new jersey geographer

Alcyon Lake

Brought my Blackberry with me on a bike ride around Glassboro and Pitman. I used beGPS One, a Blackberry GPS logging application to record my location every 30 seconds as an NMEA sentence. I then used GPSBabel to covert the file to KML format. You can view the KML of my route here. I also took the geotagged picture of Alcyon Lake at right. Finally, tweets during the trip are also geotagged.

Most of the information we deal with daily (or in this case, generate) has some geospatial component. Why not explicitly recognize the route I took or the places I photographed? Sure, some will feel that geotagging could be abused, but both Twitter and Flickr require you to explicitly allow geotagged information to be shown to other users. Facebook strips out geotagged information from uploaded photos. If there’s no real privacy concerns, you should share your pictures and tweets tagged with geographic coordinates.

AppleInsider has a tip that the upcoming version of Mac OS X, dubbed “Snow Leopard” will incorporate the GPS and location-based services library from the iPhone into the laptop/desktop version of the operating service.

They postulate that “CoreLocation will utilize a Mac’s existing networking hardware to triangulate the system’s location in a manner similar to the way the original iPhone was able to use the technology to emulate a true global positioning signal.” Is the inclusion of GPS into future Apple laptops too foreign a concept? I’m holding out for the GPS-enabled Macbook Mini, a netbook running OS X smaller than the current offerings. With more and more location-based applications (BrightKite, Google Latitude) for mobile phones being released each day, why wouldn’t Apple start looking into including GPS into its computers?

via SlashGeo

I just recently picked up a BlackBerry Bold. I admit, I’m a CrackBerry addict; I’m an even bigger fan now that I know their browser has a GPS location object that is accessible through JavaScript.

I have a sample set up here that demonstrates how the browser provides the phone’s coordinates and javascript that converts those coordinates to US National Grid coordinates.

I’m going to spend more time thinking about integrating mobile/GPS applications into websites like NJ State Atlas. I might try making a Smart Growth Locator that performs a lookup on where you are currently located. One of my longer term goals would be to create some sort of social networking site that is based on the National Grid. The Grid would allow you to handle proximity and fuzziness in a way not currently offered in other location-based social networking apps.