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And the news just keep coming today: History is Beta! Yes – we’re experimenting with blogloc’s new and long-announced location history feature. Want to record, store and share the route of your next journey around the world? Add a little bit of location to your lifestream? That’s what blogloc history is all about!
For now we keeping this in a closed beta test phase. During the test phase, location history will not be visible on the map badge yet. But you’ll be able to get your history track in KML format and as GeoRSS feed.
Drop me a note if you want to join. By the way: In particular I’m looking for testers who use blogloc with Fire Eagle (and who do not directly update their location via blogloc) – but everyone’s welcome of course 
Filed under: blogloc | 3 Comments
Dear blogloc users! There’s a few new features available for you to try:
- Personalize Your Google Map! Since this was the most frequent feature request I got: It’s now possible to change the default map type and zoom level for the interactive Google Map badge. All you need to do is tweak your embed code a little. Check the blogloc FAQ to learn how.
- blogloc on MySpace. Ok. I must admit we’ve been a little reluctant with regard to delivering on our "embed your live location on your social network profile" promise. Because, quite frankly, blogloc didn’t really work properly on any of the large social networks. Unfortunately, they all have their peculiarities. We’re working on it… But at least: if you’re on MySpace you can now grab our new MySpace embed code from the FAQ!
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Still no press release out yet, but by now it seems to be official!
Update: official results are here.
Point to Discover has scored FIRST PLACE at the 2ND INTERNATIONAL NOKIA UBIMEDIA MINDTREK AWARD!!!
Congratulations to anyone on the team. And since I’m also on the team: a big thank you to all my team mates – Peter (who represented us at the ceremony), Erwin, Gerhard and Mat! It’s been great working with you!
By the way – in case you are wondering what happens to the prize money: Peter called to tell me he’ll spend most of it on girls and Finnish Vodka. Anything that’s left when he returns from Tampere he’ll hand in to our research center management. Fair enough. (I wonder if someone’s going to leave a comment on this post…)
Filed under: Heroism | 1 Comment
Award ceremony is over for the 2nd International Nokia UbiMedia MindTrek Award at the MindTrek 2008 Conference up in Tampere, Finland. There is no official press release out yet. I’m waiting for that. But let me just say… it seems my former research project Point to Discover did rather well 
Update: see here.
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Location and the Web 2009
Speaking of Location and the Web: Call for Papers is out for the 2nd International Workshop on Location and the Web. The first workshop in this series took place last year in conjunction with the W3C conference in Bejing. This year, the workshop will be held in conjunction with CHI 2009 – which I think is an even better match since CHI traditionally attracts a more interdisciplinary crowd.
Deadline for workshop papers is October 23rd, 2008. Workshop will be held on April 5th, 2009. Full details and CfP are on the Website!
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W3C Geolocation Working Group
Quick note: Found via the locweb mailing list – the W3C just announced a new Geolocation Working Group as part of their Ubiquitous Web Applications Activity!
Official announcement is here.
Filed under: Geospatial Web, Location, W3C | Leave a Comment
Tags: Geolocation Working Group, W3C
Already mentioned two posts ago: Mat has extended the blogloc mobile site! If you visit the update page with a device that has the Google Gears plugin installed, you’ll notice something new below the “Where are you now?” input field: a nifty little tickbox with a label that says “Locate Me!”.
And – guess what – if you tick that box, your current location will automagically pop up in the “Where are you now?” field! (See this post on the Google Mobile Blog to find out how this works.)
I have to say Mat was really fast with this: He had a first version online on August 27 – which is a cool 5 days after the original Google Mobile Blog post. Not bad, Mat! (But hey, just a few lines of JavaScript, right ) He also left me a few screenshots on how Gears updating looks like on his PDA – see above.
Filed under: blogloc | 1 Comment
A big thanks to the Yahoo Fire Eagle team! And not just for bringing us the awesome Fire Eagle location platform – but also for being so kind to include blogloc in their featured application gallery. (And incidentally it turns out that "blogloc" is an advantageous name – from an alphabetical point of view )
I’m not quite sure whether blogloc truly qualifies as a "foxy little beauty" – which is the term the FE team use to describe their current selection of apps in the gallery. But hey, the glassy see-through look of our new embeddable Google Map IS probably quite sexy 
Filed under: blogloc | Leave a Comment
Man, there’s been utter madness going on here at the geekvault. It used to be such a quiet and cosy place. And then everything just happened all at once: The blogloc server down for days. Fire Eagle out of closed beta. Google releasing the Gears Location API.
Needless to say that this forced us to act. But if there’s one thing on earth we really love down here, it’s a good challenge. And here’s what’s been going on so far:
- First: blogloc has moved. This time I’m actually paying for hosting. Reliable server, a support team, it’s all there. No more day-long downtimes. (I also wrote about it in my last post.)
- Fire Eagle support. That’s right. All the nuts and bolts needed to connect blogloc to Fire Eagle have been finished. Right now I’m using this myself (see my sidebar), and I’ll keep this feature in test/observation mode for about a week or so before I fully open it up for everyone. But: if you want to help me beta test this and use blogloc as your Fire Eagle blog sidebar widget right now, contact me and I’ll show you the secret handshake you need to get into our tight-knit blogloc Fire Eagle community. As always, I’d appreciate your help!
- Yes, you’ve read correctly. It’s "we" from now on. blogloc is no longer a one-man show. I’m proud to announce that the ‘vault has grown by two new members. Say hello to Mat and Katz. Mat is currently tackling the ‘Gears situation’ that arose last Friday (unless he’s busy inventing new transitions for the animated map badge he wants to have, that is), while Katz has taken the burden of designing the UI for the history/timeline feature that we will hopefully add to blogloc in the not to distant future.
Interesting times ahead! If you haven’t already checked out blogloc, be sure to do it right now
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I should have known better than to write this whole "challenging fate" thing in my last post. Because the thing with fate is: it just seems to have this tendency to strike back on you on such occasions. And strike back it did.
The power problems I had several weeks ago at my hosting location seemed to be under control. But right at the weekend I started my holiday – they returned. Bigger and badder than ever. Point is, the people who housed my machine run a very well managed network. And inhabit a building with power cabling that’s apparently half a century old…
To cut a long story short: blogloc has been down every weekend of my holiday, all weekend. And – for the first time – even during the week for two days. This whole situation has been as… hm… inconvenient… for me as it has been for my users, believe me.
The good news is that I have now abandoned my initial plan of running blogloc at 0.0 investment cost. As of Tuesday morning, blogloc has been moved to it’s new home: it’s own little virtualized niche in some 19-inch-rack in the basement of some commercial data center. And so far the service has not only been operating faster than ever before, but also without the slightest downtime. In other words: we’re back now. Honestly
Filed under: blogloc | Leave a Comment
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