This is something of a ‘hobby’ rather than a work-related library blog post.
I recently started using Foursquare, the “location-based social networking website“, and it’s got me thinking (again) about genning up on geolocation and how to handle geodata in practical, mashup-y ways. (My brother works with geographical information systems and geodata professionally; I’m a bit of a cartophile at heart; I’m interested in library geolocation and space/time services – I’d like to bring all of these things together and really learn how to handle web mapping data properly.)
So: I’ve begun to mess around with location data that I’m producing myself, through various sites on which I have a profile, and which is available in KML or some other standard geodata format.
Including…
1. My Foursquare check-in location data, available from foursquare.com/feeds, as KML.
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2. The locations of photos I’ve uploaded to Flickr, accessible from a feed at the bottom of my photostream page as KML (most recent few photos only).
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3. Tweets geotagged using Twitter’s (often somewhat unreliable/easily-distracted) location service. This was the most complicated: taking my RSS feed of recent tweets at http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/pstainthorp.rss and feeding it through this Yahoo! Pipe results in this KML file.
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4. Find which other [social] websites might be offer up geotagged feeds of my activity.
5. Mashup! I’m reading up on the Google Maps APIs, which are the standard tool for manipulating KML in a web browser. (It’s not possible to display multiple KML files in the standard maps.google.co.uk display, though you can do so easily in Google Earth.)
6. ???
7. Profit!
