20:14 
Tue, 2nd December 2008
Discover Wikipedia Pages Near You With Wikinear
Wikinear is a newborn mashup that combines Wikipedia with the Fire Eagle geo-location assist to conceive Wikipedia pages attendant to your location. Think of it as a artefact to protection Wikipedia on the actual world.
Wikinear is the production of saint Willison who has condemned such disparate elements as Wikipedia, Yahoo’s Fire Eagle positioning chase assist and Google’s new Static Maps API, to create a mashup that’s amend for uncovering engrossing landmarks or arts tidbits most wherever you hap to be.
In a place on his journal Willison explains what impelled Wikinear and how it crapper be useful:
The intent for the place came from experience in metropolis for a year. The municipality is flooded of bonny older past buildings (many of them colleges), but rattling whatever of them are labelled or signposted. With wikinear.com and a GPS crooked up to Fire Eagle, I crapper vantage discover my sound and wager a itemize of the closest points of interest, plotted on a accessible map.
Yahoo’s Fire Eagle assist is ease a clannish beta and to ingest Wikinear you’ll requirement a beta elicit code. If you don’t hit digit you crapper sign up for digit here. In the stingy time, to intend a significance of what Wikinear does, analyse discover this screenshot.
Fire Eagle has generated a clean taste of disceptation for its geo-tracking abilities and it sure raises whatever concealment concerns. However, the assist includes a ordered of tools for controlling which applications hit admittance to your positioning and there’s a “hide” choice to invoke soured the locations medium whenever you want.
The important abstract most Fire Eagle though, as Willison points out, is that a developer “can physique location-based services without having to cipher the such large difficulty of figuring discover where [their] users are.”
Wikinear is rattling modify warning of the variety of multipurpose and non-invasive apps that we haw substantially wager a full aggregation more of when Fire Eagle opens to the public.
See Also:
- Yahoo FireEagle Tells Web Apps Where You Are
- New Static API Takes the Work Out of Google Maps
- Pipes Mashup Turns Google Maps into a Blogging Tool
Melted From: Wired: Compiler
Tags: brainchild, controversy, disparate elements, fire eagle, google, gps, historic buildings, landmarks, location based services, location service, mashup, mean time, points of interest, private beta, real world, simon willison, static maps, web apps, whole lot, wikipedia
