Phil Gyford

I’ve geo-encoded this site, which weirdly does actually make me think of it as a bit less floaty, to actually have some location in the real world. Anyway, if you look at the HTML source of the front page you’ll see these lines…

<meta name="ICBM" content="51.550541, -0.051859" />
<meta name="DC.title" content="Phil Gyford" />

These are used by the GeoURL ICBM Address Server to draw a big map of the world with dots for all the registered sites. The numbers in those tags are my home X and Y coordinates, found from Streetmap (you need to find and click the very tiny “Click here to convert/measure coordinates” bit beneath a map). You then just tell GeoURL’s server the address of your website and it grabs the data (more on adding your site here). I put similar tags into Pepys Diary, setting its location as where the diarist lived.

I’ve never been particularly bothered about the endless schemes for mapping where webloggers live. I really don’t quite see the point. I don’t care whether a weblogger lives near me or not. But, for some reason, a more general and open method of assigning a real world location to any kind of site seems to have far more potential. OK, I don’t know what actual use it is, but there must be something…

What you really need though is a big Wargames-style map with big nuclear attack traces swooping across to indicate incoming links.