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

Steve Coast announced that OSM now has Yahoo’s Satellite imagery. This is incredible news, as there is a tremendous amount of data and imagery that would be too difficult/expensive to obtain with out the support of a company like Yahoo. Steve shows off an applet that automatically generates streets from the imagery. Geobloggers (Dan Catt) has some thoughts on how this really helps the cause and experience of the open-mapping front.

He mentions the “Here be Dragons” experience of people really wanting to go out there and find the unmapped places. This is how OSM really got off the ground in the first place, as most of the world was “Dragon-land” and everyone’s individual contribution made a huge difference, at least in the UK/Europe.

Data as good and bad

The US still doesn’t have great OSM representation. One response I’ve heard from the OSM crowd is, “the US already has TIGER/Line data, so there’s less impetus for people to go out and contribute new data”. There were very few “unknown areas”, so people found less benefit to put effort into adding those few places. Now, with Yahoo’s imagery & an applet to automatically generate roads, will there be the same effect in the UK/Europe? Nearly overnight the amount of mapped areas with dramatically increase with little to no effort by the actual mappers. While their efforts made OSM what it is, and therefore made it possible and useful for Yahoo to give the imagery, I wonder if they’ll now feel they’ve partly “lost their voice”?

Will looking at the next generation OSM map and seeing 90% coverage make the developers/gatherers more apathetic about setting up mapping parties? What happens when you go from the underdog to the superdog? Google is dealing fairly well with it – they spend a lot of effort to seem like a “small company” – but when you have an open call to hire more than 150 engineers, you’re not small.

Bring out your users… <dong>

What this data definitely will do is bring more users to the project, whereas before there were mostly devs/contributors, and very few users. We’ve already seen some of the first commercial uses of OSM data, albeit for very specific locations. With more data, better coverage more developers can use OSM data for their projects. And perhaps we’ll even see people able to load the data into their GPS receivers or nav systems and use them as their primary mapping source.

Having users is a whole different set of issues than what OSM has dealt with in the past. Part of the growing pains is dealing with a quick increase in the community size which can affect the quality of data, reduction in a feeling of ‘community’, and also just dealing with common issues, support, and questions from new people as they start flooding in.

Simple Inspirational

The primary contributors to OSM have been in Europe, and they’ll probably have the largest change from development to users. European contributors will have to deal with the possibility loss of identity that they had with OSM as a grass-roots organization and helping shape it as a larger, more stable entity.

But another benefit of this huge surge in usefulness and visibility of OSM is that it should inspire contribution and development around the world. It can spur users in Asia, New Zealand, Africa, and South America what the power and purpose can be in contributing new data. They’ll now see OSM not just as a bunch of geeks “over in Europe” running around with GPS units, but a solid, useful, system where they can contribute to and really use this new data and services.

Of course, all this will still take some time. OSM just got the imagery, and they’re still working out the bugs and features of the applet to convert the images to real street data. But it’s definitely a turning point in the open-geodata front, one that will cause quite a bit of excitement.

And good luck conquering the last of the dragon-lands.

It’s quite the big week for cool technology getting a lot of limelight. Today Nestoria demonstrated that they’re using OpenStreetMaps to display some of their properties.

The quality of the resulting maps from data gathered by “people on bikes” is rather incredible. Granted, the maps are currently mostly used around places like the Isle of Wight that have super-good coverage due to the enviously fun mapping parties.

It’s interesting in that a very commercial site is using and supporting an open-initiative to gather free geodata and finds it high enough quality to use for selling high-priced items to customers. So instead of paying continual royalties to large mapping suppliers, or dealing with possibly incompatible (or variable) terms of service, companies can help guide and support open-source projects with the desired functionality, and get to use the resulting products in a much more amenable manner.

And to give them extra-special open-source goodness, Nestoria supported the development of Mapstraction, the free and open-source “cross-mapping” javascript library that is used in GeoPress.