In agosto avevano detto che avrebbero implementato anche la geolocalizzazione dei twitterers, per far si che i propri followers sapessero da dove sta twittando il proprio amico o la persona che ti sta seguendo. Qualche giorno fa, la svolta. La pubblicazione delle Api che ne permettono l’applicazione. Il geotagging, avviabile solo se l’utente lo vuole (opt-in), può essere comunque disabilitato quando meglio si crede. Per rendere possibile tutto questo hanno dovuto cambiare le policy sulla privacy, per ovvie ragioni.

L’applicazione di questa nuova funzione ha essenzialmente il sapore di puro marketing, ma ne avevamo già parlato in precedenza sempre su questo blog.

Le nuove Api sulla geolocalizzazione aprono nuovi scenari di marketing

Si intravedono nuove prospettive per i quotidiani locali, che potranno indirizzare le notizie solo ai quei followers che abitano in una determinata zona (più o meno grande). Si pensi passeggiare in via Montenapoleone a Milano e ricevere tweet con le offerte dei negozi che sono vicini.

Per non parlare a livello stradale. Non sarebbe bello se l’Anas avvisasse i bolognesi dell’incidente in tangenziale, suggerendoti (magari con più tweet) una strada alternativa? O se a Roma una twittata ti avvisasse che vicino al quel ministero una manifestazione ha bloccato la strada? O ancora, se passando vicino ad un locale ti inviasse dell’evento del prossimo fine settimana? O magari che in quel centro commerciale un tweet ti avvisasse dello sconto che c’è sui detersivi o sulla birra?

Insomma, qua si sogna ad occhi aperti..

Ecco subito aggiornato il geotag

Sono tornato a Roma dopo 12 ore di autobus: ho dormito quasi bene stavolta.

Peccato per il film hanno messo stavolta un film di Pieraccioni orrendo, come tutti gli altri, quello fastidiosssimo dove parla tutto il tempo con lo spettatore nel suo odioso toscano spiegando la sua visione del matrimonio. Insieme a Sconsy o comecavolosichiama, che non c’entra una cippa con il film però evidentemente in quel periodo era reduce dal successo di zelig e andava messa di traverso nel film, dove appunto interpreta il suo personaggio e basta. Un capolavoro ancora purtroppo non compreso.

Io intanto ascoltavo altro sull’ipod.

Cari autisti della SAIS: ma perchè mettete sempre gli stessi film? L’altra volta, all’andata, mi avete stupito invece, mettendo due prime visioni: La Matassa, anche se in realtà ero l’unico nell’autobus a non averlo visto, ed era pure in tema per quelli che viaggiano in sicilia, ed avete pure messo “Si può fare” che è davvero un bel film (lì però ero l’unico ad averlo visto). Per la prossima volta fatemi vedere Baaria che tanto al cinema di mio non ci andrò mai a vederlo e dura tanto così il viaggio passa più velocemente, oltre ad essere pieno di siciliani e sicilia.

Twitter  is now allowing its externally-built applications to provide geolocation features to end users, after announcing its intention to do so in August. The functionality is provided via a specific geotagging API (application programming interface) that external developers can use to build geolocation features in their applications. Some applications like Birdfeed, Seesmic Web, Foursquare, and Twittelator Pro already have activated geolocation features. For end users, geotagging is disabled by default. They can turn it on by going to their Twitter “settings” section. Twitter plans to activate geotagging on Twitter.com later. For now, it’s limited to third-party applications. With geotagging functionality, developers could let end users append location coordinates to their Twitter messages and let them search for posts generated specifically from a particular physical place. For example, a Twitter user could find what people are posting from the place where an important event is happening, or what people are saying about a specific restaurant or store. Geotagging adds an important spatial dimension to the Twitter user experience, which has had a strong real-time component from the start

http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/182748/twitter_turns_on_geolocation_functionality.html

So, in my recent internet travels, I came across this awesome site: 360 Cities

360 Cities is one of a host of sites that are exploring the concept the geospatial web, or geoweb.  The term geoweb refers to the combination of geographical data with the more abstract information available on the internet; think spatialization of information on a global scale.  Geographical indexing of the information available on the internet would allow for new ways of organizing, discovering and using that information beyond those made available by the most widely used paradigm on the internet today, keywords.  Most notably, the geospatial web has some serious implications in the development of immersive digital environments and augmented reality applications.

