Geotagging your WordPress blog

Image by [Dicky] via Flickr

Well WordPress has beaten Twitter to it. You can now Geotag your blog and your posts – see a Blog Near You

I have for some time been geotagging my Flickr photos and of course I have been exploring my location aware mobile phone and all those lovely apps that make use of my location like Google Latitude.  Most of these location aware apps will publicise your location in Twitter either directly or through Fire Eagle.  Latitude gets a bit complicated but even that is possible see my post about My Lattitude Location in Twitter

Now if you enable geotagging in your WordPress profile you can share both the location of your blog and the location of you blog post.  At the moment WordPress have not made any tools available that will make use of your location, although some are promised.  However as the location is stored as geo microformat, geo.position and ICBM meta tags, and GeoRSS and W3C geodata in feeds it should be discoverable by tools that recognise such formats.  If you use the Firefox browser you could try the browser plugins like Operator and Geo.

Gradually, step by step the web is being semantified, so that machines (software) can recognise the format of the data and can therefore be specific about what it is.  Location is just one such format. There are formats for places, people events and others that can now be recognised by the search engines. See from Tags to Meaning

The next step will be even more useful when we can link from one site to the next because we (or our software) can recognise the same data in each site and know that it is the same object.  The BBC has been doing this already with their artist links to MusicBrainz and DBpedia in this blog from OpenLink.

I have geotagged this blog and this blog post if you want to try locating me.

If you are using Windows Live Writer for your blogging then as yet it doesn’t pick up the geotagging feature.

The Web of Data approaches.

Making Climate Change Fun for Blog Action Day

How gloomy do you get when you read, hear and see all the effects of climate change?  Well cheer up.  You can have fun with climate change.

My wife knows that if she wants my attention she only has to mention the latest gadget. Well now I have discovered that I can have fun with gadgets and help cool down climate change at the same time.

Governments and big corporations may have their grand plans but in the end it comes down to you and me.  We have to do something.  This blog isn’t about all the standard things an individual or homeowner can do, like using the bike and insulating the house. These are all important but I just want to have fun.

Now if I had one of those new Toyota Prius with that super energy dashboard, I could compare my energy usage with others and we could compete to see who is managing to reach the lowest energy reading.  How about that then – fun, competitive and social and helps alleviate climate change. This is becoming known as the Prius Effect

There are a number of devices for use in the home to monitor your energy consumption. The latest monitors can be quite sophisticated with inbuilt storage, multiple detectors and linked to a computer and the internet.  So not only can I monitor my consumption device by device over time I can also share my performance with my mates on the internet.

Take a look at Joe Baguley’s item on HomeCamp Joe ends up with Trio from Green Energy Options which monitors gas as well as electricity, outputs the lot to a MySQL database and then serves it to the internet.  Once again fun, competitive and social.

GO ON        HAVE SOME FUN     WITH CLIMATE CHANGE

Digsby Updates My LinkedIn Status

Digsby has been a very useful Instant Messaging (IM) client that also monitored your emails and social network feeds.  It has recently become even more useful with the ability to update your social network status including LinkedIn together or separately.

SomeTwitter clients, such as Seesmic or Tweetdeck, allow you to update your Facebook Status as well as Twitter but Digsby is the only one I have found that allows you to update your LinkedIn status.

It has always been difficult to update your Linked in status other than from within LinkedIn.  You can of course use Ping.fm which is a very flexible updater but isn’t itself a Twitter client so you have to run a Twitter client and Ping.fm.

This was made easier when you could include a ping.fm gadget in your igoogle page along with a twitter gadget and facebook gadget. Note no LinkedIn gadget.

Now Digsby is not just a status update.  It is much much more. I use it most of the time. It sits in a locked window on the right hand side of my screen.  It is constantly keeping me updated on my IM, email and social networks.

Digsby has three main parts.

1. An Instant Messaging (IM) client handling Yahoo, Google, MSN, AIM, ICQ, Jabber and Facebook chat
2. An email notification client. It sits there constantly updating you with the number of unread emails you have and shows you  Yahoo. Google, Hotmail, AOL/AIM, POP or IMAP
3. A feed viewer and updater for your social networks – Facebook, MySpace, Twitter and LinkedIn

The IM client is really very good as it not only handles chat very well but allows you to send emails from the chat window or make a voice call or start a video chat.

