Not only is their (unsupported!) expedition the first Irish circumnavigation of the globe by bicycle. It’s also a journey with a purpose: to promote the positive contribution that cycling can make to the world. It’s environmentally friendly, and it’s an effective way of incorporating regular exercise into a daily routine. And that’s also key to people’s well-being – both physically and mentally. Which is why Simon and Fearghal will be supporting Aware with their tour, an Irish organization that provides support for those suffering from depression.

Along the way, they’ll keep the rest of the globe up to date on their progress with blog posts, photos, tweets and – last but not least – live location updates sent via a Spot and Fire Eagle – and displayed with blogloc. You can get up-to-the-minute news on their progress on their site revolutioncycle.ie

“Au contraire!” Because fact is: why would any sane person out there opt for Latitude when there’s so many reasons to use blogloc? Like, for example, because you have your blog hosted on wordpress.com instead of Blogger? Or because you prefer MySpace over Orkut? Or because you want a whole host of options to update your location and not just a handful of Google tools? Or because you’re going on a trip and want to share the full track instead of just the last location? Or because you don’t want to give all your location info away to a big, impersonal corporation? Oh – and did I mention that over here on blogloc, the users are just so much cooler than anywhere else, too?

Update: OR… Because Latitude is simply not available in your country! (Thanks to hotigris for pointing that out! )

See? So many reasons.

Starting May 2nd, the team will participate in the Allgäu Orient Rallye – a car race from Southern Germany to Amman, Jordan with a few… special rules:

• Only cars aged at least 20 years, and with a value of definitely no more than 2000 Euro allowed
• Everyone’s free to choose their own route – but strictly no motorways (that’s “freeways” – for you Americans out there)
• Multiple vehicles per team are allowed (up to three cars or various combinations of cars and motorcycles). Not all of those need to arrive in Amman, but all team members must arrive in/on at least one vehicle
• For overnight stays, each team member is allowed to spend a maximum of 10 Euro per night (tents allowed)
• There will be special challenges in each country along the route (I wonder what that will be…)

I guess most of that probably bars people like Dean Martin and Sammy Davis Jr. from taking part in a Ferrari 308 GTS. But then, the Allgäu-Orient Ralley is not about money, anyway: It’s about fun, a little bit of “calculable adventure”, and about supporting a good cause – in this case the United Nations World Food Programme. (Even the cars will get donated after the race is over.)

Oh and by the way – in case you were wondering what “KRBO” stands for: It’s short (and German) for “Kette Rechts und Bremse Offen”. Please don’t ask me to translate that. (I’m not sure it can be translated – Christian, correct me if I’m wrong ) But let me just say… it expresses a certain affection for high velocities.

Anyways: The Allgäu-Orient Ralley starts this Saturday, May 2nd and will take 10 days. You can follow team KRBO’s progress on a blogloc track map, which they will update from a SPOT Satellite Messenger through Fire Eagle. Be sure to head there soon, check it out regularly and… keep your fingers crossed for team KRBO!!

First of all: Activity Messages. Those little twitter-like text captions you can add to your map badge. Believe it or not: An astounding 17% of messages in the system are “working” or “at work”. To all of you out there who write such messages: Stop doing it. It’s depressing. There’s a world full of adventure waiting to be discovered and what are you doing? Get out there. GET A LIFE.

No seriously. Working on blogloc has been a great experience for me. There has been some real enthusiasm, positive feedback and active communication with users from all over the world. And if there’s one thing I really learned from it, then it’s what location sharing on the Web is really about: it’s about stories.

True, when people put stuff on the Web nowadays, it mostly a lifestream/twitter-kindof thing: A little status message here, an uploaded photo there. It seems to be no different with location sharing – and to be fair, that’s just how I use blogloc as well. But the really exciting stuff starts when people have a story to tell. And as with any good story, there’s usually a journey involved.

I learned about some exciting and funny stories during this past year. I got in touch with interesting people. Today I want to thank all of you who make blogloc such an enjoyable experience for me – by letting it play a tiny part when you tell your stories!

