Welcome everyone to the first post on the MapMe.at blog. I’m in Liverpool, GB as I write this, sat on the sofa at home in fact. Why would you want to know this? Well, perhaps you would like to meet up with me for a drink sometime, if you know I’m in Liverpool that might help with your planning. Perhaps you would like me to do some work for you and want to arrange a meeting, my location will help you to know whether I’m likely to be attending the meeting in person or will be on the end of a telephone.

How about another scenario, a few months ago I twittered:

Just rowed many miles down river. Barbecue now then bit more rowing to the beach.

If you know I live in Liverpool you might find that message a bit odd, have I really been rowing down the River Mersey?? In fact on that day I was halfway through a holiday to southern Turkey and we’d spent the day rowing down the Xanthos River. Being able to know my location when reading my past (or even current) twitters could obviously be useful.

Finally, here’s a snap taken when I was visiting San Francisco in May:

Me and the Golden Gate Bridge

Most people probably know that the Golden Gate Bridge is in San Francisco, but not everyone is going to know that it’s on the South West coast of the United States. Being able to find out where I was when I took a photo is a great way of making it more interesting.

So there you have it, location is important. Being able to find out where people are now is important, being able to find out where people have been is also important. Why am I telling you this? Well this is what mapme.at is all about. I’ve been tracking my location in various ways for 2 years now. Up to a year ago I was finding it difficult to track myself as much as I would like. I setup mapme.at to try to make things easier, before mapme.at I had a single method that required me to have GPS coverage and to run a Java app on my phone. The original version of the site took this up to three separate ways of logging where I am. There are now 8 ways to log my location on mapme.at and considering one of those methods is Fire Eagle there’s potential for many more. Over the coming days I’ll be writing a few more posts to try to cover all of the ways that you can update your location here, if you’re interested in trying it out head over here for the first of these posts!