I love the Geobloggers’ Flickr + Google Maps and Stamen’s Mappr hacks. Mappr guesses locations from the text accompanying the photo, whereas the Geobloggers’ system uses special tags. The geobloggers can also use latitude-longitude embedded in the JPEG’s metadata. Enter the Ricoh Pro G3 GPS Camera–it’ll take 3Mpixel photos and embed the coordinates of where you took them. Sweet!
As the cost of embedding a GPS chip in a device drops to a handful of dollars, expect to see a lot more of these location-aware devices. We already have some, in the form of cellular phones, though the carriers tend to try to charge heftily for it. But what happens when my car comes with a GPS device that’ll automatically upload my traces to my server? When will my bank statement come with lat-long for the places I shopped?
I can work at hacking together some of these things, but it’s not reliable and it’s not scalable. My sister doesn’t want to know about Garmin’s buttheaded attempt to lock down the data your GPS collects, she just wants to see where she drove last month so she knows why her petrol bill was so high. My Dad doesn’t want to arse about annotating cell towers when the pesky phone company already knows where they are, he just wants to know whether he’s been successful at reducing the amount of time he spends driving and talking. My wife doesn’t want to have to carry around two bulky devices and greatly extend the already considerable time it takes her to get photos online by manually tagging photos with lat-long, she just wants to be able to find all the 2004 photos of the kids in New Zealand in one quick search.
Kudos to Ricoh for making one set of hacks redundant, thus enabling an entirely new set of hacks built on top of their work.