Boy, am I tired of waiting for 'location-based' services to take off. It's one of those things like the paperless office or the multimedia message service: people keep talking about it, but nobody does it.

Maps are, of course, insanely useful things. It was a map that first alerted Dr John Snow to the fact that cholera was spreading along Broadwick Street in Soho, London, from a water pump which was connected to the sewerage system by mistake.

And if you go to the bother of plotting things geographically, it's amazing how often you spot a trend like that.

These days, of course, we're all going mobile. And as a result, it becomes possible to "provide location-based services to the mobile user". Which boils down, mostly, to adverts.

As you walk down the street, your pocket electronic device is able to alert you to goods and services that you might be unaware of (so the theory goes) - as if people were incapable of putting a sign in their shop windows.

For my part, the idea that everything from socks to violins can be funded by advertising is not a technology trend. What I think is far more likely to make maps work is something that tells other people where I am.

I recently saw a couple of hacker programmers demonstrate their compiler system. It's expensive (of course) and clever, so they cast about for something to make it look particularly special. They hit on the idea of a system that auto blogs.

Here's the deal: you take a cameraphone with you on holiday. The moment you take a photograph, an option appears in the menu: 'Blog it?'.

When you say yes, you can enter a caption, if you like. You then press 'send', and the photograph is uploaded to your blog site, together with a map of the area in which you were standing when you pressed the button.

For the Microsoft product managers who demonstrated this, it was just a convenient way of showing that MapPoint contains maps you can match to latitude and longitude values.

The mobile phone, though you may not realise this, knows roughly where you are, because it knows which cell it is in, and which other cells are near.

Tie the MapPoint database of maps into the mobile phone network, and it is possible to have a big arrow pointing to your mountain saying: "He was here!" on your blog. Easy, even.

The problem is, multimedia messaging simply isn't interesting. The reason for this is that it's beyond the typical user to set up. Too many buttons on too small a phone - no idea what to press, and when things go wrong, it's impossible to find out what happened.

The thing about this application is that it's a user application. The user can decide whether to run the software - in fact, now Microsoft is giving away the 'Express' versions of all its programming tools, the user could possibly even write the software.

All you need is a contract with MapPoint at Microsoft, and they'll charge you a little for each map you retrieve.

And where does this leave the PC? If we can blog our holidays with nothing more than a cameraphone, why do we need to struggle home with our notes, plug the phone into the PC, download all the photographs, try to remember what was going on, type up the captions, and add the data to our home website?

Of course, a year ago you'd have said: "So that we can print the pictures out!"

Now even that reason has gone. You can plug your phone directly into the printer, and the printer has a tiny colour display which shows you which picture you would print if you pressed 'PRINT' hard enough.

Despite this, I predict that the arrival of good, 2megapixel cameraphones means more PCs will be sold, because I think the habit of printing out one's photographs is a hangover from an earlier age of the world.

I have two very good colour photo printers, and I haven't used them to print a photograph for a year.

What I do with my photographs is to collect them all with a freeware program called JAlbum. It scoops them all up and creates a slideshow that I can upload to my website (it will even do that for me!) and then I can just tell people what the URL is.

The Exif metadata saved by the camera says what time the pictures were taken, what aperture, which camera model I used and lots more - check out the Windows Properties of one of your photos to see exactly how much.

But I have to say, I would like it even more if my photographs knew where I'd taken them, as well as when.

Am I really saying that the paperless home is just around the corner, and that location-based services are about to become real? Goodness, surely I can't be. Can I?