Everything you see in the maps below are tweets – every dot is a tweet and the color of the dot is the tweet count. Twitter says that these maps make use of every single geotagged tweet since 2009 (billions and billions of tweets).

What you’ll notice is that you can totally recognize these cities and other areas of the world based solely on boundaries created by tweets.

Look at Europe, for instance:

Here are some more:

New York City

Moscow

Tokyo

There are a bunch more over on Twitter’s Flickr page. I’ve intentionally failed to disclose the identity of the location mapped out in the lead image. I’ll let you see if you can figure it out.

The map was created by geography students at California’s Humboldt State University, the same group of people who brought us the post-election Twitter racism map back in November. Back then, they looked at racist tweets the focused on President Obama’s reelection and found that Mississippi and Alabama were the two hotbeds for such activity.

“Rather than focusing just on hate directed towards a single individual at a single point in time, we wanted to analyze a broader swath of discriminatory speech in social media, including the usage of racist, homophobic and ableist slurs,” say the researchers.

For instance, here’s the map of generally “homophobic” tweets, which are determined by the use of words like “dyke,” “fag,” “homo,” and “queer.”

And here’s the map of racist tweets – those containing the words “nigger,” “chink,” “wetback,” “gook,” or “spick”:

Of course, analysis like this is never going to be 100% accurate. Keyword analysis has inherent issues. For instance, the word “queer” is not always used in a derogatory, hate-filled manner. People could be tweeting out the word “fag” in another context, such as bemoaning its usage.

On the other hand, it’s hard to justify many used of words like “wetback” on Twitter. Sure, it’s not completely solid analysis, but it’s pretty close. You have to to imagine that the majority of people tweeting about fags, dykes, niggers, and chinks are doing so in a hateful manner.

But to completely cut out this sort of uncertainty, the researchers manually read and coded each tweets to judge the sentiment, “in order to address one of the earlier criticisms of our map of racism directed at Obama.” This way, they could know, for sure, whether a tweet that contained the word “queer” was actually posted in a hateful context.

Using DOLLY to search for all geotagged tweets in North America between June 2012 and April 2013, we discovered 41,306 tweets containing the word ‘nigger’, 95,123 referenced ‘homo’, among other terms. In order to address one of the earlier criticisms of our map of racism directed at Obama, students at Humboldt State manually read and coded the sentiment of each tweet to determine if the given word was used in a positive, negative or neutral manner. This allowed us to avoid using any algorithmic sentiment analysis or natural language processing, as many algorithms would have simply classified a tweet as ‘negative’ when the word was used in a neutral or positive way. For example the phrase ‘dyke’, while often negative when referring to an individual person, was also used in positive ways (e.g. “dykes on bikes #SFPride”). The students were able to discern which were negative, neutral, or positive. Only those tweets used in an explicitly negative way are included in the map.

You can check out the full interactive map here, where you can zoom in to see specific concentrations of twitter hate speech.

[Floating Sheep via MIT Technology Review]

But sometimes, you may be giving people a lot of information without even realizing it. And it could be as simply as mentioning a single word within a tweet.

WeKnowYourHouse.com is billed as a “privacy experiment” that pulls every tweet that mentions the word “home” and is also geotagged. I’m sure you can guess why these types of tweets could be a bit dangerous. Let’s say just tweeted that you arrived home from a vacation and you’ve enabled location on your tweets. From those two simple factors, anyone in the world could pinpoint the exact location of your residence on a map.

Think about it: It’s a stalker’s wet dream.

The site owners explain how they do it, and it’s frighteningly simple:

This website uses Twitter Search API to collect information, for example if you look at http://search.twitter.com/search.json?q=at+home you’ll see how Twitter give away all the recent posts that match the search criteria in JSON format. We simply get the ones that contain location data (latitude and longitude) and use a geocoder to turn them into human readable addresses. Google Street View also accepts latitude and longitude into its web APIs, so we can actually see the places that people are when they tweet.

For the “experiment,” they star out the user names and locations, but you can click on any entry and see a Google street view shot of where they think you live. They say that all of the entires are expunged after an hour to protect privacy, but that’s just enough time for you to see how easy it is for anyone to snag the location of your home.

Of course, having the location of your house known on the interwebs isn’t necessarily a bad thing, and there are plenty of other ways that a criminal or someone else could locate you. But if you’re someone with a history of online stalkers, it might be better to leave the “So glad to be home!” out of your tweets.

[h/t Sophos Naked Security]

The popular photo-sharing site has previously worked with (and will continue to work with) OpenStreetMap in order to fill in the gaps left by commercial maps but Nokia will be the major provider of awesome, updated maps. You can see below a before and after comparison of what the updated maps will look like (in case you can’t tell, the older map is on the left).

