2004-02-12 Geospatial Markup and Distributed Geographic Annotation http://conferences.oreillynet.com/cs/et2004/view/e_sess/4737 geourl: very simple fragment of data in the page, send a ping to the server to have the page indexed. there's a map of all these points, and there are feeds to see who your neighbours are. why not a centralised database? - simple - no authentication needed for distributed - webpage markup is the solution [could i make a whole bunch of pages with x,y coordinates to spell out letters and messages on joshua's map? i mean, that'd be evil, but anyway.] simple access in api: - rss feed for regions - other people can build systems without touching the db ping in australia: "a terrifying project of geo vrml". [crazy isometric map picture with loads of 3d objects and points] dashboard: dashboard also detects geotags in the pages and pulls out information and presents it to you (maps, weather, neighbours). localfeeds: watches geourl and sees whether there's also an rss feed. localfeeds combines them to have rss feeds by area. funny map. deviantart.com geocoded all of their users. there's a huge diagonal line across the map where people have typed in the same number twice for lat/long. there are also densities in the US and europe... but also tibet: the ghost blogs of tibet. it looks like the US, flipped. people transposing lat and long. [here http://www.deviantart.com/ -- nice!] geospam: when every point of interest is available to you, you can't see anything. there's also the problem of stealing the pagerank. loads of blogspot sites that ping geourl so geourl link back to the blogspot sites: the geourl pagerank gets given to the blogspot sites. and the blogspot sites have on them google search results, because "google likes to eat its own search results". there are loads of people like this. a german company doing search engine optimisation doing the same thing. but they all do it by hand, and they're really devious. when joshua blocked it, they took down all the spoof sites and put a stamp collecting blog up and asked why that blog was being blocked. [these people are incredible! by hand, trying to figure out all the loopholes. and i've seen all those fake weblogs too which just post reuters things.] on the getty thesaurus of geographic names: "this is deeply not free" [that's a wonderful turn of phrase] [i wonder whether, if you looked at the density of points submitted to geourl, you could deduce the extent of cities, and cluster it?]