McFilter

After over a year of GeekUp mailing list membership, last night I was finally within striking distance geographically of one of the meetings. So, late afternoon I hopped on the bike, cycled to St. Helens station and caught the train into Liverpool.

The venue isn't the most obvious to find, but the directions on the Upcoming page for the event solved that problem and it's nice and central. Looking forward to next month when it'll just be ten minutes or so walk from our flat.

The event itself was pretty relaxed and informal, and everyone there was really friendly. The format is loosely hung around a talk or presentation bookended by general chat and drinking, and this month's talk was from mapping-addict John McKerrell.

John announced a new service that he's been building to let people keep track of where they are, called mapme.at. It's still a little rough round the edges, but you can sign up and start using it.

MapMe.at seems to be on a mission to provide the greatest number of ways to update and keep track of your location. Then you can use the site to see where you've been in the past; find out where your friends are (or have been); or even synchronize your location with FireEagle (one of these days I'll have a look at what that is, other than Tom Coates' baby).

There's more information over on the mapme.at blog and as I've got an account, you can even see where I am (if I've remembered to update it recently, and if you aren't using Internet Explorer (or if John's fixed the bug that stops it displaying in IE))

After the talk, John even gave me a brief tutorial on editing maps on OpenStreetMap, but more on that in a separate post.