"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.

"I will confess to mild chagrin, because as well as having all these wonderful properties, MapIt does almost everything that Unlock Places does for Boundary-Line and Code-Point."

"I’m very pleased to announce that mySociety’s upgraded point and postcode lookup service, MaPit, is public and available to all. It can tell you about administrative areas, such as councils, Welsh Assembly constituencies, or civil parishes, by various different lookups including name, point, or postcode."

'The paper, "Automatic Construction of Travel Itineraries using Social Breadcrumbs" (PDF), cleverly uses the data often embedded in Flickr photos (e.g. timestamp, tags, sometimes GPS) to produce trails of where people have been in their travels. Then, they combine all those past trails to generate high quality itineraries for future tourists that tell them what to see, where to go, how long to expect to spend at each sight, and how long to allow for travel times between the sights.'

"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.

BBC press release for an Ordnance Survey competition. Except: "Ideas already submitted include a service that lets pedestrians map safe routes based on the location of CCTV cameras." "There are three broad themes for the GeoVation prize - crime, health and the environment, although entrants can come up with other ideas." Sigh.

"The Geolocation API will give us the ability to attach geographic metadata to tweets to provide additional context with your update. Along with the option to tag updates, we will be able to search for nearby tweets and view the geo metadata in user timelines." Hurrah. Opt-in, though.

'Any talk about the "context" of a photo quickly becomes a hairy problem conceptually and a hairier problem technically. Shouldn't a photo be able to have multiple contexts (outdoors, at night)? How do users add their own contexts? How and why are contexts different than tags or machine tags? Isn't this specific to a photo and not just its geo information? The answer to all those questions is: Yes!'

Like Where On Earth, but for space: put in an object and it'll return RA/dec (and a bunch of sources for images of that part of the sky).

"we’ve just launched two new API methods; flickr.panda.getPhotos, flickr.panda.getList"

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

I'd love to be able to get Where? What? When? to the point that it looked this pretty, and was this useful to people. Unfortunately that might take more work than I'm willing to put in.

Looks interesting, although my geo-using projects are in GAE and I've just discovered geopy, which seems to be working. As you'd expect, over in the Rails world there's a bit more magic involved (like "an option to automatically geocode a model's address field on create").

'Setting a map "point" for a photo is fine in nearly all cases, but for many or even most videos, the concept doesn't work. ... Flickr should let you should be able to trace a line, set waypoints, or at least set start & end points for video uploads.' Yes, it's a lot of work, but Chris might have a point here.

Aaron writes up a new API method, flickr.places.placesForUser, which might be just the thing for me, and reiterates a bunch of other useful geolocation stuff.

Tom Insam runs with my commentary (why don't the OS get their data onto the Google interface?) and highlights the Google response: the data's there, it's just not displayed. Unfortunately, as he also notes, there's not much of a good UI to display it in the end either.

The oft-quoted portion seems to be "Projects such as Open Street Map, through which thousands of Britons have contributed their local knowledge to map pubs, landmarks and even post boxes online, are the first step in the fight back against "corporate blankwash". Yes, but...

"Feed Maps is a new API from Map Channels that lets users create Google Maps mash-ups from a number of different data sources." Aaron implies this might be useful with Flickr feeds. Hm.

Thoughts on Twitter, Fire Eagle and using place IDs (as also supported by Flickr, and API-accessible) to do location things.

"you can use (drum solo, please) Flickr::Upload::FireEagle to not only geotag your photos but, in turn, use your photos to update FireEagle itself"

Looks like it might be a nice demonstration of tying together web apps to provide a service, but why the geographically limited alpha? Oh well, patience is apparently a virtue.

As mentioned in the Guardian, an experimental map plotting the live locations of (some) buses and trams in Helsinki on a Google map. Can we have this in London now please?

A nice piece on the London iBus project (complete with the usual grouchiness from regular passengers about the annoucements) that also looks at what Helsinki's doing in public transport information.

A split-screen comparison of Google Maps and the Ordnance Survey OpenSpace map tiles. Quite nifty in its own right (and using Google Mashup Editor?)

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)

Skyhook-based location mapping for Firefox and IE across Mac OS X, Linux and Windows. If you want to see what the iPod touch maps can do, try this (although I haven't; no wireless at work.)

More Flickr API changes. I'm not sure if I really have much of a use for places, but then maybe I would if I thought about it more.

Used for the iPhone (and especially iPod Touch) new Google Maps assisted GPS, apparently. I wonder if this is part of the answer to Chris Heathcote's "where do Google get their cellid lookups" or not? The mention of wifi implies no.

I wonder how they'll find the (Perl, I think) infrastructure there? Also, does this point to a consolidation in mapping, and what happens to Streetmap?

This was sort-of demoed at dConstruct, but it's nice to see a proper announcement (and it'll be nicer still to see it launched).

"Despite the best of our efforts we have been informed by Google and the Ordnance Survey that our Virtual London model will not be appearing in Google Earth due to data licensing issues." They're pretty clear the blame lies with the OS too.

A(nother (see Zonetags)) Yahoo! Research project. Looks obvious in hindsight. Wonder if I'll ever get around to buying a phone that's shiny enough?

A nice little hack from Tom.

"Nokia plans to start offering the smart2go application for free, on Saturday, February 10th, for selected Nokia S60 and Windows Mobile 5.0 devices"... "plans to roll out support for most of the major mobile OS platforms"

Look like Sony's little photography-focussed GPS device might actually be useful.

Where are the Guess Where London photos? Mind you, it seems only yersinia uses geotagging. (I've also found out where all the graffiti is. Not in the City.)

Interview with that UCL chap who does mapping things. I pimped Free Our Data in the comments.

"Subway stations are not attributes; Navteq honors the primacy of the automobile" Satellite navigation (is that a British term only?) in a historical context

Launching a "Free Our Data" campaign to get the UK (and EU?) to open up the data Government bodies/quangoes collect, like most US national agencies.

Wonderfully geeky UK geolocation thing

Mind you, people have demanded screenscraping modules be removed from CPAN too