Subscribe to RSS feed!  Geolocation and Google maps  Google Maps
Marker in Tokyo  Image by heiwa4126 via Flickr  Google Maps has
has geolocation support for a long time, but I still find people
surprised of how it all works. So here’s a short writeup, skip
it if you already know all about geolocation.  Lets start at the
Google Maps frontpage. Among the zoom controls, above the little
old man, there’s a button in the form of a small circle. It does
not look like much, but what it’s doing is incredibly cool.
Click it and the map moves to where you are, with an accuracy of
~20 meters. Sci-fi crazy!  How does it work? In the newer
browsers (all but IE6, IE7, or IE8) may ask you for your
positioning information from the browser. It usually shows up as
a bar at the top of the browser. The browser then gathers two
specific forms of positioning information from your computer:
your IP address and the signal strength of any wireless network
near you. That information is then sent, if you approve it, to
Google, which re