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Flickr adds support for geocoding

The popular photo sharing website Flickr introduced native support for geotagging photos on Monday.

Because of the flexibility of the system, there have been a number of options around for a while that have allowed users to geotag their photos. None of them have been quite as simple as Flickr have just made it though. And it's great to see that the guy that built the first geotagging mashup of Flickr and Google Maps - Rev Dan Catt - was actually the person that Yahoo recruited to build up the geotagging functionality within the site itself.

The new geotagging system is really easy to use, it's functional and it's pretty at the same time. It also has a geotagging API that developers can plug into if they wish.

The thing that surprises me is the lack of support for GeoRSS in their feeds. With all this location information flying around (1.2 million photos geotagged within the first day) it would make sense to include that geodata in the RSS feeds from the site. I'd really like to be able to pull geotagged photos from my Flickr stream into my geoblog and photos section over at geodan.org and have their location information automatically assigned based on the information stored against them in Flickr.

You can also see my map of photos on Flickr.

Posted in Geographic, Photography at 1:11 PM on Thursday 31 August 2006 | Comments (4)
Tags: flickr geo geotagging photography

It comes but once in a lifetime

I realised the other day when celebrating a colleague's birthday that my birthday this year is something that only happens once in a lifetime. I turn 24 today, on the 24th of August.

Posted in Miscellaneous at 12:43 PM on Thursday 24 August 2006 | Comments (3)
Tags: birthday 24 august

Design for geodan.org

Geodan.org has a new theme, for the most part at least. I got the basics done on Monday night having begun with the basic bluemarine theme that Drupal ships with and has enabled by default. I had an idea in my head of what I wanted to acheive with the theme and it didn't take me too long to get it into a state that I was relatively happy with.

It's best viewed in Firefox or Safari at the moment as I can't get the opacity levels to have any effect in Internet Explorer. It's just no good if you can't see the earth through the body of the page (thanks go to NASA for that beautiful Blue Marble image of the earth).

Posted in Drupal, Geographic, Web at 11:11 PM on Wednesday 23 August 2006 | Comments (0)
Tags: drupal theming blue marble

Drupal geospatial testbed

It's been long enough that I've been working with Drupal and not had a site of my own that runs off it. I'd love to migrate dankarran.com to Drupal but it would take some time to migrate. So for now I will leave this site as it is and create a new site aimed at demonstrating Drupal as a Geospatial Content Management System.

geodan.org will be a testbed for geospatial functionality within Drupal. I'll be using existing modules such as the location module which gives a basis for handling geographic information about users and nodes in a site, gmap module which allows for Google Maps to be easily created, as well as a number of others. In addition to these I'll be adding the KML module I've been working on as part of my day job, and also the WFS Server module which still has a little way to go before it's ready.

Right now it's just a shell, but over time it will grow. And as it seems somebody over at the OGC recently picked up on my last post about Drupal as a WFS I should try and make that sooner rather than later...

Posted in Drupal, Geographic, Web, Work at 12:09 PM on Monday 21 August 2006 | Comments (0)
Tags: drupal geospatial kml wfs geo

Happy Birthday OpenStreetMap!

OpenStreetMap is celebrating two years in the making of a freely available street map of the world.

Got a GPS device? If you go out walking with your GPS, or go geocaching, then your tracklogs could help build up a picture of the area around you.

Posted in Geographic at 9:54 AM on Saturday 12 August 2006 | Comments (0)
Tags: openstreetmap geocaching geo

Finding my first geocache

I went hunting for my first ever geocache today and found it without too much effort. There were a couple of little goodies in there along with the visitors log. I didn't take anything, but signed my name and left an OpenStreetMap badge to try and spread the word of open mapping to people around Stuttgart who have GPS devices.

My finding the cache brought on a long spell of very heavy rain - not a good thing when at the top of a hill in just a t-shirt! I did manage to walk 12km today though, most of it whilst drenched.

Despite only having the clues for the first cache, I went looking for a few more that were nearby. I got to the location of the first but after a little searching I spotted what looked like a syringe sticking out of the ground and gave up the search. Looking at the clues online later, it seems that the waypoint I'd downloaded to my GPS was just a starting point for finding the cache, so I was looking in the wrong place anyway. On my way home I stopped to find another and was within 50 metres or so of it, but the GPS wasn't working so well under tree cover and kept changing its mind.

Next time I go out geocaching, I think I need to take more of the clues along with me.

Posted in Geographic, Stuttgart at 9:33 PM on Sunday 6 August 2006 | Comments (0)
Tags: geocaching gps stuttgart geo

Stuttgart JAG site launch

One of my colleagues reminded me today that I hadn't linked to the Drupal site I mentioned last week. So, here's the link to the Jugend Arbeitsgruppe Greenpeace Stuttgart, a site for youths in Stuttgart interested in Greenpeace.

It's still not quite polished, but I think it's looking pretty good for now.

Posted in Drupal, Web at 10:45 PM on Tuesday 1 August 2006 | Comments (0)
Tags: drupal greenpeace stuttgart