"I made another book: an atlas written by robots." James Bridle, being wonderful again.

"Malte Spitz from the German Green party decided to publish his own data collected from August 2009 to February 2010. However, to even access the information, he had to file a suit against telecommunications giant Deutsche Telekom." "Each of the [35 thousand] rows of the spreadsheet represents an instance when Spitz’s mobile phone transferred information over a half-year period."  "Taken together, they provide what investigators call a profile – a clear picture of a person’s habits and preferences, and indeed, of his or her life." Naturally, it's a German politician - and a Green - who's pushing the envelope on this. (Would any American dare? Or care?)

The first in-depth user research study on the usage of the "Location" field within Twitter profiles has just been published by the Palo Alto Research Center (PARC).

"Eighteen months ago I wrote about redesigning my site’s front page and mentioned in passing that I’d also created a page for every day which aggregated many things. I’ve now taken this a step further and added a map for every day which aggregates various pieces of location-based information about me." I've been thinking about doing this, but Phil actually has. Interesting musings about privacy in there, too.

Fetching EXIF data from Twitpic to find the locations of Twitter users, even if they have geolocation turned off. This raises a few questions for me, such as "why don't Twitpic strip (or hide) EXIF". (Personally, I do use Twitter geolocation (although this seems to be rare: most people seem wary of it, for some reason), so if I posted via Twitpic I'd rather they offered to set the metadata from the EXIF location.) I note the site's been there since at least May, so perhaps nobody cares that much.

"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 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.'

If I actually *used* Latitude, this might be useful. As it is, I'd be better pulling locations out of Twitter and Foursquare. Mind you, the moon banner is a bit Jones/Dopplr-y, although not as nice (obviously).

"Since we launched our geotagging API in November, we store the latitude and longitude for your tweet out of band" "Flickr has implemented our geotagging API, so if you upload a photo to them with geotagging, they'll pass it through to Twitter. And then on Twitter's side, we allow you to ask either for tweets within a certain location or connect to our geohost and get a stream of tweets subscribed to location"

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

When did this get so easy?

"Here’s an idea for newspaper website homepages — just a search box and a list of blogs." One reader's frustrations trying to get local news out of a world-focussed US newspaper site.

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.

Interesting both for the MarcoPolo app (which I wasn't aware of previously) and for the "not-faffing-with-the-API" method of updating Fire Eagle (not what I'd recommend, mind). Would be useful if I moved my Mac around.

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?

Slightly overblown headline for a grab-bag of stories from 3GSM, including Nokia's maps for pedestrians (rather than just drivers) to tie in to their increasing shipping of (A)GPS capabilities.

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.)

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.

Amidst all the praise for Google's new mobile map app, Chris asks some pertinent questions about where their data comes from, and concludes it's probably the users.

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?