Phil Gyford

Writing

Friday 24 January 2003

PreviousIndexNext My x and my y

I’ve geo-encoded this site, which weirdly does actually make me think of it as a bit less floaty, to actually have some location in the real world. Anyway, if you look at the HTML source of the front page you’ll see these lines…

<meta name="ICBM" content="51.550541, -0.051859" />
<meta name="DC.title" content="Phil Gyford" />

These are used by the GeoURL ICBM Address Server to draw a big map of the world with dots for all the registered sites. The numbers in those tags are my home X and Y coordinates, found from Streetmap (you need to find and click the very tiny “Click here to convert/measure coordinates” bit beneath a map). You then just tell GeoURL’s server the address of your website and it grabs the data (more on adding your site here). I put similar tags into Pepys Diary, setting its location as where the diarist lived.

I’ve never been particularly bothered about the endless schemes for mapping where webloggers live. I really don’t quite see the point. I don’t care whether a weblogger lives near me or not. But, for some reason, a more general and open method of assigning a real world location to any kind of site seems to have far more potential. OK, I don’t know what actual use it is, but there must be something…

What you really need though is a big Wargames-style map with big nuclear attack traces swooping across to indicate incoming links.

Comments

Have you already pinged the lazyweb for this kind of display?

Actually I might be preparing something similar, albeit using weblog posts' position in time instead of space and trackback pings instead of links. Ok, not very similar then...

Posted by victor jalencas on 25 January 2003, 8:27 pm | Link

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