Further update on geolocation

Avid and regular readers of this blog – I know you’re out there somewhere – will have picked-up that I’m rather interested in geolocation, tracking and using tools and widgets to broadcast location. I can’t imagine why anyone would be interested in “Where I am?” apart from my colleagues in Cardiff who’re always asking whether I still need an office, so it’s really just a throwback to my former life as a geographer. One that brings ever more warm recollections.

So that’s the rather feeble justification over. What have I done now! Two things. Firstly I’ve implemented Navizon on my laptop and enabled it to update Fire Eagle using WiFi or cell information. I misinformed a colleague the other day on this one. It is possible and does work! You can also configure it for your Blackberry (alternatively you can use BBTrackr to do the same thing). I’ve not chosen to do either of these – you’ll see why later. I like Fire Eagle, it’s a repository which stores my location and then allows applications to draw that information and display it on maps – normally Google Maps. Currently I’m using blogloc to do that and the outcome is displayed in the sidebar alongside.

Note [19 May]: there’s a new Google Latitude Sync app that seems even better at updating Fire Eagle than any of the others so far tested.

The other development I’ve just implemented is a new extension to Google Latitude which enables the information captured from cell-phone location to be displayed in live-form on a Google Map. The first use of this was to share geolocation information with your Gmail Chat “buddies” and for the select few who I have in my contact list this was a nice feature and caused us some mirth as we compared our movements across the city. The extension is to allow code to be implanted in a web-page, or for a widget to be aded to your blogger pages. So now (if you had access to my blogger account), you could see where I am. [Unfortunately, this feature is currently not working in WordPress, this blog - still investigating why that is ]

As a postscript, I’m working on another blog which will be dedicated to this subject and my travels, and when public I will put a link in the sidebar to that site.

This is where I am …

A further update on the previous post.

Just found out that Firefox 3.1b1 has in-built geolocation functionality. You can check it out also with v3 using the Geode plugin. With 3.1b1 and brightkite you can use “Guess my location” – it might work, but using WiFi it’s likely to be a bit hit and miss. Otherwise there’s a Loki plugin that will work with other browsers (ie Flock). For more information go to Mozilla.

Then there’s blogloc – an application that takes your location from FireEagle and provides two kinds of map – static (safer) and a live Google Map of your location to paste on your website. So this is where blogloc (static badge) thinks I am.

Once a geographer, always a geographer at heart.

Geotagging, GeoRSS, Geospatial … Geoanything

Some of my friends and colleagues know I’ve been using brightkite to record my location, usually from my BlackBerry, but occasionally from the web. I used to feed brightkite direct into twitter so that any posts or pictures would also get referenced to fellow twitterers, but aware that this can also be an annoyance, I’ve chosen to chnage the default so that I just update my location in twitter, and just send a message saying where I am, then it’s up to anyone to see where I am and what I’m up to.

I’ve been doing this for quite a while, doing it manually using the mobile web interface on brightkite, waiting for the GPS on the BB to feed brightkite to make it that little bit easier for me. Hasn’t happened yet, but Fire Eagle has landed and now EagleFeed has emerged which makes the business of “publishing your location” that little bit easier.

What’s new is that using EagleFeed, my location can be fed out to any blog, or website, or anything that accepts an RSS, or Atom feed. This enables mashups and other location related material to be incorporated in pages – I know I’ll find a use for this someday, probably linked to photography.