Some early developments in the field are likely familiar to many internet users.  One such development is photo geotagging.  Currently, many photo sharing sites, like Flickr, allow users to add geographical data to the photographs they upload.  This data then allows other users to explore photographs geographically, perhaps doing things like viewing photos of a planned vacation spot or checking out what other users find interesting in their own locales.

360 Cities takes this concept of photo geotagging to the next level.  The site is dedicated strictly to geo-mapped panoramic photography and the photographers behind them.  The site aims to promote panoramic photography as an art form, marketing tool and experiential medium.

Besides the fact that the panoramas are absolutely stunning, 360 Cities’ easy-to-use, spatially oriented browsing system makes exploring the photographs immensely pleasurable.  You can start with a particular location of interest, chosen from the initial world map.  Then start exploring, following a path of little arrows to nearby locales or clicking on the little globe to jump to a random spot far, far away.

I suggest starting with one of the following:

• The Arctic Cathedral
• Shinjuku Kabuki-cho Crossing
• The Colosseum
• Philadelphia Art Museum Rocky’s View

Be forewarned, you could get lost in there for hours…

Today’s openness is a normal thing. Internet and software has developed so much that everybody is now able to share everything in tremendous ways of blogging and free tracking web sites. Is that good or bad? There are many controversies about online privacy nowadays. The most recent and, in my opinion, very scary way of sharing is the geotagging, or more specifically, geoblogging. Originally, geotagging has been developed exclusively for professional need. These days you can find the function geotagging function in Google Maps, almost in every portable device, internet blog or social network. Seems to be pretty harmless. On one hand, it is quite useful and handy option. Here it is… I take a photo with my camera on my cell phone. If I am lucky enough to have brand new, expensive phone, I have the function ‘geotagging’. Immediately after I’ve shot my picture, I can see where I shot it. Even more exciting is that I can save this information and every time I go back to look for the photo I know where I took it. That is just awesome! On the other, there are web sites like ‘Ipoki’ which allows you to track and see people’s locations…for free. You can be tracked as well if you want to show your location via mobile phone’s GPS in real-time. This is undoubtedly dangerous. “We believe that Ipoki users should have control over their location information and who can see it.” This is official statement of Ipoki owners to users. That’s good, but still, everybody can sign up there for free and immediately become your ‘friend’ in case he or she wants to monitor you 24/7. Isn’t that outrageous?

Well it looks like wordpress my start “geotagging” posts. In English this means that when you make a post, wordpress tells everyone where you are.

Thankfully this is looking like its “opt in”, as in its not forced on you. Hopefully it will be kept that way. I would love to keep the freedom to say how happy those Christian kids look on the Atheist bus, without having Dawkins knocking on my door…

Thanks to two brand new developments, your Twitter experience will never be the same.

The social networking service recently introduced auto-retweet feature — previously only available to a test group — to all users. The tweets you see on the Web will now look like this:

Pretty nifty, huh? The new RT feature is great because it eliminates the old  “RT @” drill, which can understandably confuse new users. It also now takes less characters to retweet another user than before, which is especially valuable working within the confines of 140 characters. One possible annoyance: A slew of users you don’t follow will start populating your feed — Twitter selects tweets from the users you follow that it thinks you might find interesting. So far, there are no ways to avoid this — we’ll see if Twitter makes it optional or not.

Also new is the new Geotagging feature, which Twitter rolled out yesterday evening. (Hint: Visit your Twitter “Settings” tab to enable it.) First, though, you have to decide whether or not you want everyone to know where you are at all times. And in a world where deleted tweets don’t really stay gone, we’re not sure if the service is useful. Yet. Read more about it at PCMag.

What do you think?

“Aha”, denk ich mir. Wie kommt denn die nette Frau vom Reisebüro XY auf mich? Bei über 1800 ‘following’ werden die zwitschernden Menschen, die potenzielle Kunden darstellen könnten, wahrscheinlich beliebig gewählt. Oder steckt ein bestimmtes System dahinter? Ich bin leider noch nicht dahinter gestiegen. Ich habe zumindest keinen Tweet nach dem Motto “Ich will Urlaub” geschrieben. Aber selbst das hätte denen ja wahrscheinlich nichts gebracht. Also dann doch wieder unpersönliche Massenkommunikation!?

