Geolocating Everything

I’ve been excited about geolocating photos, blog posts, etc for a while. So this past month or so has been quite exciting. Most recently, GPS Photo Linker has been updated with Mac OS X 10.4 specific features:

With Spotlight in Mac OS X 10.4, you can instantly search for the city, state and country information automatically saved by GPSPhotoLinker. Additionally, Mac OS X 10.4 does support the GPS metadata tags in photos. This will open up a whole realm of opportunities for users and developers to take advantage of the position data on photos.

Then The Map Room linked to Geobloggers, where they link Flickr with Google Maps. Their instructions are simple enough — “add three tags to your photo, ‘geo:lat=xx.xxxx’, ‘geo:lon=xx.xxxx’ and ‘geotagged’” — and they’re mapping over 4000 photos now.

Even easier, however, is the Flickr & GeoURL World Map at AllTheGoodness.com. It works a lot differently, as it only looks for photos tagged with a city and state of interest, and it’s Flash based, and the map isn’t as good as Google’s, but it works cleanly and the framework is available for free download and re-use. Looks similar to worldKit that I got excited about a while ago.

And now I’ve found Plazes a social software that tells you who else is online on your network or near you. The concept is neat and I think it could explode if it had an API as good as Flickr‘s. There are some blog plugins available that will automatically add location info to posts, but I’d like to see more. I just requested their API docs and a dev key and I’m excited to see what it supports.

See the previous Geolocating Everything post for more.