Flickr said that the new maps are available to everyone as of today, but when I use Flickr to go map around I’m still seeing that the maps still have the Navteq 2010 tag (Navteq is a subsidiary of Nokia). Nokia’s map site, however, displays an updated Navteq 2012 copyright tag, which I imagine Flickr will eventually display once the site’s maps are all updated. Even searching for the Tanzanian city of Dar es Salaam, as was used in the above example, I’m still seeing the older map. At any rate, the updates will be arriving soon enough (I presume) so keep an eye out.

Nokia’s having quite maptastic moment lately. Nokia partnered with Bing earlier this year to boost the aesthetic and search quality of Bing Maps while last month Bing announced that Nokia would be providing backend support for real-time traffic info. Last week, Microsoft announced that the upcoming Windows Phone 8 would be getting mapping support from Nokia instead of Bing Maps.

While some users are understandably reluctant to add their location to their tweets, millions of other users are doing so on a daily basis. This naturally creates a trove of data that can be used to construct some pretty fun apps, and Twaddler is one of them.

Twaddler creator Justin Reynen explains his service like this:

Twaddler live streams geotagged tweets from around a given area, such as your home town, but you don’t have to stay there. You can check out what’s happening in London, New York, Paris, anywhere! Just use the Go To box. Twaddler only displays tweets with a geotag, not just a location, [and] Twaddler uses your location to get an idea of where you are when it starts up. Nothing is stored on a server, Twaddler is completely anonymous.

The Twaddler interace uses Google Maps to plot the exact location of live incoming tweets to any location in the world. You can check out the flurry of tweets coming from your own city or explore what people are saying all over the world. There’s also a tweet stream attached to the left-hand side, if you don’t want to click all of the little flags:

Twaddler isn’t the first application to pull from Twitter’s location data to pinpoint tweets in your area, but it’s fun to see everything in the map view and have the stream right next to it.

I found Twaddler via reddit, and some users have some pretty interesting yet contrasting opinions on how Twaddler could be useful:

It would be nice to highlight notable locations where a lot of people might be looking to learn of an event going on (like Egypt). This is a great idea your working on with lots of potential uses. Good luck!

or…

I had a LOT of fun with this last night. I punched in my local and pretty much twitter spammed anyone posting in my area that was being a dumbass on twitter.

So there you have it. You could use Twaddler to track tweets in a particular location where something big is going down – or you could use it to troll all of the idiots posting inane tweets about their lunches. It’s up to you.

Couple this with the fact that Twitter just launched location-specific Twitter trends, and you be a real-time news tracking machine. Or, you know, you could get a glimpse of just how stupid the twitter users in your hometown really are.

That’s why the U.S. Army is warning soldiers about the dangers of geotagging.

The threat is pretty obvious. Not only could voluntarily sharing a location compromise a mission, but so much that’s done on a smartphone or tablet these days is geotagged, soliders could be sharing their locations without even knowing it.

“A deployed service member’s situational awareness includes the world of social media. If a Soldier uploads a photo taken on his or her smartphone to Facebook, they could broadcast the exact location of their unit,” said Steve Warren, deputy G2 for the Maneuver Center of Excellence.

“Today, in pretty much every single smartphone, there is built-in GPS,” Warren said. “For every picture you take with that phone, it will automatically embed the latitude and longitude within the photograph.”

In a post, the official site of the U.S. Army says that this has already happened. Back in 2007, as a new fleet of helicopters arrived at a base in Iraq, solider snapped some photos and out them online. Apparently, from those photos, enemies were able to single out the location and deliver a mortar strike that took out four AH-64 Apaches.

The Army is particularly concerned with Facebook – especially the new Timeline, which we all know, brings up all of your past Facebook information for the world to see. Users have to go back and manage their Timelines to make them ready for primetime.

“Some of those individuals have hundreds of ‘friends’ they may never have actually met in person, he explained. “By looking at someone’s map tab on Facebook, you can see everywhere they’ve tagged a location. You can see the restaurants they frequent, the gym they go to everyday, even the street they live on if they’re tagging photos of their home. Honestly, it’s pretty scary how much an acquaintance that becomes a Facebook ‘friend’ can find out about your routines and habits if you’re always tagging location to your posts,” said Staff Sgt. Dale Sweetname of the Online and Social Media Division.

The U.S. Army has some pretty in-depth social media guidelines, and they address what soldiers should do in terms of the geotagging issue. First off, they say that soldiers should never tag photos posted to Flickr or Picasa with locations, and they should refrain from using location-based social networking when deployed or during training. When engaged in operations, soldiers should just turn off the GPS function on their phones.

"Country-code top-level domains (or ccTLDs) can provide people with a quick and valuable clue about the location of a website—for example, ".fr" for France or ".co.jp" for Japan," explains Google software engineer Piyush Prahladka. "However, for certain top level domains like .com, .info and .org, it’s not as easy to figure out the location."

