Socialight / blog+news

An insightful story featuring Socialight was just published on the front page of LiveWire, the tech section for The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age, Melbourne. We’re psyched to get some love from our friends down under, home of the gap year and my personal favorite publisher of local guidebooks, Lonely Planet.

Here are links to page 1 and page 2 of the article from the print version.

Ready for the inside guide to Wine Country? Grab your glass, your fork and your sense of adventure as WineTravel.com staff sticky-note all the best spots in Napa and Sonoma to get your grape on. Get a sneak peek at 3 of their first getaways…

• Girlfriend’s Guide to St. Helena: Shoes, chocolate, wine and pampering in Napa’s toniest town. Hey, if you want you can bring the gents too.
• Zin tour of Dry Creek: Forget the clinkers and head straight for the good stuff. We ID the top Zinfandel sipping spots near Healdsburg
• Healdsburg Tasting rooms: Wine-crawl around the square

Want to feel like a local wherever you go on your summer travels? Of course you do! Use Socialight to find the best things near you. Then, let people know what you think is best. We’re happy to see that Motorola’s recommending you use Socialight to do just that.

From MotorolaRoadTrips.com:

Sign up for Online Sharing & Social Sites

• Flickr for photo sharing
• YouTube for video sharing
• Twitter for micro-blogging
• Socialight for geo-tagging
• Google Maps for interactive maps, directions and traffic

Not to be confused with the Norse God of mischief, Loki is a great new application to help you find and use location.

What they say:

Combining GPS-like location, local search and one-button access to location-based content, Loki is the first web-based application to make the Internet revolve around you. Literally.

What we say:

Loki kicks ass at finding your location using the WiFi in your Windows or Mac laptop. We’ve been using it since day one and recently integrated with their new developer API so that if you’re using Loki, we’ll automatically detect your location and show you content around you on Socialight. Sweet!

Download the plugin from the Loki site here. Once you’ve got it installed - you can also play awesome location-based games like Plundr from our buddies at area/code.

We just launched our new Facebook application! It lets you create Sticky Notes using photos in your Facebook albums. Now, you can explain the story behind the picture and where it was taken. The app also shows off your latest creation on your Facebook profile. Check it out over at Facebook. We were also mentioned in a Wall Street Journal article today about the launch of many new applications on the Facebook Platform.

Yahoo’s Pipes is a visual mashup tool for RSS, GeoRSS and now KML feeds. Pipes has a super slick interface that lets you drag and drop feeds onto each other and their latest release from today adds support for extracting location from GeoRSS or KML feeds. What this means is that any Pipe that contains GeoData is automatically displayed using a Yahoo Map and that you can also get the output for any pipe as KML - which lets anyone make mashups with geographical and then view them in Google Earth. I made a pipe that searches for pictures on Flickr based on the content of Sticky Notes from Socialight. If you want to, you can even check out what it looks like in Google Earth.

We’re really excited that the Pipes team used Socialight in one of their examples - but the others rock too - check them out on the official Pipes blog or in Brady Forrest’s post on the O’Reilly Radar.

I’m speaking at the NYC Wireless meeting tonight at 7pm in SoHo. It’s open to the public if you’d like to attend.

More information here.

Piers Fawkes came by our Greenwich Village office a couple of weeks ago to interview me for his trends site, PSFK. Video from the interview was just posted.

We’re in The Wall Street Journal again. Staff reporter, Amol Sharma wrote about us in a front page story in a special section.

Another creative application, says Richard Wong of venture firm Accel Partners, will be letting consumers blog about particular locations as they travel. Then those blog entries would be automatically tagged with their geographical coordinates. So if you were to post photos or blogs from, say, a scenic rest stop on a long drive, others could find the same spot later. Companies like New York-based Kamida that offer such “geotagging” services now require people to enter their location manually but are integrating GPS to remove that step.

Full article (registration required)

Fast Company notices that “Social mapping technology grows up a bit” and that Socialight is part of the next stage in its evolution.