And to share a little bit of this great experience, I’m happy to announce that over the next weeks, I’ll have the honor to present some of those stories right here on my blog! Starting off with a first post later this week: meet the prospective future winning team of the Allgäu-Orient Ralley – a low budget car race from Southern Germany to Amman, Jordan. Sounds risky? Well not risky enough for those people, obviously. Because they’ll also be tracking their progress with a very little tested pre-pre-beta version of the blogloc trackmap-badge! Yep. Totally Mad.

But fret not: with blogloc you can now share your live location – and still be a real geek! How? Just share your location the Semantic Web way! That’s right. If Google Map access is enabled in your Personal Settings, you can now get an RDF representation of your blogloc location. Yeah I know what you’re thinking: “Perfect for my FOAF file!” You bet.

Your personal RDF resides at:

http://geekvault.no5.at/blogloc/rdf/%5Byourusername%5D.rdf (see mine for example)

Note: The RDF contains exact coordinates! Therefore – as always – this URL will be blocked by default to protect your exact location, unless you enable Google Map access in your settings.

We will present the mobile landscape of Austria and have key players of the industry up on the stage talking about their business. We will announce the list of speakers shortly.

However, you get a informative view on the Austrian market and will have the chance to meet people who shape this industry. You will enjoy a healthy dose of networking and meet-up.

I love the way they sneaked the word ‘however’ in between ‘have key players […] talking about their business’ and ‘you get a(n) informative view’. Brilliant. Otherwise though it’s set to be an interesting and well-attended networking event (the list of participants is up on Xing).

Update: some post-event material (video and a nice overview of who’s making up the “mobile landscape” of Austria) can be found here (thanks to Erich Holzbauer of mobilepulse.de.)

Good news, however, is this: The aliens got bored running bizarre experiments on my body and now I’m BACK – for even more once-a-month blogging. With the plan to shift the tone of this blog slightly away from mobile and more towards ‘pure’ Geoweb topics. And hopefully with some positive announcements to make about blogloc as well. Stay tuned!

Ric’s post also got me thinking further: As a concept and technology, LBS are now more than a decade old already. Many seem to agree nowadays that with the advent of commodity GPS phones, cell ID databases on the Web, open mobile OSes and progressing standardization on client-side location APIs, LBS are finally ready for a real, decent 1.0 release. But what might be in the next round of evolution for LBS? From a technological perspective? From a topical/feature point of view? A little bit of speculation from my side (split up in several posts – to keep posts shorter & to give me more time to think about the next post )…

Part 1: A Tad of Geospatial Knowledge Discovery

Most of us spend their time at the same handful of places day in and day out. It’s pretty obvious, really. Even if you don’t see it plotted on a map. But if you’re actually weird enough to track yourself (like me), it’s almost striking to see those focal points of your daily routine start to emerge on the map – your home, your daily commuting route, places you visit regularly after work, on the weekends and so on.

A personalized view of the world – the meanings behind locations – is something that LBS are lacking today: home and workplace, places linked to friends, family, or personal memories; places we plan to go in the future; or places we’d rather avoid. Some of these concepts are likely to change over time or due to external factors (such as our mode of transport, or things happening in our social network). In Geographic Information Science, the term geographic knowledge discovery (as one form of Spatial Analysis) refers to techniques for mining spatial information for interesting patterns.

My first speculation about what’s next in LBS is: we will increasingly see LBS that include geographic knowledge discovery approaches (at least in a simple form) to achive higher degree of personalization by inferring meaning from locations.

To be continued…

http://blogloc.com/feed/yourusernamehere.xml

If you look at somebody’s blogloc feed in the reader of your choice, it might look something like this:

But that’s not all. Since the feed is geo-enabled, it’s easy to plot the entire feed on a map: E.g. you can simply cut-and-paste the feed URL in the Google Maps search field. Or use online tools like Yahoo Pipes to build your own personal blogloc mashup!

We want to hear from you!

We’re currently playing around with different configurations, styles, and contents of the feed. Let us know what you think! How are you going to use your location feed? What information would you want to have in the messages? In the headlines? What kinds of personalization options do you need?

Drop me a line or leave a comment below! And – by the way – if you have not already joined the blogloc history beta: do the same to have your account history-enabled right away

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

• 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!

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…)

Update: see here.

Deadline for workshop papers is October 23rd, 2008. Workshop will be held on April 5th, 2009. Full details and CfP are on the Website!

Official announcement is here.

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.

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

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

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