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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."

29 of 188 comments (clear)

  1. That's right! by JanusFury · · Score: 5, Funny

    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();
    1. Re:That's right! by ender81b · · Score: 5, Funny

      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!

      Now, I don't want to alarm anybody, but I'm fairly sure to *stalk* 'women' you have to leave the house. This is a scary concept for us all... I think I will stick to downloading pr0n of that lovely housewife next door who wants me. She does. I'm serious you guys.

    2. Re:That's right! by Spunk · · Score: 4, Funny

      Sure beats the old A/S/L method!

    3. Re:That's right! by JWSmythe · · Score: 3, Funny


      She's a 46 year old homebound man in North Dakota. But congratulations none the less. :)

      --
      Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
  2. There goes the neighborhood? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Doesn't anyone else long for the privacy and anonynimity that the 'net used to provide?

    Posting anonymously for effect, of course....

  3. Probably bought by Google. by $$$$$exyGal · · Score: 5, Insightful
    At first I thought this was just another lame whois database of url's. That's been proven to be idiotic. What this is is a human-edited database of url's to locations. You can submit your own.

    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
    1. Re:Probably bought by Google. by gabec · · Score: 3, Funny

      Actually, this sounds like the winning submission for Google's programming contest.... So.. yeah, google probably would be interested... either in suing or being the owners... probably in that order.

  4. Ahem? by Noodlenose · · Score: 3, Funny
    Why, oh why in this age of deranged stalkers, nutters and neverending digital identity theft would I tell the world where I live?

    Just so half of this planet's socially challenged would appear on my doorstep and want a beer?

    1. Re:Ahem? by orthogonal · · Score: 3, Funny

      Why, oh why in this age of deranged stalkers, nutters and neverending digital identity theft would I tell the world where I live?

      Just so half of this planet's socially challenged would appear on my doorstep and want a beer?

      Knock, knock.

      Uhm, ok, Noodlenose, where's that beer you promised me?

      (/me: Socially challenged and not real good at reading comprehension.)

      --
      Opinions on the Twiddler2 hand-held keyboard?
    2. Re:Ahem? by digitalsushi · · Score: 4, Insightful

      I think as the net gets more and more mainstream, it becomes safer and safer to share your personal information online- I think it'll get to a point where it's as safe as real life- whether that be sharing your phone number in your sig, writing your name on a bathroom stall, or filling out all the info on a Church flyer. That is, real life isn't that safe either, but it's safer than what we fear online. Also then again, I'm not in the right demographic for my claims to be bold. If I were a 16 year old girl saying the same thing, these words would have a different weight behind them. Instead, knowing that I'm a 23 year old male and having a phone number of 603 330 3532- I just proved that it's not a big deal cause there ain't but nobody who's gonna look that up, much less call it, and MUCH less stalk me by it. :D "As the Internet becomes less and less an exclusive club, it becomes a universe, common to all, and sacred to none." When's the last time you heard of someone getting hacked via YellowPages?

      --
      slashdot: where everyone yells sarcastic metaphors to themselves to understand the issue
  5. 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
  6. Only RSS per location? by irc.goatse.cx+troll · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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
  7. 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
  8. 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?

  9. geourl mapping using php and mysql by chrisranjana.com · · Score: 4, Informative

    Is it the same as this http://www.networldmap.com/TryIt.htm of is it different ?

    --
    Chris ,
    Php Programmers.
    1. Re:geourl mapping using php and mysql by cioxx · · Score: 5, Informative

      What you have linked is IP lookup tool. Not even close.

      The article talks about a service which is comprised of user-submitted links where you might find bloggers near your community just by providing coordinates on the globe, and specify the threshold of the perimeter in miles.

  10. Finding out your coordinates. by cioxx · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.

  11. 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.)

  12. slashdotted by zephc · · Score: 4, Funny

    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.
  13. Geolocation is the future by edLin · · Score: 3, Informative

    Here are some Debian geolocation links for you:

    1. Re: Geolocation is the future by mutende · · Score: 3, Informative

      And then, of course, there's the Jabber World Map.

      --
      Unselfish actions pay back better
  14. 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 ....

  15. My Blog is 500+ miles away by daniel_isaacs · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.
    1. Re:My Blog is 500+ miles away by iso · · Score: 3, Insightful

      I agree. All of my websites are in Salt-Lake City, Utah and I live in Toronto, Ontario. Besides the fact that I'm in a different country than my web host, it's also nearly 4,000km away. Though I would imagine they've thought of this situation, and while they probably default, there must be a way to tweak the results.

      - j

  16. IP-based lookup by nwetters · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

  17. finding spammers and crackers by tacocat · · Score: 4, Funny

    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!

  18. Why do it by hand? by FyRE666 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.
  19. 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,
  20. 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."