Some time ago I bought a small GPS datalogger from Wintec. This device captures GPS location information every few seconds and stores the information. Sometime later I can then download the information to my computer. I have a program that will read the data from the downloaded GPS information and match digital picture date and time information with the GPS information and put the latitude and longitude information into the digital picture. One of the features in Flickr is to be able to search for pictures by geographic coordinates and see all other Flickr pictures around the same area. That’s kind of cool so if I ever get around to uploading more pictures to Flickr, they’ll have this geo coding information in them.

The other capability of this device is that it is a Bluetooth device and can hook up with my Treo cell phone. I’ve been looking at a couple of mapping programs for the Treo and will probably get one of these programs to use in combination with the GPS data logger.

Saturday I turned the GPS data logger on and captured our activities for the day (click on the datastream to download the track for the day). Bring up Google Earth, open this file, and the little green line will show where we went during the day. That’s kind of cool…

Google Earth is a very interesting program. A couple of weeks ago I was listening to a podcast where someone forecasted that Google could get as much as a billion dollars of revenue per year just from Google Earth as businesses start wanting their info to appear on Google Earth. This capability is already becoming available on my Treo cell phone. I can connect to Google Earth and navigate all over the world. I can turn on different layers of information, including advertisements. One of these days I won’t need to buy every year the latest highway map book. It’ll all just come to a device near me as I need it. Very cool.