Discover Wikipedia Pages Near You With Wikinear
Wikinear is a new mashup that combines Wikipedia with the Fire Eagle geo-location service to discover Wikipedia pages related to your location. Think of it as a way to overlay Wikipedia on the real world.
Wikinear is the brainchild of Simon Willison who has taken such disparate elements as Wikipedia, Yahoo’s Fire Eagle location tracking service and Google’s new Static Maps API, to create a mashup that’s perfect for finding interesting landmarks or historical tidbits about wherever you happen to be.
In a post on his blog Willison explains what motivated Wikinear and how it can be useful:
The idea for the site came from living in Oxford for a year. The city is full of beautiful old historic buildings (many of them colleges), but very few of them are labelled or signposted. With wikinear.com and a GPS hooked up to Fire Eagle, I can pull out my phone and see a list of the closest points of interest, plotted on a handy map.
Yahoo’s Fire Eagle service is still a private beta and to use Wikinear you’ll need a beta invite code. If you don’t have one you can sign up for one here. In the mean time, to get a sense of what Wikinear does, check out this screenshot.
Fire Eagle has generated a fair bit of controversy for its geo-tracking abilities and it certainly raises some privacy concerns. However, the service includes a set of tools for controlling which applications have access to your location and there’s a “hide” option to turn off the locations broadcasting whenever you want.
The remarkable thing about Fire Eagle though, as Willison points out, is that a developer “can build location-based services without having to solve the much bigger problem of figuring out where [their] users are.”
Wikinear is very cool example of the sort of useful and non-invasive apps that we may well see a whole lot more of when Fire Eagle opens to the public.
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