I still use Outlook and Seesmic but it is Digsby which is open all the time.

My Google Latitude location in Twitter and FireEagle via Ipoki

Google Latitude has for some time been out there on its own in the big wide social world.  It’s a simple but effective real time location service to share your location and status with your friends.  But now it has been brought in from the cold by Ipoki another GPS based real time service.

At first Latitude was only available on mobile phones but was excellent at quickly determining your location either via your inbuilt GPS or via WiFi IP address or Phone cell ID. I use it a lot as the basic Google maps mainly as an A-Z in London with the occasional announcement of where I am to my Google Latitude Friends.  It is now also available as a gadget within iGoogle so as soon as I open up my laptop and connect to the internet, Latitude kicks in with my updated location without me having to do anything.

However this has all been a bit flat because Latitude didn’t link to any of my other networks where most of my friends were. Now ipoki has come to the rescue by enabling  ipoki to read my location from Google Latitude.  Ipoki is also GPS driven real time location service that can run on my laptop or mobile phone and is used by athletes, cyclists and walkers to plot their route and time their performance.

Ipoki also enables you to send your location and status to your Twitter. So now all your Twitter followers and your friends in your networks which absorb your twitter feed  can be told of your location.

What is even more significant is that Ipoki can send my location to FireEagle and thus opens Google Latitude up to all the location aware networks that can interoperate with FireEagle including Facebook.

my earlier related items

my location aware mobile phone 2

my location aware mobile phone

Related articles by Zemanta

• First Google Latitude Applications (mt-soft.com.ar)
• Google launches apps for sharing Latitude location (news.cnet.com)

National Freelancers Day 23 Nov 2009

I happen to be a freelance computer consultant hence I’m shouting about the National Freelancers Day.  There will be a number of events taking place for freelancers across all sectors.

I think we do a fantastic job. We’re highly skilled, highly mobile and highly flexible, and are good value for money in this harsh economic climate, but then I would say that wouldn’t I?

Here is a quote from the National Freelancers Day website

“There are an estimated 1.4 million freelance workers in the UK. Freelancing has grown in importance to the UK economy: in 1998 there were only an estimated 1.25 million freelance workers in the UK. Freelancer numbers have increased by 14 percent in a decade.

Freelancers can be said to:

• Be neither employers nor employees
• Be skilled professional workers
• Supply services to a range or succession of clients
• Have commercial (“self-employed”) relationships with their clients
• Work for a fee  “

So if you want to take the plunge and become a freelancer yourself or just want to know more about what we are then follow the link and keep your eyes open for events on the day.

My News Sharing Set-Up

I have been experimenting with how I use bookmarking sites and news sharing sites.  I like to use more than one but also have a place where they are brought together.

I also want to discover what my friends are learning.

So far I have settled on Delicious  as my bookmarking service and Google Reader as my news sharing service.

I also occasionally I use the option to ‘Tweet This’ so that I share with my Twitter followers but I prefer to use Delicious where possible.

Both Delicious and Google Reader allow me share my choices with my friends and to see which topics interest my friends, but it is difficult create a community of friends with these two services and so really benefit from sharing knowledge.

So I now use Social Median as my knowledge community.  Both my delicious bookmarks and my Google shares are fed into Social Median and assigned to my interest groups within Social Median. This way I get to learn from others with similar interest  whether they are using Delicious or Google Reader or not.  Social Median can take feeds from other services should I take them up in future.

I also share my Delicious Bookmarks and Google Reader Shares with the activity streams in my Social Networks.

This is what my set up  looks like

My Flickr Photos on my WiFi Photo Frame

I really enjoy devices that use my home wireless LAN and Internet gateway . 

Not so long ago I bought a WiFi Radio which receives internet radio, podcasts and music from my PC media server. All our household mobile phones have WiFi and can therefore access the internet and Skype and, depending on the software, media from home PC. My TV can also access by home LAN and the internet.

Now I have acquired a WiFi photoframe a Kodak W1020 which can take feeds from the Internet, from my home LAN or from its own internal storage.

