A couple of weeks ago I emailed Paul Currion and happened to mention that I wanted to plot RSS news feeds on an easily accessible map. Paul passed my question onwards and it mushroomed into an interesting conversation between some very clever people. Numerous hat tips and thanks to you all. I’m still experimenting with some of the ideas that were shared and I’ll update everyone at some time in the future.

So far I’ve run into some stumbling blocks:

• In Google Maps Sri Lanka is a big empty space. The only thing missing is a ‘here be dragons’ label
  • RSS to GeoRSS utilities tend to encode the first place name encountered. This means that a story about Trincomalee will be plotted to Colombo if Colombo is in the by-line
  • Some utilities don’t work well on some platform/browser combinations
  • It seems the IT section’s web filters are causing some problems as well
  • Popfly seems to work pretty well but so far the Geonames database they use only covers the US

Common sense update

No sooner did I post my common sense rant then I came across this picture.



My common sense tells me that aircraft getting struck by lightning would be an extremely rare and very dangerous event. Apparently my common sense has let me down as this article and the reader comments explain.

Tags: NGO Security, Maps, GeoRSS