ZoneTag! You’re ZoneIt.
| Wednesday, October 25th, 2006 | --Sean |
In all of the hubbub surrounding the winning Open Hackday project, Blogging in Motion, I completely forgot to mention one of the very cool technologies that it uses: ZoneTag.
ZoneTag is a product of the Yahoo! Research labs in Berkeley, designed to simplify the process of uploading photos from your phone and associating them with relevant metadata. When you take a picture, ZoneTag grabs info about which cell tower you're connected to and uses that to take a guess at what your location might be (based on locations provided by other users for the same cell tower). It also suggests tags that make sense based on where you are --- tags that you've recently provided, friends' tags from the same area, or events/venues based on Upcoming and Yahoo! Local data. Apparently, the team has also added geotagging support to get your photos automatically mapped in Flickr as well. The caveat is that ZoneTag only works for a few Nokia phones within the US, but they're working on expanding.
Check out the ZoneTag photos page and users group for more autotagged goodness!
October 25th, 2006 at 3:06 pm
ZoneTag works outside the US as well - I’ve used it in London, Brussels and Amsterdam.
October 25th, 2006 at 3:25 pm
Oh, awesome, thanks! I guess they haven’t quite updated the FAQ on their site yet to reflect new locations.
April 24th, 2007 at 1:47 am
Speaking about “geotagging”: do you know locr?
locr offers the ideal solution and makes geotagging exceptionally easy. locr uses GoogleMaps with detailed maps and high-resolution satellite images. To geotag your photos just enter address, let locr search, fine-tune the marker, accept position, and done! If you don’t know the exact address simply use drag&drop to set the position.
For automatic geotagging you need a datalog GPS receiver in additon to your digital camera. The GPS receiver data and the digital camera data is then automatically linked together by the locr software. All information will be written into the EXIF header.
Use the “Show in Google Earth” button to view your photos in Google Earth.
With locr you can upload photos with GPS information in them without any further settings. In the standard view, locr shows the photo itself, plus the place it was taken. If you want to know more about the place where the photo was taken, just have at look at the Wikipedia articles which are also automatically assigned to the picture.
Have a look at http://www.locr.com.
April 24th, 2007 at 4:54 pm
Tell the truth, Tom: you just did a blog search for “geotagging” and pasted the same comment into any posts that showed up, didn’t you? :P Also, aren’t most of the features you mention (aside from Wikipedia correlation) already provided by ZoneTag and Flickr’s geotagging?