Ich sollte mich mehr mit Behavioral Targeting befassen und den in diesem Zusammenhang eingesetzten Technologien. Da gibt’s ja bestimmt schon einiges. Wahrscheinlich wäre auch eine Art Premium Account sinnvoll, der verbesserte Sucheergebnisse durch Verwendung mehrerer Kriterien ermöglicht oder durch den sogar Suchoptionen gespeichert werden können, die bezwecken, dass regelmäßig Vorschläge für neue Kontakte, Artikel & co gegeben werden. Aber wahrscheinlich gibt’s das schon längst.

Eine Möglichkeit bietet bereits das Geotagging, welches einem Tweet sozusagen die Location des Verfassers zuordnet. Das aber wahrscheinlich noch viiiieeel zu wenig genutzt. Wie fasst alle Anwendungen des Web 2.0!

Twitter has finished an optional feature called geotagging, that allows you to show others your exact location when you tweet. You can add a link to the end of your tweet that will show a map with a pinpoint on your location. I’m not sure why you would want to use this function – sounds like a good tool for a stalker, at least on an individual basis. For bands and organizations holding events, it could be a good way to show people exactly where you are, when you want them to join you.

This new geotagging function has a more practical function too – it let’s you find what’s happening in your area. You can search for tweets in your city, and even your neighborhood. So if you want to know what people are doing in the East Village on Friday night, you can find all the tweets from people that live in the East Village.

This feature is optional, and you have to go into your settings to change it:

According to Mashable.com, Twitter changed their privacy policy to incorporate this new feature. Do you think this is a feature you will start using? Or do you think it’s sharing too much information?

Twitter has just announced release of its API to enable geotagging. This means that you can allow people to see where your tweets were tweeted from—and to see where others are tweeting from. Twitter says

The added information provides valuable context when reading your friends tweets and allows you to better focus in on local conversations. Now you can find out what live music is playing right now in your neighborhood or what people visiting Checkpoint Charlie are saying today about the anniversary of the Berlin Wall.

In other words, it should make geographical dicing of the twitter torrent easier.

Geotagging is turned off by default. To turn it on, go to your settings page and look for the location section:

Check the enable geotagging box:

(To delete such data in the future, click on the button below it.)

To see it in action, check out one of the applications that has already built this functionality in. (Twitter lists Birdfeed, Seesmic Web, Foursquare, Gowalla, Twidroid, Twittelator Pro as among those which have.)

If someone has it enabled, you’ll see it on Seesmic web as a small beacon. Mouse over it and a map will pop up:

On 12th November, WordPress brought out a new feature which allows geotags to be attached to a blog’s user profile and posts. Once the feature is enabled, setting a geotag to a post is as simple as checking a box to confirm you want the location to be made public. Although searching of geotags has not been enabled yet (they are apparently waiting for more data),  there will be location-based searching for WordPress blogs (GeoSearch) soon.

WordPress geotagging

If you’re travelling around and want to show your current location for each blog post, this is a really handy feature, and, once GeoSearch is enabled, I could see that business blogs would also benefit from this.

Here in Taiwan, Google Maps is obviously better set up to recognize Chinese addresses. I had a little trouble getting the app to recognize the address in English (the “Find Address” didn’t work and the “Auto Detect” set a pointer in Neihu when I specified Sijhih), so ended up setting it to a local landmark – the railway station down the road. Some of the comments on WordPress article introducing this feature (that can be found here) indicate there is some hesitancy to use the service due to privacy concerns. For these people, designating a close-by public landmark, as I did, may be a more viable option. The address supplied is machine-readable only anyway, so if you live in an appartment block, you’re location wouldn’t be able to be pinpointed.

I’ve attached a geotag to this post, and although there seems to be nothing apparently different (no indication of location on the post), behind the scenes the geographic data is being made available to the ’soon-to-be-lauched’ Geosearch.

 Instructions on how to enable geotagging in WordPress can be found here.

Heute wurde das MacGraPhoto Bundle enthüllt und es ist 15 Tage lang erhältlich.

39,99$ (knapp 27 €) anstatt 251$. 84% Rabatt.

Folgende 7 Anwendungen sind enthalten:

• Picturesque – Bildmanipulation und Effekte
• ImageFramer – Fotorealistische Bilderrahmen
• GraphicConverter – Multiformat Umwandler
• Funtastic Photos – Bildmanipulation und Effekt
• Graphic Designer Toolbox – Generator für Grafiken und Texturen
• DrawIt – Vektor Grafikprogramm
• HoudahGeo – Geotagging von Fotos

Ein doch recht brauchbares Bundle wie ich finde.

http://www.macgraphoto.com/

I found that Geotagging my WordPress blog posts has some utility even before WordPress release features that use the information.

