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.

I’m now back in the US after 2 weeks traveling Central/Eastern Europe and along the way I’ve picked up some new cultural/travel/technology lessons learned.

The first one wasn’t immediately noticeable. I’m a big fan of coffee, and I tend to drink it in large quantities. This is already a problem, and one of the few, when I travel Europe: land of the ‘coffee shot’. However, in hostels and some hotels they will serve coffee normally and let you fill up as often as you like.

The coffee often tasted bitter. I attributed this to the bad coffee served in such large quantities at these ‘reasonably priced’ establishments. On the contrary, this is actually a remnant of the rationing of materials during World War II, where chicory root was put in as an available filler for coffee. This lent it a bitter flavor. Over the years of the war, this flavor was acquired, and even now Europeans will add chicory to their coffee to get that familiar taste.

I like my coffee relatively root free.

Note: Japanese tourists were observed to travel in large tour groups, where as Chinese tourists travel in sets of pairs (2 friend, 2 couples, etc.)

Pictures of people are usually more interesting and enjoyable than pictures of monuments and buildings. I am amazed by what appears to be the gigabytes and gigabytes of (the same) bad photographs being created every minute during high-season in tourist areas. It becomes very apparent that the future of computing is search. How else am I going to find that picture of Mozart statue amongst the hundreds (or thousands) of photos I took on a trip (or that exist on my entire hard drive).

Vienna is a much cooler, and memorable city when you spend less time running around to see all the sites (which are mostly Hapsburg estates), and more time in the “Vienna Living Rooms” of coffee shops and cafes. This is true of many, but not all, cities.

Internet access is a real pain to find, and will probably cost a lot. Forget wireless (at least publicly available wireless)

Another interesting aspect of travel is the end of the trip. Whether or not you’re tired and want to relax. Its the hours and hours in lines, through counters, gates, flights, and sitting waiting that really drives the feeling: “I want to be home.”

It may not necessarily be that you want to go home, but finally getting home is a release from the mundaneness of sitting in the airport and passing through customs after customs agents. If only they could put us in hibernation at the end of the trip so we just “showed up” at home, all exuberant and vibrant from the end of our travels.

So, I’ll be making it to the Where 2.0 conference coming up in San Jose, CA, June 13-14. I’m super excited to meet a lot of people I’ve corresponded with, but haven’t had the chance to meet yet. The Where 2.0 program looks really good. Some developers are even offering various internal organs to go.

I agree with Matt Croydon’s take on the 5/15-minute presentation schedule. It seems very “lightning round”, but also a really good way to get lots of ideas out and then move the interesting discussion to the sideline and various nightly gatherings.

In particular, the Birds of a Feather (BoF) meetings should be great. There is a Microformats meeting to discuss the possible directions microformat. also hope to meet with some of the GeoRSS developers and bloggers.

I’ve even secured a place at the Google Geo Developers day on June 12 - so I should get a chance to show off my cool mashup projects. Not to mention discussing other possibilities of visualizing geo-specific driving simulations in GoogleEarth.

I think my biggest concern about attending is wanting to meet everyone and discuss all the current ideas and possibilities in location information & mapping.

Of course, to get to California, I’m heading out of Vienna early, by way of Detroit, then on to San Francisco. Yay lots of time on a plane. Here’s to hoping for flying on something nice like an Airbus 330.

Greetings from Prague. The trip is going great - and don’t mind the 30Kr Pivo ($1.20USD 0.5L beers). I have limited internet access, so difficult to upload some of the great shots I’ve gotten.

While traveling, I can imagine an incredibly useful technology, where you could rent small handheld GPS receivers & maps that were pre-loaded with sites & tours of a city. As you wonder the city, interesting historical facts pop-up, and routes to sites, hotels, restaurants, etc. show up as well. The device would be small and inexpensive. Perhaps rentable from a central location and as you traveled to different cities, you jacked it into a booth and it uploaded new information. Then when you return the unit, your actual travel logs are downloaded and emailed to you or burned on a CD. Then you would have a time history track of your travels and sites. You could even make your own bookmarks & notes of locations.

I think this is what Schmap (Dynamic travel guides) is, though I haven’t gotten to try out my demo cd that recently came in the mail. However, this still requires a full computer to use.

Off to see a bone church & then to Budapest.

So, I’ll be making it to the Where 2.0 conference coming up in San Jose, CA, June 13-14. I’m super excited to meet a lot of people I’ve corresponded with, but haven’t had the chance to meet yet. The Where 2.0 program looks really good. Some developers are even offering various internal organs to go.

I agree with Matt Croydon’s take on the 5/15-minute presentation schedule. It seems very “lightning round”, but also a really good way to get lots of ideas out and then move the interesting discussion to the sideline and various nightly gatherings.

In particular, the Birds of a Feather (BoF) meetings should be great. There is a Microformats meeting to discuss the possible directions microformat. also hope to meet with some of the GeoRSS developers and bloggers.

I’ve even secured a place at the Google Geo Developers day on June 12 - so I should get a chance to show off my cool mashup projects. Not to mention discussing other possibilities of visualizing geo-specific driving simulations in GoogleEarth.

I think my biggest concern about attending is wanting to meet everyone and discuss all the current ideas and possibilities in location information & mapping.

Of course, to get to California, I’m heading out of Vienna early, by way of Detroit, then on to San Francisco. Yay lots of time on a plane. Here’s to hoping for flying on something nice like an Airbus 330.

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