Wearing the badge “still beta,” Plazes, the free, network-based geolocation service, now sports a new coat of paint. Among the improvements is the Flash-based badge (above) and a much improved frontpage/dashboard that combines the map of known locations with the map of active users, formerly two separate screens.

On the downside, I sort of miss the old tracker. I love the icons on the new one, but there was a simplicity to the old list of recent plazes and favorite plazes that I liked. Also missing is the ability to display a time-range; instead, it simply displays the locations in date order. What I really want back is the ability to see, in one screen, all the places I’ve been in the past year, or month, or whatever (yeah, as Tim notes, it’s a bit exhibitionist, but…). Still, the new Plazes does add “hangouts,” which is sort of cool, you know, as a stalking aid.

The final downer is the useless of the “My World” map. It’s not that it shows I’ve only visited 1% of the world, it’s that it suggests I’ve visited all of the US — including Alaska and Hawaii. The map might be gratifying for the European developers, but I’d like more granularity.

Still, I continue to run the Plazer, and continue to look for new plazes to claim.

beta, geolocation, gis, location aware, mapping, plazes, still beta

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

Here’s an interesting GeoPlace.com article on open source GIS tools, including GIS extensions to PosgreSQL and MySQL. Via The Map Room.

tags: geo world, geocode, geocoding, geographic information system, geography, geolocation, gis, gis development, gis guide, gis tools, map room, mapping, mysql, open source, open source gis, open source tools

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

A an old John Udell piece at InfoWorld hints at GeoURLs, but the GoeURL site is down, and has been for a while. The concept sounds interesting: you mark pages with coordinates, then use GIS to map those pages to geographic locations, finding pages and people of interest along the way.

To join GeoURL, you add this kind of metadata to your homepage:

<META name=“ICBM” content=“42.93564,-72.27239”>
<META name=“DC.title” content=“Jon Udell”>

I got interested in this sort of thing (geolocation) a while back, and I haven’t quite given up.

Update: Bjørn is right, GeoURL is back and I should have updated this post ages ago. Look here for more about geolocation on MaisonBisson. …And Bjørn’s website is worth a look too.

Technorati Tags: geographic, geolocation, gis, map, metadata, semantic web