Newsletter (August) – A geolocation special

A themed knowledge section this month – information with spacial awareness… who and what is near you?

• This Huffington Post gallery of geolocation apps highlights how geolocation is starting to change how we use web, often for good.
• These amazing city locals vs tourists infographics seek to distinguish between the different types of Flickr users that take photos in various areas of major world cities: London / Sydney / write up in Fastcompany.
• Mashable reports that Google are fully focusing on their check-ins in their Places API.
• For the techies, it’s now very easy to create a basic site that finds the visitor’s location and shows information on the returned info. This hackday project called Look Around You does exactly that in the browser, plotting wikipedia entries on a map so you can explore your area. How it was done is documented on the Yahoo! Developer blog. There is also good overview of geolocation on Smashing Magazine.

But what happens when geolocation goes wrong?

• Websites can change the language you see based on your location. Go to Sweden and suddenly Google shows you Swedish results every time for example, you’ll need to use a work-around like one of these.
• We know people are worried about loss of privacy from geolocation, as this survey found. The problem seems to be that users haven’t yet realised the implications of what they’re already publishing as Leo Hickman discovered when he became a Foursquare stalker for the Guardian and wrote about it.
• And what about the children?!

Random / Fun
Silly things to be getting on with in August, wherever you are!

• Go on twitter, say you want to travel half way round the world in thirty days, get spotted by Steven Fry, and almost make it there. Then write a book.
• Vampire Kittens on E4. It’s like that Yeti Olympics game, but with obstacles.
• Peckham Terminator on youtube (nfsw / swearing etc) … watch to the end to see how the guy gets off the bus – London style.

Our Projects
A few of the interesting things we got up to in July.

• In collaboration with Baseconcept and 66db Digital, we “did the dev” on a new WordPress 3 site for Old Bailey Solicitors.
• The stats are in from our Vitamin iPad competition on Fried My Little Brain.
• And we’ve signed up with Protein Networks to deliver ads on Fried My Little Brain and UKStreetArt.co.uk – more to come soon.

Hope you have a great August!

GeolocationNewsletter