Blogging on Location

From the first explorers, to ships and aircraft crossing continents, the telephone, and the all-encompassing network of the Internet. All have contributed to decreasing the size of our planet. As far as I know, we’re not talking directly here, but rather our perception of the “small world” that we live in today.

People increasingly talk about location as though it’s not important. From the business community, we can get all the work done we need, wherever the skills are available, and it’s most economic to do so. Knowledge can be shared between communities no matter how remote, or central. Families can stay in touch, and new friends can be made whether you’re meeting for drinks in a bar, or sitting on your new wireless network connection halfway up a mountain.

And maybe they’re right, maybe location isn’t important. On the other hand, where you might be at any one point in time could be extremely important. Blogging often relies on location. The most popular writing on this blog so far, is the entries I made while “not here”. The news reports that highlight what an exciting area blogging can be all talk about people writing news from within disaster areas. I can talk about tornado in North America quite comfortably from my living room here in England. But nobody really sits up and takes any notice until I’m actually in the eye of the storm. So location can be important. It gives a unique context to a story that can’t be given in any other way.

And that’s why I’ve just installed the Geo plugin for this particular blog. Fuelled by the success of my travel map for my photos, I don’t see why I shouldn’t give location to my blog entries as well. Especially as a large part of them will be made up with travelling.

So imagine; a map of photos and blog entries. Being able to search for all entries that are 20, 50, 100 miles away from the current entry. Find all the photos that were taken nearby. Find other blogs or pictures from same area, by any number of photographers or bloggers.

There are cameras on the market that have built in GPS, so longitude and latitude can be stored alongside the photos. Hopefully this will become more of the norm in later cameras, and I can get one ๐Ÿ™‚

Okay, so I’m not introducing anything new here. And similar functionality to that I’ve described is already available. There is a blogging community with plentiful location support, and it’s searchable by location. Highly useful for holiday ideas. But I forget the name of it now ๐Ÿ™‚

But it’s my plan for this particular blog, and gives me something to do / write. Whether or not I will, being a professional procrastinator – that’s a different matter and one to leave to the future to decide ๐Ÿ™‚

Good night, all!

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2 Comments

    • Ali
    • November 8, 2005
    • Reply

    Geek ๐Ÿ™‚

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