"Have you ever needed to generate some fake polygons to test a geo application?  No... oh.  I have, so I created GEOIPSUM!!!" "I used polymaps for the map, rails for the app, don't go near the dateline, it's a bit crap."

"we’re using an index that combines the IDs across different partners into one. This means you can use the IDs from your preferred partner’s dataset when using Twitter Search" Includes Gowalla and Zagat.

"We've started from a baseline that's really straightforward, tackling the simplest part: getting dots on maps, without legacy code or any baggage. Just that, to start. Dots on maps." Upload a spreadsheet, get a map sheet (and a location hierarchy - and linkable page - for every dot). Nice work.

"Future Checkin is an app that allows you to check-in to your favorite Foursquare venues automatically when you’re near them. You don’t have to do a thing besides simply have your phone on you and this app will check you in while running in the background with iOS 4." Web APIs + background APIs = a solution for forgetful people who don't want to look rude.

"The woedb is a searchable and linkable index of every single Where On Earth (WOE) ID published. The data is derived from the Creative Commons licensed Yahoo! GeoPlanet data dumps. A page for every WOE ID!" Aaron is being embarrassingly amazing again.

Tom Taylor's Boundaries, but for parents/children, on steroids, and on Flickr itself - in other words, a nice UI to explore the Flickr/WOE places hierarchy and shapes data via a pointy-clicky website. This is good.

Tom Taylor on the precision inherent in the likes of Google Latitude. I wonder: will we miss being lost?

"These are the absolute busiest hubs, and it takes a rich and populous city or country to support one. Not by accident, fully half of these airports are in the United States."

When did this get so easy?

I think I'm going to move to using all the tags he mentions here, as well as offering to put in "proper" location data (with the flickr.geo methods). Also- nice hack, and a really good prod for me.

Nice in-house use of the API to prototype a feature (in this case the "iconicness" rather than "interestingness" used for the places page)

The first of a series (of two?) posts about the new Flickr places feature (which is also cropping up repeatedly at the API level with flickr.places API calls)

Wonderfully geeky UK geolocation thing