Location Stuff

Flickr is using the street data from OpenStreetMap to map the inner city of Beijing for the Olympic games - their own Yahoo! maps just don't have any available data for this region. This might look like quite a surprising move for Yahoo/Flickr but then Yahoo! has been supporting the OpenStreetMap project for quite a while. [via]

The location broker Fire Eagle from Yahoo is now open to use by everyone - the private beta has ended as of today. Fire Eagle itself doesn't do much besides taking your location and brokering it in various levels of privacy to other services. As far as I know it is currently the biggest user of OAuth and a middle men to many different services. [via]

For those of you who are using an iPhone - over at the O'Reilly radar is a nice post about location-aware iPhone apps that covers Loopt, Whrrl, Where, OmniFocus, Urban Spoon, Twittelator and NearPics.

The German memetracker Rivva is now actively using geo data to visualize the German-speaking blogosphere. Both a static map of all blogs and a live map of articles as they come in are available. The live map is oddly mesmerizing. [via]

One of the compelling reasons to get a second generation iPhone was the new in-built GPS that would extend the "XPS" from Skyhook Wireless that was powering the positioning system of the first iPhone. While it might be quite fun and useful for rather static location based services, there is one problem:

Unfortunately, there's not much you can do with the G.P.S. According to Apple, the iPhone's G.P.S. antenna is much too small to emulate the turn-by-turn navigation of a G.P.S. unit for a vehicle, for example.

- For iPhone, the 'New' Is Relative

That in itself makes the GPS a fun addition but nothing new for areas that were already covered by the XPS data before.

Markus Spath at netzwertig.com reviews three travel communities in German: triplib seems to be quite basic, tripwolf is built around content from the leading German travel book publisher and Geoflags is a quite cute maps mash-up.

Most mash-ups with geodata are using the Google Maps API, mostly because it is rather easy to use. A better way to use all kind of map APIs - Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, Open Street Map, MapQuest and many more - is the Mapstraction library. This OpenSource JavaScript library allows for quite easy embedding of all kinds of mapping and geodata display. [via Mike in IM]

If I ever get a dog, I so need to get him the Garmin Astro DC 30 dog tracking collar.

This rugged, all-weather collar has an integrated GPS transmitter and antenna that work with the Astro® 220 to ensure that your dog will never be lost again. Plus, it's specially weighted so the antenna will always point to the sky for optimal signal.

Will be pretty useless for Joe Dog-owner, but it might be fun. [via]

Care like taking a trip from San Diego to Sydney? Don't forget to bring your Kayak. [via]

One logical use case for location data are travel communities.

Most people like to know a bit about their future travel destination, get some insider tips from travelers who have been there before and are looking for general advice about the area. Reading travel blogs or travel communities can provide an often subjective, but yet informative and interesting view on events, places and sights.

And especially the back-packing kind of traveler is very open to meet and stay in contact with other travelers world-wide - and while Social Networks like Facebook or Friendster can offer a certain way to stay in contact, community websites especially aimed at this crowd are often better at catering for their specific needs.

Last but not least those poor people who stay at home are often interested in the whereabouts and adventures of those who manage to see new places - and the blogging and picture sharing functions of travel communities offer a way to keep them informed without having to use long CC: lists by email.