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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."
That's right folks, now all you bored /.'ers can finally find an attractive local girl to stalk! Just enter your location into the convenient form, hit 'Submit', and stalk away!
using namespace slashdot;
troll::post();
Doesn't anyone else long for the privacy and anonynimity that the 'net used to provide?
Posting anonymously for effect, of course....
If they are successful (will need a very large database), then I bet Google would be very interested.
--free sex
Very popular slashdot journal for adul
Just so half of this planet's socially challenged would appear on my doorstep and want a beer?
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
I'm not about to give them ANY information unless I can download a full dump of their database whenever I want.
Anyone remember how badly people got burned by CDDB? Its the same buisness plan;
Phase 1) Invent neat idea with a few good uses so that people will populate your content
Phase 2) ???
Phase 3) Profit!
where ??? becomes 'Fuck over users, start charging for access, bite hand that feeds.'.
Pain lasts, kid. Its how you know you're alive. Sometimes I think this growing up thing is just pain management-TheMaxx
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
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?
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.
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.)
something the RIAA could use to locate "pirate sites" and then send some guys to rough up the place... They would of course call it "Market Demographics Analysis."
I drink, therefore, I am.
-- W. C. Fields
Many potential 'location-based services' can spring from this if the database gets big enough.
...assuming they backed it up before the server melted.
"I'd rather have a full bottle in front of me than a full frontal lobotomy"
Looks like no one will be stalking random local girls anytime until this story drops off the front page...
"I would say that 99 per cent of what my father has written about his own life is false." - L. Ron Hubbard Jr.
Here are some Debian geolocation links for you:
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 ....
Really. It's co-loed in Ohio. I'm not in Ohio. And my companies website? It's 300 miles away. How functional can this be, really?
- Dan I.
It's more like finding out people or places near each other. Your homepage can be hosted in some other country, but maybe you would like to keep your personal location. And the DNS is only for each server, with this system, each page can have it's location.
J.
Why do you care? Don't go to those sites. It's simple. Do you sit and watch some stupid Sitcom on TV, even though you decided it sucked after 2 episodes, and whinge about it?
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.
This is a great concept! I absolutely love it!
Now I can associate addresses to the script kiddies trying to break into my servers, hunt them down, and beat the ever loving crap out of them with baseball bats and chains.
Finally, something useful on the internet!
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
You know, if Google decided to search for a specific META tag that gives the geographic location of a company, then I'm betting a lot of designers/companies would add it immediately (and update old sites). If they announced this new tag I'd certainly update some sites!
At the moment, it would be a bit hit and miss to try to search for an address in a page to generate the database programmatically.
Code, Hardware, stuff like that.
Some guy has already proposed some standard meta-tags for this at geotags.com
Then, as you say, anybody can create a geographic search engine.
This is the greatest result of a slashdotting I've ever seen:
/usr/local/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.005/i386-freebsd /usr/local/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.005 /usr/local/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.005/i386-freebsd /usr/local/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.005 /usr/local/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.005/i386-freebsd /usr/local/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.005 /usr/local/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.005/i386-freebsd /usr/local/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.005 /usr/local/lib/site_perl/5.00503/i386-freebsd /usr/local/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.005/i386-freebsd /usr/local/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.005 . /usr/libdata/perl/5.00503/mach /usr/libdata/perl/5.00503 /usr/local/ /usr/local/lib/perl) at /home/joshua/work/geourl/site/autohandler line 5
... ...
/usr/libdata/perl/5.00503/Carp.pm:279 /usr/libdata/perl/5.00503/AutoLoader.pm:88 /home/joshua/work/geourl/site/autohandler:5
System error
error: Can't locate auto/DBI/connect.al in @INC (@INC contains:
context:
275: # whether they should generate a full stack trace (confess() and cluck())
276: # or simply report the caller's package (croak() and carp()), respectively.
277: # confess() and croak() die, carp() and cluck() warn.
278:
279: sub croak { die shortmess @_ }
280: sub confess { die longmess @_ }
281: sub carp { warn shortmess @_ }
282: sub cluck { warn longmess @_ }
283:
code stack:
I only mod up parents of "mod parent up" posts...
Anybody know how they've implemented their spatial query when grabbing URLs within $x kilometres of $lat,$lon?
I hope it's not "SELECT * FROM urls WHERE latitude > $a AND latitude $c AND longitude $d;", however based on the slashdotting they've had....
Somehow my SQL got screwed after pressing SUBMIT. The where clause was a correct "latitude is less than AND latitude is greater than AND longitude is less than AND logitude is greater than" but it got hosed.
It seems geourl.org is located... nowhere. It seems the /. effect can alter the very fact of your physical existence.
LOL! Right you are. I got my names mixed up. :) But I still detest this "blogging" flash in the pan.
Like woodworking? Build your own picture frames.
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,
I know that a lot of "matching" sites (as in, for people like slashdot geeks who'll never meet a girl without a PC) use postal code or combined postal/phone-area-code as a geographic identifier. From what I've heard, it's pretty good, you can tell within about 50km or so where a person is at most times
Why would we use longitude/latitude. It's one thing to know that a user is somewhere "nearby" and another to whip out the old GPS and track them down to Lat 34 Long 82. Sounds more like a tool to be abused to me.
Why oh why did I register with InstaTrace?
"The cost of freedom is eternal vigilance." -Thomas Jefferson
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
They'd still be up if they were using Linux instead.
Just because it CAN be done, doesn't mean it should!
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."
Somebody should start a movement to ban Blogging. Surely 259 members of Congress would sign on immediately just from hearing the term.
It uses GeoIP and a Perl snippet to determine where the users are at. But ofcourse, it's nothing like that site.
http://www.internetional.org/ if you want to give it a try.
www.6502asm.com - Code 6502 assembly or.. DIE!!
That's Apache::Mason curling up and (croke|die)ing.
Looks like the coder is trying to be a good citizen, and either the database can't handle the load, or Apache is running out of swap. Or, there's a dumb captialization problem in the use statements or somesuch.
Sorry, I've just been doing too much of this lately. "Stop me before I debug again"...
I forget what 8 was for.
And many more companies would populate multiple pages with multiple locations so that they could be close to everyone. What happens with websites representing multiple locations? Say franchises?
Does 120.000,-35.000 mean the coder lives there or they have a crummy atlas?
Location is cool, but is linking it to a web page the way to go? What about a geographic LDAP?
Xix.
"Everything is adjustable, provided you have the right tools"
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.