geoTract.com provides a central commonplace to share experiences and interests in the form of maps mashed with chatting, blogs, friends lists, favorites lists, and general locations. On geoTract users have the ability to open their opinions on restaurants they have visited, post photos of their friends at the club they went to last weekend, or even provide a reference to their favorite nature trails or hikes they have at their favorite camp ground. These experiences are then plotted on gMaps a Google API that allows the placement of markers based on coordinate systems generated by the API. Once a marker has been placed, or as we call it a “Tract” created, users can then share that information with the world, or maybe just their friends and relatives. They can write about their experiences within that geoTract Blog, and post pictures that correlate with that particular area or experience.

Slightly different tack but similar to Plazes maybe?

So after bolting my GPS unit (Magellan 320) to my bike I started recording tracks for the Openstreetmap project. This led me to a greater understanding of tracklogs, the mad amount of proprietary data formats used by GPS manufacturers. The hoped for standardisation, GPX. The amazing conversion utilities, GPSBabel and GPSVisualizer. And as an added bonus the creation of KML files for use in Google Earth. So after all that I think that I now understand tracklogs.

OK but that still leaves navigation.

So there’s a sport called geocaching, which involves navigating from one clue (or geocache) to another. If you liked treasure hunts when you were a child, you’ll love this. After initial hiccups, like using the wrong map datum,
I’ve learned to use landmarks, bearings, routes, and goto’s. Plus I’ve learned a little basic encryption along the way. I think there’s still a lot to learn about navigation, but now I know enough to get by.

It seems that Chandu Thota (the creator of Blogmap) has updated it again. Well actually the company he works for, Microsoft, have made a huge improvement in their mapping data for the rest of the world. This means that for the first time we in the Isle of Man have access to street level mapping.

It’s impressive stuff, and compared to the tracklogs I have been creating for the OpenStreetMap Isle Of Man project, it’s accurate enough for most purposes.

Blackhat search engine optimisation (SEO) techniques often involve the creation of huge blog farms of autogenerated pseudo content all linking back and forth to each other. These useless (to the reader anyway) blogs have become known as Splogs= Spam+Blogs.

Another technique which will be recognised by anyone who has run a genuine blog for any time are Spam Comments - again designed to create backlinks from authoritative page ranked sites to the website that was being SEO’ed. Indiscriminate use of specifically written comment spamming programs has resulted in this widespread nuisance - which because most people now use REL=NOFOLLOW for their comments - no longer provides any benefits to the users of this technique.

Now we are beginning to see exploitation of Web2.0 tagging in the drive for higher search engine rankings. Automated Tag and Ping programs have been developed and released(and no I’m not going to link to them). Now we will see the automated poisoning of tagging which will reduce its effectiveness and lead to greater amounts of Splog in our feed readers.

Will we see a new round of Splogs using this method? I believe that we will, because the short term gains will appeal to the ‘get rich quick’ mindset that makes up one segment of the Internet Marketing community.

Ultimately another round of countermeasures will be produced which will reduce Tag and Ping effectiveness… and so the cycle will continue.

Registration is free (for low bandwidth users) and of course in best Web2.0 fashion it’s a beta.

How does this work? well the people who created it don’t give a lot of clues on their website, but my best guess is that they look up the location of the IP Address of each visitor to your site using a technique known as geolocation .

Found via Trendhunter Magazine

The increasing ability to integrate geospatial technology into a wide range of IT systems, and the increasing visibility of it to business and the public, makes this an appropriate time to form a specialist group within BCS so that members may be well informed and understand the issues and best practices associated with the technology.

Openstreetmap is enlisting the help of enthusiasts armed with a handheld GPS to create an opensource, freely available, streetmap of the entire world.

This may take some time.

Especially as their homebrewed server rack oftens creaks under the strain and this makes editing a somewhat frustrating affair. But this is the early adopter zone and these issues tend to go with the territory (pun intended) .

Dan Karran and I have launched our own attempt to map the Isle of Man and to get the data onto Openstreetmap, so any Isle of Man readers who would like to assist, please get in touch.

Every UK reader with a GPS should visit Freethepostcode at least once and put in your Postcode and your Latitude and Longitude coordinates. Do your bit to create a free UK postcode coordinate list.

Since 2002 when the article was written, we have much cheaper storage, mini video cameras, HSDPA and locative based technologies that are enabling a greater degree of granularity for recording than ever before. Allowing indexing by date, time, location, people. The security and privacy concerns are also greatly elevated by this type of application.

You can find out more about the project at Microsoft’s Project Page for MyLifeBits

This must be quite alarming to walk on! Imagine the effect of too many Gin &Tonic’s plus Jetlag, then you get to walk over this. Stunning.

Got this in my email the other day, nice one.