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GeoURL: We Know Where You Live, Work and Blog!
hrbrmstr writes "GeoURL is a location-to-URL reverse directory. This will allow you to find URLs by their proximity to a given location. Find your neighbor's blog, perhaps, or the web page of the restaurants near you. Many potential 'location-based services' can spring from this if the database gets big enough. The site has an easy process for maintaining your entries. And can even generate RSS feeds for a given geographical area."
Is it the same as this http://www.networldmap.com/TryIt.htm of is it different ?
Chris ,
Php Programmers.
If you're looking for the Longitude and Latitude information, you can get it fairly easy at Census site
Too bad the original link in the article cannot witstand the hits. But the concept of it does sound like a good idea.
I personally would enjoy finding out the location of few bloggers and kicking them in the mouth repeatedly so they stop whining and typing in caps on their pathetic sites.
Here are some Debian geolocation links for you:
The site is slashdotted, so I haven't been able to have a look at it. However, if I were building a geo-search engine, I'd use the WHOIS data for the bulk of the indexing work, and for providing a default location for visitors. The tweaking around the edges (changing the location of the website or page), is just icing on the cake.
No one really knows the accuracy of IP->Country lookup. There's an onlgoing thread on the london perl mongers list about this topic. Some geolocation companies state 98% accuracy, which is pure bullshit. It's more likely to be around 70%, with most of the error occuring in overestimation of US addresses.
By the way, if you want a fast IP locator, here's one that's just as accurate as any of the commercial products. I'm surprised more people don't use this sort of stuff for providing intelligent defaults for their users when filling in HTML forms.
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.