Unofficial Google Tools: MyGmaps/M(osele)y Blogmaps
Here's a new and fun e-gadget: a Google-mapping tool that gives us the option to label points on a Google map. So, for example, one might use it to take a walking tour of Moseley, where each point is linked to an image somewhere, or linked to a website, or even just a spot on the global coordinate system.
Would be fun to have a GPS device and to go stand at exactly 52.436000,-1.865000, poke a stick in the ground, take a photo, kind of like being at the North Pole and planting a flag. Lots of games around this idea...
Would be most fun to take said GPS device and send people out on their own favourite journeys, then come back, upload the co-ordinates, and produce a series of mapped routes - personal Moseley routes with notes, photos, and who knows, maybe even a treasure hunt on the ground!
21:00
Thanks to a perspicacious Apprentice, we've now got all-spinning, all-cacheing number-crunching available. Here. So there's a potential for finding local co-ordinates online by tracking geo-cachers. The corollary step is to get some people with GPS-enabled phones or other gadgets to have a reccie around Moseley and send in the data. At that point, if someone wants to do some geo-cache-ing, they'll have the precise numbers for whatever spots they choose to leave prezzies at. (Of course, just to be awkward, one could leave a prezzie without any co-ordinates... . Now whose sense of humour would that appeal to?)
4 Comments:
like
this
http://tinyurl.com/7a8bk
6:56 pm
Oh my. I know people have done things like the Degree Confluence Project*, but I hadn't imagined it had taken on a character like this. Geo-cacheing seems to a be a pun on web-cacheing and link-cacheing. But yeah, something like this could be part of it, treasure hunt wise. Call it bog cacheing? Moseley-cacheing?
What I'd be interested in seeing on the web is a gazetteer with GPS coordinates for places around town.
*Note that nobody has visited 52N,2W so far...
8:31 pm
You don't need a fancy gadget to look up lat/long co-ordinates. Just a decent OS type map. Failing that, you could use streetmap.co.uk. Find your place and the link at the botton which says 'click here' will show them. Take care to locate minutes and seconds, rather than the decimalised version. Here's a local fishing hole.
11:32 am
Yeah, a large scale map with digital lat/long would be cool. But one still has to sit down with pencil and ruler to come up with each set of numbers. The marked-up map would be a nice artefact of each journey, but might be awkward to scan and put on the web. There's also the notion of doing this IRT, with people out in the field uploading stuff as they go. That's what the po-mo psychogeographers do. These days. Flash Geo-cacheing. Choreographed rambles.
1:58 pm
Post a Comment
<< Home