Bergie has posted more stuff about location awareness, and it’s very cool stuff. Plazes.com has a desktop app that lets you register locations where you usually hang out, and then it knows where you are based on what address(es) you are connecting from.

There are still some problems with it, such as, predictably, that our proxy/firewall at work seems to block it, and I don’t know what port(s) it wants open. It does cool stuff like, no only “where am I”, but also “where have I been” which is a flash application that draws a time/position map of where you’ve been. It would have been very cool to have had this running since January, since I’ve been more places this year than any year ever.

The grunt work involved is that I have to register all the “plazes” that I am likely to visit. But, presumably, if there’s critical mass achieved, we’d end up with any place I visit (open wireless locations, for example) already being registered, and it would Just Work.

Now, I need to go read more of the documentation.

But the very coolest thing I’ve discovered so far is exactly what we were talking about that night in Moscow – the ability to integrate Plazes with Flickr, so that photos are tagged with a location, and you can search for photos of a particular place, by coordinates. Obviously, this is still very basic, but I hope that as the data set grows, you’ll be able to search for “photos near Lexington” and the like. It’s a pretty exciting new piece of metadata for us geo-geeks.