As most people who read this blog are probably aware, Flickr added mapping directly. What they didn’t advertise or get talked about is the formatting they’re supporting.

Hidden underneath the “taken…” line is a bit of Microformat geo:

<span class=”geo” style=”display:none”>
  <span class=”latitude”>38.017804</span>,
  <span class=”longitude”>-78.475342</span>
</span>

Additionally, in the RSS output, you can get GeoRSS tags. You need to add the following to your URL: &georss=1.

It’s a great example, and source, of how easy it is to add some simple markup to your HTML and RSS to add geographic annotation.

The newer, more full-featured kid on the embedding Maps-in-your-Rails-App-block has gotten an update. YM4R v0.5.1 was released a couple of days ago. It’s now mostly a plugin, instead of a gem, since it includes a lot of Rails specific stuff. There are Ruby libraries for creating GoogleMaps tiles, and geocoding that are still in the gem, which is great too.

And I’ve even done my part to contribute by submitting my GeoRSS Simple Parser.

Technorati Tags: ym4r, plugin, rubyonrails, rails, ruby

What I really need and want is a really flexible and useful “geo-tool” software application.

I have been gathering a lot of waypoints, tracks, location histories, notes, geo-photographs, etc. Yet when I want to put my location in a blog post, an email, a website, an article, or add metadata to a file, I have to dig through many programs, files, and then copy and paste. Perhaps even convert between DMS and DDMMSS.

This application should be enable me to store my waypoints and tracks. These would either be loaded from GPX files, hand entered, CSV files, drawn on a map, or geolocated by an street address. In addition, these tracks and waypoints could have time component.

I can then add notes or photographs to these locations and tracks, share these with friends, or easily search for things like “what photos have I taken in Southern Germany before 2004?”, or “what’s a good 3-5 mile hike I’ve done?”

Lastly, this tool would easily allow me to do local searches, enter the location latitude/longitude, address, or track information into text fields, as GeoRSS, XML, Microformat, or anything else. Place it directly on my clipboard for pasting, or pop-up a window with the information for me to edit, fill-in, then copy and paste. Or provide a Mac OS X service/hotkey that I would quickly enter this information into the current field in a program, or website.

Any other ideas on what this type of application should do or look-like? Is it a web-application? A desktop application would let me use it “in the field” where I may not have net access. So it could run a local-webserver if that were the case. But my data would have to be able to be private, though shareable is nice too. I could bundle up a track and photos/notes and send them to a friend or post them to a webpage.

Last night I got to attend a talk given by Robin Chase, Founder and Former CEO of Zipcar. Her talk was titled “Sustainable Transportation and Accessibility Research & Transformation”, where she discussed how to decrease the impact of transportation on the environment and also using new transportation paradigms (such as shared car ownership) as a vehicle for bringing out mesh networks.

Mesh networks are simple: everything is a sensor and can connect to other sensors. She referred to it as “Ad Hoc Wireless networking”, but I think that confuses the issue, because then people start thinking it just means WiFi everywhere.

What it really means is that all of these sensors and network devices can talk to one another, gather, share, and use information. For example, if every car was a member of the mesh network, they would all share traffic information, road conditions, and driver destination, perhaps. Then your in-dash display would update real-time traffic ahead of you as each of these cars shared their data. Also, you may be able to get internet down the line as you all shared a common network system.

Other examples that have popped up in the past include finding potential mates/friends around you by a profile you broadcast, or tracking birds with RFID.

Of course, now that you have all this data, how do you share it? Robin says she envisions all of this being built on open-source technologies, to allow for “innovation” (aka ‘good hacking’). Open standards like GeoRSS could also be used to begin disseminating all of this data as it streams in and share it between devices. See the notes on Mikel’s XTech talk for more inspiration along those lines.

If the devices are cheap (< $100), open-design, and run on open-software, this is a great future. If, however, it is run by proprietary, expensive technology, and closed standards, then you’ll have a future where you get fast connections in your Ford car from other Ford cars, but no connection to all those BMW’s or Toyotas on the road.

There are many GeoRSS aggregators showing up. It’s a balancing game - you need feeds and data to build the tools, but why produce the data if no tools to consume them? But it appears with the large rise in geo-location awareness, and “neography” (for lack of a better term), there is sufficient enthusiasm behind putting geographic meta-data inside of feeds and sites, which is great.

So far I’ve seen the following aggregators pop-up with GeoRSS support. These are being covered in the GeoRSS blog - so you can get more specific information, as well as useful feeds, from there.

• Mapufacture - personal maps with bounded locations & feeds
• PlaceDB - large listing of aggregated feeds, where the user can produce localized feeds. It also geolocates news items by looking for location names, cities, and regions.
• FoFRedux - general feed aggregator which supports parsing & aggregating GeoRSS feeds