"With the new display, you no longer need to refine your search or click through the results to figure out which page is the one you’re looking for," says Prahladka. "In general, our hope is that these region tags will help searchers more quickly identify which results are most relevant to their queries."

If you wish to provide Google with the information required for getting your site’s region to show up in search results, you will need to log in to Webmaster Tools and go to Site configuration > Settings > Geographic Target. There you will be able to associate a country/region with your site.

Webmasters have been able to utilize the feature that lets them associate their sites with regions for quite some time, but that information hasn’t appeared in search results in the past.

Right now, Google is only showing region tags in results for certain domains like .com and .net. They don’t show them at all for sites that have location-specific ccTLDs (.br, .co.uk, etc.). The feature is designed to help users figure out where a site is based if that is not already clear.

It is also worth noting that Google will only show the region tags when the region associated with the site is different than the region the searcher’s query originates from. So if I search from here in the US, I will not see results that say "US", but I might see results that say "Canada".

Related Articles:

> Get More Links in Your Actual Google Results

> Google Gives Forums More Links on SERPs

> Google Improves Universal Results for Locations

There is no geotagging on Twitter.com yet, but Twitter apps will now be able to support it. So potentially, you will be able to geotag tweets and show the location from where you tweeted.

"The added information provides valuable context when reading your friends tweets and allows you to better focus in on local conversations," Twitter says in the announcement. "Now you can find out what live music is playing right now in your neighborhood or what people visiting Checkpoint Charlie are saying today about the anniversary of the Berlin Wall. These are only the beginning and we are really looking forward to seeing the creative uses emerge from the developer community."

If you’re concerned about privacy, you should note that geotagging is disabled by default for all users. You have to opt-in to use it. You can do so by going to the settings page and clicking "enable geotagging."

In addition to that, Twitter has updated its privacy policy to include geotagging, as well as to "describe the public nature" of most of what people post to Twitter. "We’ve tried to keep it short and sweet with lots of real life examples so it’s simple to read through," the company says.

The location element can make Twitter more useful in some cases.This doesn’t only apply to where a Twitterer happens to be at any given time, however. It is also helpful to know where they are from or where they reside, in some cases. This means you can find Twitterers of interest in your own town, for example. Our own Twellowhood tool (part of our Twellow service) is a great way to do this.

Related Articles:

> Is Your Neighbor On Twitter?

> Twitter to Become Location Aware

> Twitter Gives Apps Access to People Search

"When you use Blogger in draft, you’ll see an option below the post editor to ‘add location’," explains Elaine Filadelfo of Google’s Lat Long Blog Team. "If you know the exact location, you can simply enter the address, city, or zip code; if you’re blogging about the view from the top of a mountain you just hiked or don’t have a precise location, you can browse the map or turn on satellite mode and put a marker at the right spot (and the reverse geocoder will label the location for you). The geotag will appear below your published post as a link, which will open up Google Maps. The location will also be included in your blog’s RSS and Atom feeds using GeoRSS."

There are some known issues with geotagging that Brian at the Blogger in Draft blog was kind enough to address:

– The location editor is hidden behind the text field in the Edit HTML tab. Please switch to the Compose tab to view and edit locations.

– Some users are having issues with the blog post map gadget. Brian is investigating.

To learn more about the geotagging feature, I suggest reading Brian’s full post. If you are interested in finding out more about Blogger in Draft itself, this page should sum it up for you.

On the Yahoo Local & Maps Blog, Michael Lawless explains that places have been given unique Where on Earth IDs (WOEIDs).  The use of numbers, instead of letters, keeps everything "language neutral."

 Yahoo Internet Location Platform

He then continues, "[T]ag 727232 for example, is Amsterdam, and we can use the new APIs that we’re releasing to find out all sorts of relevant relationship information, including: The parent, the administrative region of Amsterdam . . . Neighbors, such as Landsmeer, Zaandam, and Watergang . . . Belong Tos, such as North Holland, Western Europe, and the Europe/Amsterdam Time Zone."

This technology should increase the usefulness of existing services like Yahoo Maps – WOEIDs can sort out the Marquettes located in Iowa, Kansas, Michigan, Nebraska, and Wisconsin.  Flickr is also bound to benefit, as the photo-sharing service’s Dan Catt discussed geotagging in detail.

As for what else happens, it’ll be (at least to some degree) up to the public.  Yahoo has encouraged developers to play with both its Internet Location Platform and Fire Eagle, so anyone with the time and skills can tinker at will.  Marshall Kirkpatrick notes, "We’re excited to see what developers come up with.  We probably won’t have to wait for long, either, since the Platform was released the day before O’Reilly’s Where 2.0 conference begins in Burlingame, California."