for Android, and an iPhone version is on the way. The service is free, but there are premium options for those organizations wanting their own rewards and badges or needing to have a large number of users checking in at once, options for creating your own rewards and badges.

An open-source platform, Ushahidi was developed in the aftermath of Kenya's disputed presidential election in 2007. Ushahidi means "testimony" in Swahili, pointing to the projects roots in citizen journalism. Ushahidi was used as part of the response efforts to the earthquakes in Haiti and Chile last year, as well as to numerous other crises and disasters.

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Not On Our Watch, a human rights group co-founded by what's best described, perhaps, as Ocean's Eleven luminaries (George Clooney, Brad Pitt, Matt Damon, Don Cheadle and Jerry Weintraub), announced yesterday that it has teamed up with Google, the U.N. and several anti-genocide organizations in order to launch a satellite surveillance project to monitor the Sudan region. The project aims to prevent a new civil war from breaking out in the area.

According to The Washington Post, Not On Our Watch is funding the startup phase of the Satellite Sentinel Project which plans to collect near-real-time satellite imagery from Sudan and combine it with field analysis from several other humanitarian organizations, including the Enough Project and the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative.

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The satellite imagery should point out the movement of troops and civilians in order to gauge impending and ongoing conflict. The U.N. Operational Satellite Applications Program, with the help of Google and Trellon LLC, will publish the findings online so that the reports and maps are easily accessible.

"We want to let potential perpetrators of genocide and other war crimes know that we're watching, the world is watching," Clooney said in a press statement. "War criminals thrive in the dark. It's a lot harder to commit mass atrocities in the glare of the media spotlight."

The group hopes that the satellite imagery will be able to gauge impending conflict and warn civilians in the area, hopefully according to the website "heading off humanitarian disaster and human rights crimes before they occur."

The project is another example of the ways in which real-time mapping technologies are being used to both prevent and respond to crises.

And the crisis in the Sudan region is hardly a new one. Southern Sudan is preparing to vote on a secession referendum in early January, something that has raised fears of a north-south civil war. The vote is a result of a 2005 peace deal, ending a 20-year conflict that has cost the lives of millions.

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When WikiLeaks began its release of more than 250,00 classified diplomatic cables late last month, its domain name - wikileaks.org - was the first thing to go. In the week that followed, however, a slew of mirror sites popped up, and Harvard-based developer Laurence Muller gave us a look at the global effort to keep WikiLeaks standing. Muller took the list of WikiLeaks mirrors, determined their locations, and plotted the points on Google Earth.

Now, Muller has taken this same data and plotted it over time, showing the viral replication of WikiLeaks from just a handful of mirrors to nearly 2,000 in just seven day's time.

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To create the initial visualization, Muller wrote a PHP script to scrape the primary list of WikiLeaks mirrors on the WikiLeaks site, resolving each URL with a geospatial location and converting them to KML for use with Google Earth. The result is a series of pins on a 3D globe showing all of the locations, globally, where WikiLeaks data is being mirrored. Then, by keeping track of the list of mirrors, Muller was able to create a similar visualization showing the spread over time.

Muller also broke down the spread of WikiLeaks mirrors by country, finding that Germany was host to the majority of mirrors, with the U.S., France and the Netherlands all following close behind.

His latest work, however, plots these points over time using Google Earth and gives an interesting look at how the data spread across the globe in the week following the removal of wikileaks.org.

For those of you with the Google Earth browser plugin, you can also take a look for yourself.

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In the midst of the SXSW festival last month, we reviewed a mobile social network called LoKast. Our one lingering question about the app's utility, at the time, was were we really going to run around town staring at our phone to see if someone else nearby was running the same app?

The answer was "no" then and is "no" now, but the difference now is that the iPhone OS 4.0 that was announced yesterday allows for background location multitasking. This opens up a whole new realm of experiences for the iPhone.

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First, LoKast. LoKast is a self-described "disposable" social network. That is, as you move about and come near other people running LoKast, you can quickly interact with them. Then, when you move ot of range, you may never see them again. It is social networking based on location, without a persistent friends listing.

So now, with background location monitoring, an app like LoKast is actually feasible. I can turn it on, leave it running and wander around town and perhaps have it notify me when I'm within range of someone.

As Kim-Mai Cutler notes, background location also brings up some "slightly creepy" privacy concerns relating not only to applications running in the background, but also location based advertising. But what if you think about location based advertising like you think of iTunes' "Genius" function or all the other recommendation engine software you use?

It may be tough to realize that you are not quite the unique snowflake you thought you were and that, indeed, everyday around three you end up at the same coffeeshop, but wouldn't it be nice for your iPhone to realize this and get you 20% off? Without you even having to lift a finger? Well, fine, maybe you have to lift an iPhone.

The list of ideas for background location are endless. Of course, we'll have to see how quickly a battery gets drained with persistent GPS monitoring. Having the ability to let our phones deliver us information, as we move about the world, based on our location has some amazing potential.

Think of EveryBlock, the hyperlocal news aggregator that Marshall Kirkpatrick went ga-ga over when it arrived in Portland. The block-level delivery of news wouldn't even need to wait for you to check it any more - it could simply deliver relevant information as you move about your day. Real-time rideshare services like Avego and Flinc suddenly become that much more feasible, in fast-paced, real-life situations.

We could go on, but we have another couple of months before the next version of the iPhone OS comes out and we're already too excited as it is. What crazy, creepy or otherwise cool potential do you see with the new background location capabilities?

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