This is a bit reflexive, given that this Alexis Madrigal piece mentions X2, but still, it makes a decent point about the growing proliferation of high-quality sensing and geolocation tools, and the ways they could be used by amateur scientists:

With Steve Jobs' announcement that the iPhone 3G will have geolocation built-in, plenty of people are excited about finding good restaurants near them or worried about the privacy implications of that

But the new capability could be adapted by a different, unexpected crowd: citizen scientists taking the real-time environmental pulse of cities and suburb.

One requirement of this data-gathering effort would be maintaining the integrity of the data input. GPS eliminates the need to accurately report location data, which is a major area of human error. With Apple putting devices with these capabilities into the hands of more and more consumers, scientists could discover a huge untapped data-gathering resource if they can churn out cheap sensors that can communicate with the iPhone.

That would be the next step in the new trend of turning real built and natural environments into data that can be visualized in virtual environments, i.e., of marrying geographic and virtual space. When we asked futurist Jamais Cascio what the Internet will look like in 2020, he responded:

It will be indistinguishable from the physical world.... At a glance, I can see environmental information. Oh, it's raining? How much has it rained? What's the pollen count? What's the forecast? All of these bits and pieces of how we appreciate the world around us will be given greater specificity and made graspable.