GeoURL has a directory of goecoded web sites (pages?). GeoURL describes itself as

… a location-to-URL reverse directory. This will allow you to find URLs by their proximity to a given location. Find your neighbor’s blog, perhaps, or the web page of the restaurants near you. GeoURL is listing 4,896,702 sites.

It has a tool to add a geotagged web page to their directory and then list web sites that are located nearby. I think the reasoning is a bit weak: there are better ways of locating restaurants aren’t there? It seems like a solution running around seeking a problem to solve. But that’s okay – many things started out like that.

So I tried introducing my first geotagged WordPress post to the service to see what it would find.

You can click on any of the thumbnails above to see a full-sized picture.

1. The “ping form” for GeoURL is at http://geourl.org/ping/. You only need to add the URL of the web page that has been geotagged.
2. Press “Submit” and wait.
3. If everything goes fine you’ll see this. You can click on “see your neighbors” and see:
4. This list of sites that GeoURL thinks are close to me. The way they state Bangkok addresses is strange. That’s probably for the same reasons that Jeff Friedl’s Reverse Geocoding for pictures in Lightroom is so problematic – inconsistent address formats around the world.

You can check the results by clicking

That was a good exercise but it is of limited use. I will be interested to try the tools that WordPress introduces to support geotagged web pages.

testing to see if the geotagging feature works on WordPress hosted blogs . . . we shall see

adioso

Chris

I just signed up for a new WordPress feature that lets me geotag my blog posts and comments.

I’m a fan of geotagging all the pictures I take and even trying to geotag other interesting pictures I find so this is a natural extension.

I have updated my user profile on WordPress to include the approximate location of my apartment in the Din Deang district of Bangkok. The Thai word “ชานเมือง” below is “Chanmuang” – a road close to the apartment. It’s not the mailing address but it is close enough.

My WordPress Location

I can disable that location being stored for each post. That’s most use for somebody posting from a mobile device. I am old-fashioned and generally post from my computer at home.

I don’t think there is anything to prevent me from lying about my location.

When you edit your user page WordPress can try to detect your location automatically. It failed in my case even though I responded Yes to a request from Firefox to allow the request.

My little Feedjit widget is good at locating my location-based on my IP Address (at least to the granularity of “Bangkok, Thailand”).

I do not see any concern about revealing the approximate location on my apartment on my photos or my blog posts. I live in a large apartment block guarded by aggressive Thai security professionals.

If anybody takes exception to one of my posts then they won’t be able to get near me. I am usually cautious about privacy. If I lived in a single family home I would be more reticent.

WordPress says that the geocoding is not human-readable yet. I think they are hoping that lots of their bloggers will register their locations. Then they’ll be able to launch some more interesting services as they explain on their help page here.

I guess they’ll only add geocoding to posts made after I enabled it. This will be the first one. I looked at the page source to find out what all this talk about

Geotagged posts getting marked up with the geo microformat, geo.position and ICBM meta tags, and GeoRSS and W3C geodata in feeds. All of this stuff is “machine readable”, not “human readable”; it’s hidden from view.

entailed. I found two new tags at the very end of the header:

<meta name='geo.position' content='13.769588;100.569959' />
<meta name='ICBM' content='13.769588, 100.569959' />

I can’t keep up with all these acronyms. I found out that the ICBM tag isn’t directly related to Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles but is a reference to the GeoURL service. However, historically there is a connection: see here.

If I get people from Flickr or Nikon showing up outside the apartment because I’ve said bad things about them I will only have myself to blame.

You’re out buying groceries. You’ve bought everything you need except that little thing you reminded yourself to buy when you go out shopping. You’d wrote it down somewhere – ‘A list of things to buy’ when you go out & you totally forgot about it. You were just simply too preoccupied with your weekly groceries routine.

So here’s my idea.

What I would like is a handphone application such as in iPhone or Android base phones that utilize the geotagging & GPS feature of their phone and  the typical notification reminder ring tone you have on your unit.

Here’s how it works.

First, the handphone needs to know your home location via geotagging.

Second, it needs to know if there is a list of things you want to buy when you go out.

Third, using the handphone GPS feature, it will know that if you’re not at home, then the application will send a notification of the things you’d put in your list.

Voilà – problem solved!

* I don’t know if there’s anything in the market but would be great if there’s already such thing though.