know your place

Welcome to the headmap whole earth geoblogger!

News January 29th 2003:

We've updated the the gblogger to make it easier to deploy in your own websites!  This includes support for the blogmapper file format and for the scanning of ordinary blogs for semantic tags to display.

Use the headmap gblogger to map all of that terra ever so firma you've backpacked, or all of the species that have gone extinct, or all of the blogs of all your friends, or all of the wars on earth, or all of the protected natural habitats, or all of the oil spills, or all of the people you've ever known, or all of your favorite beaches, hot-springs, friends and foes.  It's where it's at.

Talk is cheap baby and praxis makes perfect!  Here are some sites that put themselves on the line and into the blogosphere:

Map your blogs

How to host your own maps:

  1. You can host the applet yourself by getting a copy of gserver.jar by saving this link.  You'll want to put this on your website.
  2. Or you can reference an external applet and pass it your requested data to display.
  3. Your web-page will need an applet tag referencing the applet in question such as in this example (view source to see the applet tags).
  4. As well you can configure a variety of parameters for the applet (see the example previously for well... examples). 
  5. In either case you'll want to supply a correctly formatted xml document describing your spatial data ( such as this example ).
  6. Blogware such as moveabletype or radio-userland can generate xml documents out of ordinary site contents - see their documentation for details.
  7. We will eventually support the http://www.blogmapper.com standard - visit their site for details on their format.

Adding points

How to add your own points:

  1. Ok first - think back - think way back.... yes, it's long lat pairs http://www.cssd.ab.ca/tech/social/latitude/lesson1a.htm .
  2. Next you'll have to do some math http://dspace.dial.pipex.com/town/plaza/hv78/maths/index.shtml (just kidding - ignore this step)
  3. The map will show you where you are (by sheer coincidence).
  4. As well you can use blogging applications to blend together data-sets from your friends to produce group maps.
  5. Point the applet at your documents and serve up something tasty.
  6. Check out Joshua's site for info on how to figure out where the heck you are http://www.geourl.org/add.html .

Interop with blogmapper

(Upcoming) See http://www.blogmapper.com

Blogmapper describes points in a file format called "rdfmap".  This file essentially contains point data with hyperlink support.  You will need to supply contextualizing geolocation information and can then easily headmap blogmaps. 

Hack the real world!   

This project and overall effort is totally free and totally open source with no benefit going to any of the contributing parties.  Please feel free to think of this as technology you own and feel free to contribute to the source code for this project and join our discussion about all of the neat implications that this kind of technology may have at http://www.headmap.com .

The CVS repository for the source code is currently at http://p2pmap.org/cgi-bin/cvsweb.cgi .  Feedback and contribution is strongly encouraged.  Tell us if you like this and we might do more of it.

This software was originated from various sources including Anselm Hook (http://p2pmap.org) Ben Russell (http://headmap.com) Colin Eberhart (http://www.fishsoft.co.uk) Tom Van Vleck (http://www.multicians.org/thvv) .  Special thanks to Joshua Schachter (http://geourl.org) for showing what could be done.

Upcoming goals include 1) allow opening with right mouse click to imitate real urls and open left in same window 2) faster asyncronous parsing 3) handle blogmapper formats 4) improve the quaternions 5) use hardware rendering with software rendering only for offscreen server side use 6) handle all of the input arguments 7) replace this code base with a version that is two years more recent but still ongoing.