01 Jul 2005, 03:13

Geobloggers

To me, Google Maps/Earth and Flickr are the 2 most interesting things going on with the web right now, so combining them would be just like mixing peanut butter and chocolate. That would make Geobloggers the new Reese’s peanut butter cup of the internet. Taking advantage of the open APIs on both Flickr and Google’s ends it’s a jaw droppingly cool combination that allows you to tag your Flickr photos with their coordinates on a map and then plots them as pins (with thumbnails even) on a Google map. It’s easy to get started, and by using the Greasemonkey extension for Firefox it allows you to conveniently select the coordinates for a photo from a Google map, which it then adds to the photo as Flickr tags. There’s even a simple visual walkthrough of how to geotag your Flickr images. Or if you’re lucky enough to have a camera with built in or external GPS that writes the coordinates to the EXIF data, it’ll automatically pick those up for you when you put them on Flickr. That’s cool enough that I’d seriously consider looking for that feature in my next camera. I’m completely hooked on this and I’ve gone back and updated a bunch of my pictures with geotags, and here you can see all my geotagged photos. Right now the KC area is pretty sparsely populated in Geobloggers so I’m hoping to fill it up a little more soon.