Over the last few weeks I?ve been really getting evolved in the geo-coding scene, finding out what its all about, whether it?s useful or whether it?s yet another reason to prove George Orwell right when he wrote:

“Big Brother is watching you”
George Orwell - Nineteen Eighty-Four

So what the futon is this new?ish devilry, well wiki says this, “Geocoding is the process of assigning geographic identifiers (e.g., codes or geographic coordinates expressed as latitude-longitude) to map features and other data records, such as street addresses. You can also geocode media, for example where a picture was taken, IP
addresses, and anything that has a geographic component. With geographic coordinates the features can be mapped and entered into Geographic Information Systems.”

So how does that affect my little universe? To answer this I first need to use the flux capacitor and take you back in time to last year where Tom Coates was speaking at d.construct. (his talk) Tom talked about a project he was working on called Fire Eagle that allowed applications to pass your geo location back and forth.

I haven?t been able to get my hands on Fire Eagle but I know others who have and they seem to be impressed by its potential. So combined with a mobile internet device like an iphone Fire
Eagle enables me to do lots of different things:

• I can attach my location to twitterposts and see other twitters nearby. (via Twinkle)
• I can upload photos with location information and see other photos taken from my current location. (via iFlickr)
• I can view wikipedia entries of nearby locations.
• I can broadcast my current location to my blog.
• I can see which of my friends are nearby (presuming they too broadcast their location). (via Navizon)
• I can find local restaurants, eventsand other points of interest.

Holy DPA batman, that?s a lot of information out there for any one to just get hold of, and the issue is definitely something that is on the minds of the creators of fireeagle. Tom Coates in a recent interview had this to say about the security provisions that have been built into fireeagle to set your mind at ease.

“We?ve talked to a lot of people about this, and we have been very careful about the privacy and control. These are the two watch words of the project. We are incredibly conservative, we don’t want to worry’s any one out. So at any time you can press a button to hide your information. Information will still come into FireEagle, but it won’t go out. Or you can delete all your information on FireEagle at one time, so we won’t keep any records at all if you do that. At the moment we don’t keep any location history at all ? any tracking, or location history there. And we even by default will send you an email once a month saying “Are you still OK sharing?, and if you don’t reply to the email, or you don’t click on the link in the email, then we’ll stop immediately. It’s just so there is no risk of you doing anything, you know, accidently, exposing it in ways you’re not comfortable with.”
Tom Coates.

Geocoding is still very much in its infancy, but its potential is undeniable and some believe is on the cusp of going main stream.

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 10th, 2008 at 1:58 pm and is filed under Web Design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.