Beyond Twitter: How to use GeoBlogging to catch the next social media wave

Micro-blogging with sites like Twitter is so 2008. The latest trend for the 2009 social media rockstar is to show the world where you are and where you’ve been. It’s now possible to capture not just the time, but your precise location from all manner of different devices, and publish any content you take on dozens of different sites that display your location on interactive maps.

Gadgets that capture your location

Just some of the gadgets available to you for capturing your location include:

• Stand alone GPS devices – the latest Sat-Navs from the likes of Tom Tom and Garmin don’t just tell you where you are, they let you take Geocoded pics and videos and even
• Cameras with built-in GPS . Try the Nikon P6000, or read about the dozens of different GPS camera options available to you.
• Camcorders with GPS – the first consumer models will be the Sony Handycam HDR-XR500 and XR520, both of which will feature built-in GPS and geotagging of your videos when they’re released, later in 2009.
• Cameraphones with GPS, including the Nokia N95, N82, N96 and E90, the LG Renoir II KC910, and the Samsung Omnia i900, or the superb 8 megapixel Sony Ericsson C905.
• Location-aware Browsers – Mozilla’s Geode extension for Firefox works out where your laptop is from the proximity of nearby networks
• USB or Bluetooth GPS devices – useful if you want more accurate results than network triangulation. Try the Garmin Mobile PC, for example, available in both USB and Bluetooth versions.
• Add on gadgets – if you can’t afford a gadget with built-in GPS, try the tiny Sony GPS-CS1, which adds geocoded data onto your pictures and videos after you’ve taken them – even if you’re nowhere near the location where they were taken from!

Geotagging sites for showing off your location

Capturing your location is one thing – what do you do with it once you’ve got it?

Simple – you upload your pictures, videos or text to the site of your choice and let it display your travels on a fully interactive map, so your fans can follow you wherever you go. Just some of the sites you could use include:

• Flickr, Picasa, Panoramio, SmugMug, Locr, Fotonauts and dozens of other image sites,which can all display geotagged images on an interactive map
• Feedburner – lets you stamp your co-ordinates on your blog’s RSS feed. Try mixing Geode with Feedburner for automatic geo-blogging.
• Plazes and Brightkite – social networks that focus on telling the world and your fans where you are.

Geotagging is still in its infancy, and although there are several handy guides on what you’ll need to do it, it can be difficult to setup, particularly if your device isn’t designed to support it. Some phones, for example, despite coming with GPS built-in, won’t automatically geotag your photos.

Fortunately, you can install software such as ShoZu, which will not only automatically geotag your images and pics for you, it’ll also upload the content to Flickr, YouTube, or many other sites, with the geotag info all ready to use by the site of your choice.

If you’re tech-savvy, you might like to try out Yahoo!s FireEagle, which takes your location from many different devices and lets you export it to dozens of different sites in all manner of different ways. With FireEagle, for example, you could create a widget that puts your current location on a blog, or which updates your Facebook status or loyal Twitter followers with your location. You’re a social media rockstar, remember, with profiles and accounts in tonnes of different social networks. Update them all with your location with FireEagle, and literally let your followers follow you!

FireEagle’s not for the faint-hearted, though, but again there are some useful FireEagle tutorials out there to help you get the most from it.

If you want a simpler way of using FireEagle to update your location to the hundreds of social networks you belong to, let Plazes do it for you.

Summary

If this has whetted your appetite for Geoblogging, have a look at the many Geotagging sites that make innovative use of the geotagged info you provide.

What are you waiting for? You want to be a social media rockstar – get out there and show the world where you are!

This has been the last in a series of posts on how to use the very latest gadgets and social media sites to get yourself Internet famous. You can read the rest of the posts at:

• What YouTube camera to buy
• The video sites that are better than YouTube
• How to succeed with online video
• The gadgets you need to become Internet famous

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