Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

GeoURL: We Know Where You Live, Work and Blog!

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the and-other-stuff-too dept.

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."

10 of 188 comments (clear)

  1. yikes by tunesmith · · Score: 5, Interesting

    For some reason this strikes me as a service to NOT sign up for... why would I want semi-anonymouse visitors to my blog to know where I live?

    Be good for signing up a business address, though..

    --
    skkkoooonnnggggkkk ptui
  2. Re:Nice idea, but by Mephistopholies · · Score: 3, Interesting

    They are saying that you can find a URL by it's geographical location, which I guess if you really wanted to do alot of whois queries and then drop the results into some sort of, well even a flat file, then find entries by location, then this is it. Soo I guess, yes but this eliminates the back-end work.

    --
    "We must not, my friend, be the bubbles of our own liberal sentiments"
    --John Adams in a letter to Thomas Jefferson
  3. lots of locations are arbitrary in a mobile world by ItalianScallion · · Score: 5, Interesting
    my friend lives half the year in vermont and half the year in california. his site is physically hosted in virginia. what would he be supposed to enter for his website location?

    this site might not always make much sense for individuals. the situation is similar to that of american telephone area codes; in our highly traveled world they are starting to lose their value as a location indicator, what with mobile phones, choice of area codes for faxes etc, and (in theory) relocatable phone numbers. you can choose a location, but it might only be true sometimes.

    better to link it to your frequent flyer number, perhaps?

  4. idea stolen from google contest by SobiOne · · Score: 5, Interesting

    This looks similar to what was done in the google programming contest!

    I wonder when google plans to implement this?
    It's a really neat idea! And google's method sounds like it should work better than GeoURL's
    (which requires people to submit their location info, rather than just swipe it off the web site.)

  5. DNS already has this (to an extent) by blowdart · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Not that anyone uses the DNS LEO entries (RFC 1876).

    This allows DNS names (and thus via rDNS, IPs) to store longitude, latitude, even elevation. (I did have a nice diagram here, but the ever so shit lameness filter said I had too much whitespace). The entries themselves look like this

    loiosh.kei.com. LOC 42 21 43.528 N 71 05 06.284 W 12m
    kei.com. LOC 42 21 43.528 N 71 05 06.284 W 12m 30m
    vrx.net. LOC 43 40 N 79 25 W 30m

    But, of course, DNS on a host doesn't allow for all that stalking you can do should amihotornot start supporting this on a per URL basis ....

  6. Re:Probably bought by Google. by Phigs · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I bet they would too. If I am not mistaken, a similar technology is what the winner of the Google programming contest won. A way of sorting results by distance from the requester.

  7. Isnt there an easier way...... by NiteHaqr · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Surely all that is needed is for people to put their location in an HTML meta-tag, then Google and the like will be able to search.

    For example I could embed the information

    city:London
    zip:SW9

    Then by searching for that string (I refuse to use the phrase Googling) in your fave search engine, you could find people in your area.

    Also someone could write a plug-in for browsers to pick up that info and display it in some-way.

    Hell if its that important, maybe a new formal meta-tag could be incorporated into the next version of the HTML standard.

    Just a few thought

  8. Thieves.. by grub · · Score: 4, Interesting


    Thief 1: Let's see.. who in this area has a blog..
    Thief 2: Several!
    Thief 1:How many talk about the goodies in their house?
    Thief 2:Hmm new home theatre setup 3 doors down..
    Thief 1:Good, do they mention working day jobs?
    .
    .
    You get the idea...

    --
    Trolling is a art,
  9. Domain Name by dze · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Anyone can find my address from my domain name registration, therefore I'm not going to be extra-paranoid about giving the latitude and longitude (which I've already given out for the Perl Monks Monk Map).

    --

    "Luck is the residue of design" -- Branch Rickey
  10. In the bad old days... (mildly OT) by Embedded+Geek · · Score: 3, Interesting
    ... circa 1988, I tried to convince the admin on the UNIX system (back when there were only two flavors) at school that we needed a where command to complement who, using the tty's of each user to figure out which lab they were connected from (or just flag 'external dialup'). I was willing to write an awk script to do it, but he was never willing to give me the mappings to all the ttys.

    And, no, I wasn't, er, trying to pick up on female CS students. No, never that. It's just conincidence I wound up marrying one.

    Honest.

    --

    "Prepare for the worst - hope for the best."