Henri Bergius has the info on how to run OpenStreetMap on for mapping on your Nokia N800. In fact, it’s incredibly simple. Using MaemoMapper, just add http://tile.openstreetmap.org/%0d/%d/%d.png. to your Map repositories.

This is nice in a couple of ways. First, MaemoMapper, and the underlying Maemo, are open-source applications. So it’s nice to use open geodata. Second, using and caching Googlemap/Yahoo/et al. tiles is probably a violation of their Terms of Service, especially when you use them for realtime navigation. By using OpenStreetMap as the default mapping tile provider, MaemoMapper now provides a base functionality that is free for stringy ToS that could get it into trouble and question its existence.

I finally have been catching up on my RSS feeds and saw that Dan Catt pointed out this nice example of a GoogleMap blog header.

What’s interesting is that the map has moved from the sidebar, or in post, to the most prominent space on the page.Michael also did a very nice job with unique marker icons based on the post/image/tour.

This is a feature I’d like to add to GeoPress, pulling in and aggregating multiple GeoRSS streams, to mix-in with your blog posts. Currently, you can do this with Mapufacture, but it would be nice to build this all into GeoPress itself.

While traveling, its nice to be able to blog from a desktop application like ecto or MarsEdit. However, when you want to “geoblog”, you want to add some more metadata than just the title, content, and some tags.

Geoblogging is just becoming more common, and the tools around it are figuring out what the user should be able to do. GeoPress provides a web interface for making maps and location for posts, but doesn’t yet support additional metadata for setting the location via the XML-RPC interface that a blogging client would use.

One tool that adds geoblogging capabilities to ecto is this very informative Wiki on Geo-blogging extensions on Mac that works for Blojsom based blogs. The site is a great resource on various tools and accessories for posting KML and GoogleEarth and GoogleMaps for geoblogging.

The tool works by bringing up GoogleEarth where you can spin, point, or reference an existing waypoint to choose the posting location. The plugin will then add the location metadata, a GoogleEarth KML Link, and also a screenshot of the location. Check out the Screencast for a demo of how to use the geoblogging toolkit and its functionality.

The first resource any traveler to New Zealand should use is the excellent, Webby award winning, and official, newzealand.com. At its simplest it is a large listing of the cities, activities, accomodations, and information on New Zealand. What makes it really interesting is that every page includes an “Add to Travel Planner” button. When you add a page to your Travel Planner is sits in a list of collected items. So you can browse through all the cool things to do, mark interesting ones, and even pull in “collected travels” of suggested trips through various regions.

After you’ve gone around and collected all the things you’ll want to do, you actually go into your travel planner. Here you can pull back up short descriptions, web sites, phone numbers and addresses of any of the collected items. You can also drag and drop these into a calendar to build up your itinerary. When you put successive activites in different regions a small link will appear that will give you travel information between the areas. This includes driving times and distances, airline carriers, or rail options.

If you’ve selected a “pre-designed trip” it will be brought into your calendar as several days of activities. For example, I brought in a 3-day driving trip of the southern cities of Dunedin, Invercargill, and Te Anau. I then added accomodations at the end of each day and other activies to do on the route.

And of course, after you’ve built up your calendar you can then view a map of your collection or your actual itinerary along with suggested or defined routes.

After you’ve done all this, you can then share your itinerary and contact information with a travel agent, friends/family (so they know where you’ll be and how to get in touch), or for your own use for saving or printing along the way.

For general information that isn’t part of a location you can add your own “Notes” and attach these at any point in the trip. This may be for suggestions you’ve received from friends or contacts.

Overall, NewZealand.com is an incredible resource and should serve as a model for any travel site.
Gusto uses the model of gathering up sites and locations, but just isn’t quite as smooth as NZ.com does it.

A couple of things I wish the site did:

• The map and calendar hold a lot of information and should be resizable to view larger
• Export a set of driving directions and option GPX file for loading into a GPS or Nav system. Obviously this also includes exporting GeoRSS and KML for viewing in other maps, feeds, or GoogleEarth
• iCal export of itinerary

Later this week, I will performing a very important ceremony. After this - we’re off on an adventure to the land of Kiwis, Mountains & Dwarves (or somesuch).

Of course, this is a bright time in online tourism. There are a lot of resources out there for travelers who want to find out more about destinations and share their travels.

Over the next couple of days I’ll be reviewing some of the excellent New Zealand travel resources we used to plan our trip and of course arm ourselves with all the necessary mapping and neogeography tools.

Of course, I’ll be posting geotagged photos to Flickr, and using GeoPress in my Travel Blog.

Here is a quick list of basic travel sites for gathering & sharing travel stories:

• TripHub - Easily plan and organize your trip for free
• MapSack - Travel in the Know
• TripTracker
• GeekyTraveller
• World66 & WikiTravel
• TravelBlog - GlobeTrotting Documented
• Gusto - travel + lifestyle
• TrekEarth - Learning about the world through photography