Paddyworks.com »technotes

For some reason I only recently got excited by the web geography phenomenon – i.e. GeoUrl and GeoUrl.info. I think for a long time I was fairly concerned with preserving a sense of anonymity with regards to my presence on the web; or perhaps with maintaining a distinction between my web identity and my personal identity. And while nearly the entire history of my professional career can be revealed by Google and other internet tools, somehow attaching my coordinates to a web site seemed a little too much like rolling over for Big Brother.

And so rather than thinking that broadcasting my coordinates across the ether was an interesting idea or had any real merit – much less that it could have some pretty cool applications – I preferred to remain sheltered behind a half-imagined sense of privacy that comes with publishing information in name only.

But somehow I’ve recently had a change of heart. Perhaps it’s because publishing on the web somehow generates a certain desire for notoriety. Perhaps it’s related to the fact that in the past year, even the past month, location has exploded in popularity as a focus of new web technologies – take Google Maps and Memory Maps on Flickr as evidence of this.

Whatever the reason, a few weeks ago I added GeoUrl meta tags to a couple of my websites. And then I more or less forgot about it.

Until a little while ago.

I was skimming through the referring URLs from the log of my personal blog when I noticed a hit from http://brainoff.com/geoblog/. I thought to myself, Hmmm, that’s an interesting URL, and went to check it out.

Wow! What a cool tool. Geoblogs is this: A near-realtime worldmap of geo-indexed blogs that updates as they ping Weblogs.com. Wow! And it’s built using worldKit, a light-weight Flash tool by Mikel Maron that renders points on a map from geocoded RSS (i.e. XML).

I feel almost a little embarassed to say it, but finding this tool is like a light coming on. Though I’ve spent several years working with web-based mapping applications, I had never truly ventured far from the realm of duplicating basic GIS functionality on the web. While this is no small task, it does fit into a fairly square box. While providing sophisticated geospatial information via a web interface is a challenging and notable pursuit, the beauty of geocoded RSS is both in it’s simplicity (recording point locations) and in the dynamism of its data source (RSS or Atom).

Simply put, this has all kinds of applications: from locating individual blog entries to logging photographic waypoints during a trip; from aggregating the geographic contexts of conversations that take place in ether-space to plotting time-series events in real time. Basically…lots of things…many more than I could possibly think of all at once.

Well, this is both humbling and exciting. And I have some research to do. And some tools to learn about. And hopefully before long I’ll have more to say on this topic.

UPDATES:

4.8.05
Just found Mappr, a site that displays locations of recently uploaded images on Flickr.

4.9.05
There’s also Flickr World Map that uses a site’s GeoUrl ICBM coordinates.

4.14.05
I’ve installed a version of Mikel Maron’s’s excellent worldKit package. The current installation shows global earthquake data from a USGS feed.