Like my WiFi radio (see my earlier blog Internet Radio) you need to link your device, wifi radio or wifi photoframe, to an online service. This is usually done by registering your devices ID with the online service . My Revo Blik Radio Station uses Frontier Silicon Radio Portal . My Kodak W1020 wifi photoframe can take feeds from FrameChannel wireless frame portal or from Kodak’s own portal.  FrameChannel can also feed photo frames from other manufacturers.

I prefer FrameChannel because it gives me access to my own Flickr photos. FrameChannel also provides access to a number of online photo services including its own. You can choose from

 

Framechannel photos	Photobucket
My Friends Photos	Windows Live Photos
Flickr	.mac web galleries
Facebook photos	Webshots
Picasa	any RSS photo feed

My Friends Photos is an interesting one as its basically an email address to which your friends and family can send photos, or messages as pictures,  which will then appear on your photo frame.

I use Flickr for my photos and this service allows you filter your flickr photos by tags. And of course you can regularly change your tags to show an alternative set of your photos.

In addition you can select from a range of other services such as news, sports and weather. I have chosen:

• National Geographic – Shorelines & Islands
• Reuters UK Domestic News  (or choose your own RSS feeds)
• Frame Media Calendar
• Three Day Weather Forecast

All these ‘channels’ appear intermingled on your connected photoframe.  You can also set the duration by channel and the time of day by channel. 

Other Features

The Kodak frames also have a really good way of configuring the frame through touch strips down the right hand side and along the bottom.  I like this approach as the screen does get covered in greasing finger prints.

In the evening I sometimes sit down to watch the picture frame rather that the TV.  Which reminds me this Kodak frame can also show videos but at the moment only those from its internal memory or off the home LAN and you can accompany your pictures with music.

As with most frames you can plug your camera into the frame and use the frame as a large viewer for the pictures in your camera (stills or movies).

More to come

What is coming along though are TVs with internet access through widgets loaded directly into you TV. More fun gadgets to play with and blog about.

I am also investigating a Freeview box with wifi called FetchTV which, unlike BT Vision or TiscaliTV, does not require a subscription.

Redwing berry feast

Redwing berry feast,
originally uploaded by martinrstone.

There we were chatting away on our daily walk around the block. This time were accompanied by my daughter. We were pointing out all the wildlife as we strolled then she spotted what she thought was a thrush. On closer inspection it was a flock of visiting redwings who had just popped over for a quick berry feast.

Fortunately my daughter had her camera with her so she was able to capture this perfect spotters pose by this obliging redwing. This is the first year we have spotted redwings in our neighbourhood. We’ll have to keep an eye out for some waxwings now.

My Location Aware Mobile Phone 2

Create once and make it available everywhere

I have been experimenting with a few applications that can capture my location on my mobile phone and share this with my social networks.  I was hoping to achieve a couple of ideals.

My first ideal is for the application to automatically pick up my location using the embedded GPS.  Then for it to create a Twitter post that includes my status and a link to a map which shows my location. The twitter post would then be fed into my social networks, Facebook, LinkedIn, ecademy, Plaxo and FriendFeed. This way I don’t have to persuade my friends to use the same location based software to know where I am.

The other lofty ideal was to be able to use any application that could update and read my location in FireEagle so that it didn’t matter which location based application I was using or my friends were using so long as it could work with FireEagle. In which case they would all update each other.

The overriding principle has been to create once and make it available everywhere or put more simply to manage content in one place and yet have it fed to all applications. I have been attempting this with all my content creation applications such as Flickr and Delicious (see my blog post Joining up my web spaces).

Neither ideal has been totally successful although I think I have achieved a workable compromise.

The applications I have been trialling are Loki, Ipoki, Rummble and BrightKite. Each has its advantages and disadvantages,  which I go through at the end of this post.

Each of the applications works with FireEagle but I have been struggling with getting each application to read a location in FireEagle that has been created by another. 

Only BrightKite will create a Twitter post with my status and a link to a map with my location. In fact I could probably survive on BrightKite alone. The only downside is that it has no means of automatically determining my location on my mobile.

