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Looks like GeoURL is about to get eclipsed pretty badly. It was fun while it lasted.

Since I first read about the semantic web a few years back I've been hoping that some of it's ideas would take off. I've created my own FOAF file, but it's only recently that a couple of geek friends have created theirs that I can link to. I know a few social network sites generate these, but they may not be able to link to people outside that network. The project site does not seem to have been updated in a couple of years. There's the usual problem of nobody daring to publish an email address for fear of being spammed, although FOAF caters for SHA-1 checksums to reduce the risks.

I've also played with http://geourl.org/. I see a few sites using it, but, again, the homepage is not being updated.

Cory Doctorow wrote about Metacrap in 2001. Has much changed since then? There is the risk/certainty that companies/spammers will create fake metadata to attract the clicks, but perhaps someone can come up with a trust system to avoid that.

For a while now, I've been crawling the Michigan Sex Offender Registry, and plotting the locations on my own little mapping site.

For an example, look here.

The biggest suprise I've had is the ammount of incorrect data in the database. Only about 25% of the entries geocode on the first pass. I've had to do "best matching" to correct misspelled street names, I've seen birth years with obviously transposed digits, and some quite amusing obvious test entries.

In addition to the sex offender data, I also map the locations of domains with dns-loc location records, sites registered with geourl.org, or my own Geographic Crawler experiment, sites on or considered for the Superfund NPL list, and any other data I can force into a format I can plot.

It's just a little something I've been playing around with in my spare time.

It does use cookies to store the current settings, so when you go back to the page, it should be the same as when you left it.

The tiles for the photo and topo views are USGS images, sourced from Microsoft's terraserver-usa site. For the blended mode, they are generated as needed from the map and the photo, then cached locally on the server.

The address lookup is based on geo-locator using a database based on Tiger 2003.

Place lookup (and the landmark overlay) are based on both the USGS GNIS database, as well as the NGS Benchmark database. It has 2,504,693 entries in the database right now.

The Geourl overlay is based on geourl.org's XML feed - it's cached locally, and only polls geourl.org when data expires from the cache.

Dnsloc is based on DNS LOCation records - I ran a crawler a couple of weeks ago on every site listed in DMOZ, and found just over 1,000 sites that listed location info in their DNS records.

There are a few other overlays that are about ready, but I haven't put them on the main page yet - letting users add annotations, readings from weather stations, readings from streamflow stations, etc.

Basically, I want to take every web accessible database I can find containing information that makes sense when displayed geographically, and make it into an overlay.

I agree, the title is misleading. This didn't turn up anything of interest to me. Isn't there already a handy tool for finding businesses near you called the Yellow Pages? I have been accessing them lately by messaging AolYellowPages in AOL Instant Messager.

Try GeoURL to find actual people near you.

something that is like this is GeoURL. maps coordinates to websites.

• Foaf integration
  
• Trackbacks
• Books, Movies, Music, Games
  
• Blogshares shortcut for adding your blog into a fantasy stock market
  
• GeoURL for adding lat/long and adding your blog into world database
  
• Creative Commons licensing on content so you can retain rights while promoting the CC movement
  
• Yahoo Groups features: Msg Boards, Calendar, Chat, Address Books
  
• The ability to create contests:
  • Football Pools
    
  • Baby Pools
    
  • Square Pools
    
  • Dead Pools
    
  • Bracket Pools
    
  
  

Try adding GeoURL tags to your page. Then you get a nice listing of everyones site near to you.

You can search for a nearby . It's a meta tag (mostly for blogs) that includes your lat/long.

The GeoURL service seems to have a pseudo-standard for this. To geo-code your content add the following META tags to it:

<meta name="ICBM" content="XX.XXXXX, XX.XXXXX">
<meta name="DC.title" content="THE NAME OF YOUR SITE">

The ICBM meta-tag there is where you put the coordinates. More info.

Another similar service seems to be GeoTags

/Bergie

The GeoURL service seems to have a pseudo-standard for this. To geo-code your content add the following META tags to it:

<meta name="ICBM" content="XX.XXXXX, XX.XXXXX">
<meta name="DC.title" content="THE NAME OF YOUR SITE">

The ICBM meta-tag there is where you put the coordinates. More info.

Another similar service seems to be GeoTags

/Bergie

I've seen passing references to Joshua Schacter's Geourl, and the Geocoder project Dave Egnor wrote (which won the Google programming contest)... but not much feedback here on Godseye.

Please take a moment *look* at the Godseye Project, look it over, try the search feature at the bottom of one of the geopages, and then yell at me if you would.

There's more to this project than you can see- the orthophoto polygonal clickthrough tool is already written, and I'm working on making this distributed.

You can add geosearch functionality to your own site fairly easily with the directions provided.

Last night before I went to bed I had done a GeoURL neighbors search to see what was registered around Tokyo. This morning I reloaded that search to see what had been added, to my surprise a lot had been taken away. Here's the cache html from last night: last night, and here's the html that just loaded: this morning.

I had noticed last night that some enterprising hotel marketer had plastered GeoURL with links to their hotel web sites (and hundreds of these, all over the world, not just Japan) and thought that while this probably exposed an oversight in the GeoURL design it was certainly a legitimate use of the system. The oversight being that they should have added categories to separate business from personal, etc, so that if you were looking for blogs in a certain area you wouldn't have to wade through links for hotels, coffeeshops and thrift stores.

But now they're all gone. If they were taken away by the original link poster, well OK, but I find it more likely that someone at GeoURL got rid of them. I find this disturbing; It leaves a bad taste in my mouth.

It would be easy to add another META tag that Geo-URL could use to do this categorization. That's what they should do rather than start getting picky about who can use the system. Fuck censorship.

I just checked the source for one of the de-listed hootle.com pages and it does indeed still contain the geo.position data that is accepted by GeoURL. I say again: fuck censorship.