Darkwind Media Blog

One thing you may notice recently is that people are starting to focus more on geolocation. This is the ability to place things in geographic space. We have tons of data on the internet and more being added all the time. Tagging that data is really important if we want to be able to find it, explore it, or visualize it. One kind of tagging gaining popularity is to tag the data with location information.

With Luster we can take advantage of available web services and visualize the location of data in real-time.

We can take information from online services and databases and plot them onto the globe. Viewing information by its location is just one way of exploring it, but done correctly that can be a powerful way to visualize and see patterns in the data. What you see above are the news stories from Yahoo’s Top Stories RSS Feed. The application checks for changes every minute, so you have a real-time view of Yahoo’s top stories as they happen across the world.

And since RSS provides us with all sorts of useful information, we can let that information that is attached to each news item be viewable in the application. You can roll over each pin and see the story, its source, description, etc. When the user is interested in reading the story, a simple mouse click will navigate their browser to the story’s link.

Really, RSS feeds are the just the beginning. More data is being geo-tagged online all the time. Flickr has some 35,000 images with location tags and a powerful API that can access them. Twittr recently announced that they will be letting users opt-in to have their tweets geo-tagged. If a significant number of users start tagging their tweets with this information, we can use our application to plot where tweets happen across the world in real-time.