The Geotagging evangelist

by on August 15, 2006

I’m on the phone with Rod Edwards and he’s the sole person involved in BlockRocker. This is a cool mashup — all based on geotagging, which is the use of location data. For instance, I could stick my photo on a map by using geotags. I like how he built some cool tools for people who want to add geotags to their posts, it’s really easy. You just find your location on a Google Map that he’s embedded in his page and it spits out the HTML code that lets you geotag your posts. Here, his tool created this HTML code:

See this post’s geographical context.

I just copied and pasted that right into Wordpress and have an instant geotagged post.

Anyway, Rod is the kind of guy I like to get calls from. Passionate about doing something cool on the Web and builds tools to help other people get into his world. That’s great evangelism.

  • Luogo molto buon:) Buona fortuna!
  • Joe
    Robert,

    Geocoding on cellphones isn't very hard since all cellphones are required to have a AGPS function for 911 calls. What I was wondering is there are market for a GPS / Digital Still Camera. I know Ricoh makes one, but is there any way to see how big is the geo tagging community? A GPS/DSC has many supplementors. And for a small digital camera company its hard to see the niche.
  • I can't wait until two things:

    a) all cellphones have GPS built in

    b) flat rate mobile internet plans are ubiquitous


    Things are going to get pretty cool when you have mass instantaneous photoblogging with geotagged locations and time.

    Went to a concert? Put in the time and the location and surf photos from strangers who were there.

    Took a picture on your vacation? Surf photos of the same location.

    It'll be even neater when photo auto-face tagging and auto-object tagging (much later) comes into play.
  • Just this morning I found a neat little tool called Plazes.com that updates your location on a Google map. They have a flash applet that you stick on your site to update people as to your whereabouts. We'll see how well it works when I trek the laptop to work tomorrow and in a couple of weeks when I go to the left coast for a week. You can check it out at the bottom of the sidebar on my site.
  • Very nice site BlockRocker! :)
    I just love the hole Geo thing, so I've put together some free tools for Blojsom on Geo-Blogging theme - http://confluence.rave.ac.uk/confluence/display...
  • I think Zooomr implements geotagging quite well. Hopefully Flickr is next!
  • If you're interested in geotagging... from the server site, I wrote a super easy library that makes use of Yahoo's geocoding api to get you lat/lon from a location string like address or city/state. Check it out:

    http://blog.osotite.com/2006/05/22/geocode-12-l...
  • Robert - it was great talking to you, and thank-you for writing about geotagging and my site.

    I am a firm believer in geotagging and its ability to build up a story around a place and connect people to content in a very meaningful way (be it classifieds close to home, events down the street, blog posts & podcasts about a region of the world, info about a travel destination, or whatever). Anyway - I'm very happy to be a geotagging evangelist, and I appreciate your help spreading the word.

    // PXLated
    BlockRocker currently provides a tool to geotag your posts - see:

    http://www.blockrocker.com/service_geoblog.php
    (note that there's also tools for Flickr photos, YouTube videos, Del.icio.us links, and so on.)
    (also note that I included a group of generated tags in this comment. BR will now find this comment through Technorati and map this post automatically)

    BlockRocker also provides a means to browse geotagged content - as per Robert's link above. What I haven't built yet is a straight up blog widget as you've described; but its in the works - stay tuned!
    // End: PXLated

    I'd also like to note that BlockRocker is far from the only site working on geotagging - there's a pile of interesting work being done and applications being created out there. The "Geotagging Flickr" group is one nexus of development - check out the tools and conversation threads listed on its homepage if you want to dig deeper:
    http://flickr.com/groups/geotagging/

    Anyway, thanks again for talking and all the best,
    --R.

    geo:tool=blockrocker.com
    geotagged
    geo:lat=37.4230712
    geo:lon=-122.2096825
  • Robert, have you used Picasa and Google Earth together? You can select the proper location for the photo on GE and have it update the original jpg with the latitude and longitude.

    It kept me up until 3-bloody-am the other night going through my old pictures looking for new sites to use. :-)

    I was most disappointed that the resolution for the satellite imagery at Snoqualmie Falls wasn't high enough to drop the pictures on the proper viewing platforms. :-)
  • Check out my site over at excio.com, wrote the pluggin for CommunityServer myself, so ofcourse I think it's cool, but it does put the map in your blog page. The main part of this whole thing is to get the geo coding in the rss feeds, unfortunately not enough of that going around.
    http://excio.com/blogs/hank/archive/2006/08/15/...
  • Nifty tool...Wish though that the tool would just create the code necessary to put a Google map on your page directly from Google rather than within a BlockRocker page.
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