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.

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!

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

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

Unfortunately that also means that I have not come quite as far with all those planned features as I would have hoped for: There’s still no Fire Eagle or twitter integration, no location tagging (aka location bookmarking), no timeline/history functionality.

But at least I managed to get one new feature up and running which I desparately wanted to have for myself before going on holiday: Activity Messages!

You can now add a short line of text to your map badge to describe what you are doing. The feature is still in sort-of-stealth-mode: I didn’t have the time yet to include it on the blogloc Website or upgrade the bloglocator. So far, the only place you can add activity messages is the blogloc mobile site. But that’s going to change as soon as I return from my vacation. (BTW: Nothing is keeping you from going to the mobile site with your desktop browser. There’s no device recognition + redirection. The site will work just fine. Only looks a bit strange at 1024×768+ screen resolutions.)

Anyways, I hope you find this feature useful and/or fun – I’ll definitely be making heavy use of it from now on!

That’s it. I’m signing off for holiday – and challenging fate by leaving the blogloc server unattended for two weeks

How can you add blogloc to your site?
To set up the blogloc map badge, all you need to do is copy and paste your personal embed code (which you get after sign-up) into the HTML of your site. The code is totally JavaScript- and iframe-free! That means it will work anywhere: even on sites that block embedded scripts (like e.g. WordPress.com) or on mobile Websites.

How do you set your location?
There’s several ways to do that:

• You can log in to the blogloc Website with your account and change your location over the Web interface. There’s the standard drag-and-drop Google map interface and/or a text search box to do that.
• Visit the blogloc mobile site at http://blogloc.no5.at/m with your mobile phone and set your location via the text search box. E.g. by entering city name, street address, place or landmark name. (No need to be specific or structured about it – casual place names like “eiffel tower paris” or “trafalgar square uk” will work just fine.)
• Got a GPS-enabled mobile phone? Download the blogloc bloglocator! The bloglocator is a small piece of software you can use to send location updates to your blogloc map badge directly from your GPS. As live as it gets.

That’s all for today. For more detailed information – and to sign up – go right to the blogloc Website at http://blogloc.no5.at. Have fun using blogloc!

As I understood, they currently got construction work going on, and chances are that service will go down again occasionally over the next few days. So I apologize in advance. (To be fair though, these are the only outages I’ve encountered in a long time, so it’s really a case of bad timing… And, I guess, it’s simply the price I have to pay for the price I’m paying them )

On the positive side: the incident lead me to devise a cunning plan to minimize the impact of future outages on the mission critical aspects of blogloc. (And, yes, it involves routing map requests and GPS updates to my home PC if all else fails.)

In order to prevent that your blogloc map badge temporarily vanishes from your site during a server failure, please make sure you point to the following new URL:

<img src=”http://geekvault.dyndns.org/blogloc/img?user=yourusername&#8221; />

The old URL (geekvault.no5.at) will continue to work, but will take longer to recover in case anything goes wrong at my hosting location. Apart from that, I’m working hard behind the scenes to get blogloc‘s feature set complete, so bear with me – and stay tuned!

In case you haven’t heard about blogloc yet (say it ain’t so!): it’s the soon to be released easiest-way-to-put-a-map-of-yourself-on-your-website-and-update-it-from-wherever-you-are-whenever-you-want service. Still working on that tagline. Stay tuned.

I also said that there are several tracking services out there that give you a mobile client and an embeddable Google Map to do that. But these don’t work for my hosted WordPress blog, since wordpress.com blocks all JavaScript content and inline frames. And the mobile phone clients I’ve seen so far deliver a user experience and UI that’s far from great.

Sure, it’s only a matter of time until the existing services come up with slick mobile clients, complete with animated GUIs, eye candy and stuff. And until there’s a simple static image API for people who can not (or don’t want to) rely on a full-blown embeddable Google Map. In other words – I should just sit back, wait a few more months, and then pick the first solution that’s available out there for my blog. But then again… that would be boring, right?

That’s why last weekend I started to build my own personal GPS-phone-to-Web tracking solution. Say hello to BlogLoc (still a working title)! BlogLoc consists of two components:

• A simple service on the Web that stores user locations and provides a basic, static image API. To use the API, one simply needs to embed an appropriate <img> tag. The service will provide an image consisting of a detail map (street level scale), an overview map, plus an indication of when (and how) the last update took place. Below is what you get when you insert my location using

  <img src="http://geekvault.no5.at/blogloc/img?user=rainer&quot; />

• A small (around 25kBytes) Java application for mobile phones that makes uploading the GPS location from the phone an (almost) one-click process. The client should work on pretty much any phone that supports JSR-179 (“J2ME Location API”). If your phone is Java-enabled, and has built-in GPS, chances are it will work just fine. (I’m using it on the Nokia N95. Screenshots are shown below.)

The whole thing is still in “closed beta”, meaning it’s not quite ready to accept users just yet. I’m still working on some missing parts (like a decent BlogLoc landing page for example), and plan to add a few more necessary features (e.g. a Web/map front-end where users without a GPS-enabled mobile phone can set their location manually; also, I’m considering a non-JSR 179 version of the mobile client to be used with Bluetooth-capable phones and an external GPS unit, in case there’s demand for that).

In any case, I’d be happy to hear your feedback and whether anyone else is interested in using this as well. (So far there’s at least one request from a hard-blogging friend of mine )

I also tested out a service called ipoki. ipoki provides a platform for you to share your location with the public over the Web, similar to what e.g. Plazes, dodgeball, Livecontacts , Brightkite or a whole lot of other location-enabled mobile social apps will let you do. ipoki also comes with it’s own mobile application, which is available for Windows Mobile, Blackberry or Symbian devices. They’re calling it the ipoki “plugin”. (It’s really just a Java/.NET application. IMO calling it a “plugin” doesn’t make it look any cooler or less technical. But as long as they’re happy with the name, I’m fine with that. Eeeeven though the technical purist in me is… you know… irritated. ) UPDATE: Technical purist I may be, but I have also undeliberately exposed myself as a NON-SPANISH-SPEAKING technical purist. Thanks to Javier for pointing out that “plugin” in spanish sounds like “small app” – which is ok for an excuse

Anyways, I installed the “plugin” and – while it definitely won’t win a beauty contest in it’s current state – it works and is easy to use. Capturing GPS location and syncing it to the server is effortless, and there’s also a ‘map’ feature that will show you a static Google Map image of your location with options to zoom in and out. Neat. Once your location is synced, other people can track you on a Google Map (see mine here) or via a KML network link in Google Earth. The website even has a mobile-friendly version that’s using a static Google Map instead of the JavaScript-ed desktop one.

The process of syncing your location to the Web from your phone with ipoki is actually fun (yes I know I’m a very strange person), and for what it’s worth, I would definitely want to have a map of my ipoki location on my blog’s sidebar! ipoki does give you the option to do just that, i.e. they provide a link to embed your map elsewhere. Trouble is, however, that my hosted wordpress.com blog doesn’t allow me to add JavaScript code…

So: what I really want to see is an API that will give me nothing but a static Google Map with my current ipoki location on it. Think something like

<img src=”http://ipoki.com/maps/rainer?width=240&height=320&gt;

you get the idea. I don’t think ipoki – or any other service out there, for that matter – currently does this. Correct me if I’m wrong! Hm. Maybe I should start building something like that myself. Now that I got so much more time on my weekends again