This post started with Ryan sending me this link demonstrating a KML overlay of county borders of his bifurcated state in Google Maps.

Then I found this Roundup of Google’s Geo Developer Day (btw, I so wanted to be at Where 2.0) with tales of the new geocoding feature of the Google Maps API, more details about KML-in-Google-Maps, geotagging in Picasa, and the new Google Earth 4.0 beta.

And somewhere along the line, I ran across a link to SketchUp, Google’s 3-D modeler that seems built especially to put dimensional structures in Google Earth.

geocoding, geographic information systems, geolocation, geotagging, gis, google earth, google maps, kml, sketchup, where 2.0, where20

I’m a big fan of the WP Geo plugin, but I want more.

My biggest complaint is that I want to insert coordinates using Google Maps or MultiMap URLs, rather than insert them in the modified story editor. So I wrote a bit of code that reads through the URLs in a post, finds the “maps.google” or “multimap.com” URLs, fishes the latitude and longitude out of them, and adds some geocoding tags to the body of the post.

Take a look at how it works with these posts in my archive…

You should see one or more blocks of links like the following (from my Osceola Weekend post):

geolocation: geo:lat=44.006336, geo:lon=-71.547260, geotagged, geolocation:44.006336,-71.547260 geobloggers

Go ahead and click the “geobloggers” link. I could have added these links using the old Geo plugin, but I still would have had to insert the coordinates separately. Actually, that brings up a good point: my code also inserts post metadata in the same format the Geo plugin uses, so I can take advantage of all the good functions it has, like the one that inserts the “<meta name=“ICBM” content=“44.006336, -71.547260” />” tag in the header of this post (caveat: I had to disable the add_action code in Geo that feeds the postmeta table, as it was conflicting my code).

I’m releasing this now, to start some public discussion, but please recognize that it’s a very early beta.

Download: bsuite_geocode.zip
Install: place unzipped “bsuite_geocode.php” file in your wp-content/plugins folder and activate it via the WP control panel. See the WordPress Codex for more detail.
Use: write posts as usual, adding links to Google Maps or MultiMap as appropriate. Links to those sites that have latitude and longitude components will be used to geocode the post.

Example of a working URL:

http://maps.google.com/maps?ll=19.355507,-155.072365&spn=.191780,.318003&t=k&hl=en

Example of a URL that won’t work (note how there’s no “ll=”):

http://maps.google.com/maps?q=decker+canyon+rd,+malibu+california&spn=0.019857,0.039750&hl=en

I’ve got a lot of features and uses in mind, so consider this only a start. Please post bugs and suggestions in the comments.

Also, see these previous posts on geolocating the news or geolocating everything or just search the archives to understand why I’m so excited about things like this.

tags: beta, blog, blogmap, blogmaps, blog gis, geo, geocoding, geolocation, geotagging, gis, google maps, lat, latitude and longitude, lon, map, maps, mapping, metadata, multimap, plugin, plugins, wordpress, wordpress plugin, wp plugin

Who doesn’t love tagging? No, tagging as in annotating, not graffiti. Anyway, Rixome is the latest among a bunch of plans/projects to enable tagging of geographic spaces/real-life environments.

The good people at We Make Money Not Art had this in their post:

rixome is a network and a tool that turns mobile screens into windows that show the virtual and public dimensions of our point of view.

A walker (a rixome user) can see on his/her mobile phone/PDA/laptop screen the virtual interventions that have been added to the location where s/he now stands. For example, a spoken message can be left on a given location for other “walkers” to hear through headphones whenever they pass by. The message can also be written, or it can be a 3D animation or image, a photography, a drawing, a video.

Remote rixome users can also check vía Internet the traces left by others but s/he won’t be able to add an intervention similar to those published in situ.

Developed by gelo for his at Master of Art and New Technologlies at the Universidad Europea de Madrid.

(Engadget is onto this story too)

This idea isn’t new (see Twenty Years From Now: Urban tagging and New Media Knowledge – GeoTagging The City) But time, technology, and a forward thinking art student make Rixome look more plausible than the others.

Related: previously at MaisonBisson: Geolocating The News, When You Don’t Have A GPS, and anything else about geolocation. Interesting websites: Urban Tapestries | Social Tapestries and Gelo.tv. Books: The Wisdom of Crowds and Smart Mobs.

art student, folksonomy, forward thinking, geography, geolocation, geotag, geotagging, laptop screen, mobile, mobile phone, new media, pda, public dimensions, social environments, spoken message, tag, tagged environments, tagging, tags, urban environments