We have some new location-centric toys to play with. Let the hacking commence.
Flickr has released its shapefiles dataset for free (as in beer, as in it would be nice if you mentioned where you got the free beer). These shapefiles are bounding boxes that have been generated by the action of humans correcting suggested place names for geotagged photos. Tom put this data to good use with his neighbourhood boundaries app.
Speaking of excellent location-driven creations by Tom, be sure to check out Clarke; a little OS X app that updates your FireEagle location every five minutes by triangulating your position with Skyhook.
Meanwhile, in another part of Yahoo, Placemaker has been released in Beta form. It looks very nifty indeed. Pass it some human-readable text and it will try to figure out what physical locations are mentioned in the text. You can help it along by using structured data like the geo and adr microformats, but it seems to be pretty good at natural language parsing. Christian has put together some good examples to illustrate his JavaScript Placemaker/YQL mashup.
Slowly but surely we’re heading towards a future where everything is geotagged.