So I have configured a compromise using EagleFeed and TwitterFeed. My location from FireEagle is read by EagleFeed which then creates an RSS feed that Twitterfeed picks up and posts into my Twitter.

This is how it looks

Comparing the four mobile location applications.

Each of these applications will work with FireEagle except that Loki cannot read your location from FireEagle.

With each of these applications you can determine the location of your friends and who is near you.

Loki

Location: Loki uses Wi-Fi to determine your location both on the PC and on the mobile. If you are not in the vicinity of a Wi-Fi hotspot then you have to manually enter the location. You have to download a mini app for the mobile to use the Wi-Fi.

Twitter Post: It won’t create a Twitter post. 

 Other: Loki also has a facebook add-in. You can use Loki to find nearby facilities.

BrightKite

Location: BrightKite uses Loki (on IE) or Geode (FireFox) to determine your location but only on the PC not on the mobile.

Twitter Post: It does create a Twitter post with your status and a link to a map of your location.

Other:  BrightKite has a facebook add-in. It will also find nearby businesses.

Rummble

Location: Rummble use Google Gears to determine my location I think it uses Gears to access my GPS or Wi-Fi from within the browser. There is no need to download a mobile app.

Twitter Post: It will create a Twitter post but not with a link to a map of my location.

Other: You can also use Rummble to rate various eateries and see what rates others have given and you can post an itinerary of a future journey. You can also create a blog of your journey.

Ipoki

Location: Ipoki uses the embedded GPS to produce a real time stream of your location, which is great if you want your friends to follow your cycle or walking route or car journey. You need to download a mini app to use the real time location facility.

Twitter Post: It doesn’t create a Twitter post.

Other: Ipoki has a facebook add-in

Verdict

I will probably stick with Rummble as I love the way it picks up my location and I am normally Tweeting from a local hostelry.  However most of my friends use BrightKite so if I want see which of them is near me I will have to use BrightKite.  Now if BrightKite were able to determine my location using Google Gears on my mobile then……

My mobile

My mobile  is a Vodafone v1615 aka HTC TyTn II aka HTC Kaiser which is a GPS enabled 3G phone with Wi-Fi The other networks have their own label version of the HTC TyTN II.  And no I don’t use an iPhone.

Links

see this excellent primer on location determination on TechCrunch

the first edition of My Location Aware Mobile Phone

Outlook synchronised with my fixed line phone

I have just purchased a Siemens Gigaset 685 DECT telephone system with Bluetooth and answer machine from John Lewis (best price I could find) Gigaset 685 Duo

a DECT phone with Bluetooth

I have longed to be able to synchronise my fixed line telephone with my Outlook contacts. We have long been able to do to do this with our mobiles.  Indeed our household mobiles are all windows mobile 6.0.

Now at last there is a phone out there that will do it.  It achieves this by using Bluetooth. Siemens provide some software to run on my laptop that allows me to send selected contacts to the handset.  The handsets can also receive contacts beamed from our mobiles.

I thought that the only way we were going to achieve this was to use a dual fixed line/ VOIP phone (that didn’t need a PC).  With these  you can access your online VOIP contact from your fixed line phone.  However these do not allow you to use your VOIP contacts list whilst dialling out on the PSTN. The only way to use the VOIP contacts for those not on VOIP is to use services like Skype Out and that will cost.  My current fixed line telephone service tariff from Tiscali gives me free calls to 01 and 02 numbers.

Siemens does offer an IP phone in the Gigaset range with Bluetooth so I could have had the best of the both worlds. But I settled just for Bluetooth as all our mobiles have wi-fi and use Skype.

My ideal would be for the handset to access my Outlook contacts direct over wi-fi but Bluetooth is a good comprise.

My next project is to tie all this up with my online contacts – IM, email, social network contacts.  I am currently experimenting with Digsby.com and using my Yahoo contacts to synchronise with my Outlook Contacts.  But that will be the subject of a later blog when I have sorted it out.

By way of an aside this blog entry was created using Windows Live Writer  (WLW) a very neat blog writer. WLW is part of the Live suite of applications that also includes Live Photo Gallery which allows me to upload my photos direct to Flickr