Updated at 2:30 p.m. PDT to include more details about how location information is displayed and gathered in JuiceCaster, and more specific information about the feature's launch.
First came mobile social networks, then came geotagging. Since location-based features take advantage of your ever-portable mobile phone to pin your activities to a place, we weren't surprised to learn that on Wednesday JuiceCaster (reviewed) added automatic geo-anchors to its multimedia sharing service.
Soon JuiceCaster photos and videos that are auto-posted to Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, Blogger, YouTube, and other sites will share the individual's street name and city. Friends who keep a close eye on geotags can use that to gain contextual understanding of the scene or use it to "bump into" friends nearby. In an important distinction, JuiceCaster's location feature is designed to be optional and visible only to confirmed friends.
The city and state appear on the player shown on CEO Nick Desai's JuiceCaster page.
(Credit: Nick Desai)A final tidbit called "Who was here?" attaches further meaning to a place. Selecting it from the menu will call together a list of photos and videos for that most-wanted location. You'll be able to browse through the content or add your own. You'll also be able to seek out geotagged photos and videos by location, which may muscle up JuiceCaster's searching accuracy.
JuiceCaster's new location-based functionality will become available "shortly" for GPS-enabled cell phones running on the BREW platform before rolling out to other carriers' GPS phones.
This brings some new meaning to the idea of local news: Google has added a new layer to Google Earth that shows Google News related to the area shown on the screen.
The search company announced the addition on its Lat Long blog about geographic matters.
Google Earth now can show Google News.
(Credit: Google)"By spatially locating the Google News' constantly updating index of stories from more than 4,500 news sources, Google Earth now shows an ever-changing world of human activity as chronicled by reporters worldwide," said Google product manager Brandon Badger.
I've been a fan of geotagging photos, but clearly the trend is much broader than that.
The Internet has made global news a reality, but there are several efforts under way to meet the demand for local news, too. Google News can be customized to show headlines from a given city, state, or ZIP code, and MetaCarta overlays links to local news on a Google map.
Google Earth is software that shows the planet, letting people zoom up close and show different layers of geographically relevant information. The company's online equivalent, Google Maps, is gradually growing more similar, gaining Google Earth's satellite views and its ability to show local photos, for example.
Yahoo is letting outside Web sites use information from its own catalog of geographic information, thus allowing programmers to employ the Yahoo data and services into their own applications.
The company now provides an interface to the data, said Dan Catt, an engineer and geotagging buff at Flickr, Yahoo's photo-sharing site. The catalog gives locations a numeric identifier--where on Earth IDs, or WOEIDs, to various locations.
"Yahoo have opened up their geo database," Catt said in a blog entry. One specific example: the Sydney Opera House has the WOEID of 28717584.
The service is part of what Yahoo calls the Yahoo Internet Location Platform, a service currently in beta testing that's designed to help developers build geographic features into the Internet.
Expect more news on this at O'Reilly's Where 2.0 conference, which begins in earnest on Tuesday in Burlingame, Calif. Yahoo will preview the location platform at the conference, according to the Yahoo Developer Network Web site. Catt is giving one of those speeches on Wednesday.
The service fits neatly into the Yahoo Open Services plan, aka YOS, under which the company is trying to make its Web site a foundation for other applications, either built directly on Yahoo properties or employing services over the network on outside sites.
The Yahoo Internet Location Platform provides programmers "with the vocabulary and grammar to describe the world's geography in an unequivocal, permanent, and language-neutral manner," the site said. "The Internet Location Platform is designed to facilitate spatial interoperability and geographic discovery; users can traverse the spatial hierarchy, identify the geography relevant to their users and their business, and in turn, unambiguously geotag, geotarget, and geolocate data across the Web."
According to documentation, there are about 6 million WOEIDs, including postal codes, cities, time zones, and suburbs. So far, though, natural features and bodies of water aren't included yet.
According to former Yahoo employee Simon Willison, Yahoo got the geographic data through its 2005 acquisition of WhereOnEarth.
The WOEID interface permits operations such as translating a place name from one language to another, looking up the WOEID for a landmark, and supplying a list of likely IDs that match a specific place.
It also can let programmers find the "parents" of a specific WOEID. For example, Hearst Castle's parent is the town of San Simeon, whose parent is San Luis Obispo County, whose parent is California, whose parent is the United States.
It also permits finding neighbors--for example, towns near other towns or countries near other countries. It doesn't assign WOEIDs down to the level of addresses, though.
(Via Read Write Web)
If you were waiting for YouTube to roll out a maps feature to browse geotagged videos, the solution has come in the form of a new Google Earth layer released today. With the layer enabled, videos will pop up anywhere you are on the map and play on the video's page on YouTube if you click the thumbnail. PC users get a slightly better experience than Mac or and Linux users, as the videos will play right inside the application.
Like other layers in Google Earth, you need to turn this one on to start seeing videos. You'll find it under the "featured content" section. Once enabled, each video shows up as a little YouTube logo that can be clicked for more information, such as a video thumbnail preview, how many views it has, and a community rating.
If you're a YouTube user with submitted videos, you might have noticed that the geotagging feature hasn't always been there. The option was soft-launched in mid-June, but nothing had really come of it until now. The good news is that you can go back and to add geographical locations to any of your old videos by going to the "date and map options" settings of an uploaded clip. There's also handy search box, which will let you hunt for the city or street address, and see it on a map.
It's not clear if Google's showing every geotagged video submitted to the service, but certainly quite a few are on there at the moment. In some cases, clicking one icon will pull up multiple videos and let you choose which you'd like to see. I wouldn't mind seeing a similar feature on YouTube (sans the neat 3D effects or need for the application), similar to what Flickr has done with their geomapped photos.
Hey look, it's a YouTube video on Google Earth. If you're a Google Earth user, go play with this new layer, it's fun.
(Credit: CNET Networks)Yahoo Research Berkeley has released prototype mobile phone software called Zurfer that gives people a look at Flickr that's tailored to their particular location.
Zurfer lets mobile phone users interact with Flickr.
(Credit: Yahoo Research Berkeley)The software, which requires a "beefy smart phone," shows photos taken recently in a mobile phone user's vicinity, an example of a so-called location-aware service. The software uses Yahoo's ZoneTag technology to infer location from the cell phone tower to which a user's phone is connected.
Zurfer also lets members perform more traditional Flickr tasks, including seeing contacts' new photos, searching for Flickr photos and accessing a Flickr account. All pictures that are part of a user's Flickr photo stream, called "Photo Wallet," are automatically shown in Zurfer.
Because Zurfer sends lots of photos over the phone's Internet connection, "We recommend that you use an unlimited data plan," Yahoo said. Also: "Beware of roaming costs."
Zurfer is one application based on the nascent "geotagging" concept in which digital photos are labeled with location information such as latitude and longitude.
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