There are some flash applications that are truly cool, and the geoblog site hosts one such example.
Displaying a cool world map (it shows the current daylight area), the application monitors a list of recently updated blogs generated from weblogs.com. It checks for new blog entries every minute and then fetches and displays the first few words of each entry for which the site’s location is known. The text is displayed via a short-lived popup, but a “pushpin” icon remains on the map so one can goto any site that caught their interest.
It’s a neat way to see different blogs being updated, around the world, and almost in real time (w/in 3 minutes). Unfortunately, the traffic is fairly low, as most blogs give no indication of their geographical location, which is a key to making this work.
The geourl site offers advice on how to add appropriate META tags for representing a site’s latitude/longitude so geoblog can determine where to place the entry on the map. I’m going to do that, but for privacy reasons won’t be entirely accurate regarding my location.
