macrocosm, too

learning to love geoURL

Beyond learning about where your blogging peers are physically located, the geoURL concept has been transformed into a different application: Redtail Canyon. This site is basically just a giant web application that uses the GeoURL database to associate a location with a weblog post. Membership is free, as the site is essentially contentless until users provide it. After browsing a few of the entries, I came across a series of posts located in Southern Quèbec that are part of The Degree Confluence Project.

The Confluence Project is a worldwide effort to visit and take pictures of the geographical locations of intersections in the Lat/Long grid (i.e. integers like 44°N, 80°W). The project has been around for a few years, and apparently it made it into the Toronto Star last summer. After the article ran I'm sure a rash of people decided to flock up north and grab a bunch of the points for themselves. You might notice that a lot of the posters take photos of their GPS devices as proof; I find that extremely cool (in a geeky sort of way). There's nothing like a community building excercise like this to make the Internet more human, to make it appear that there still is a world out there as opposed to just a bunch of quietly humming machines. Personally, I'd love to hit one of the points in Northern Ontario if only to say that I've done it. I'll have to keep an eye out for any cool new GPS toys.

google's powerful API

I had the TouchGraph Google Browser sent to me a couple days ago and it has proven to be an excellent little app (you may need the Java plugin for your browser). After entering a URL, the application maps out nodes and links pointing to it. The cool part is that the visual representation is like some organic being, as it is constantly reforming and reshaping to fit the screen as new links are added. It's a great way to find out who's linking where (or to whom), and lot more fun to look at than a standard listing from technorati.