An update to the Poland madness story. I've created an Poland map now.
Because I wanted to use lat/long coordinates I had to figure out how to match existing maps with a projection in GMT. I've found that the maps are drawn in Transverse Mercator projection, and it's easy to match them.
69(!) happy people.
This is getting way out of hand. I've added 29 people to the map since yesterday, of which 2 were not from Poland. I really need to automate this stuff and I've been thinking about how to solve this.
Most of the information (jid, city, country, lat/long coordinates) can be processed automatically, but when displaying this can cause problems with locations that are near to eachother. They need to be grouped somehow. For now I've been doing this by hand, but that is getting tiresome. If you have any ideas how to solve the grouping problem, let me know...
Wow! Antymon posted an article to an apparently very popular polish geek website called 7thguard.net about the Jabber World Map. It seems all of Poland (well, at least 10 people now) wants to have his location show on the Map!
Jabber is getting more and more popular in Poland from what I've heard and a community website JabberPL has been set up.
Marcoos was so kind to translate the polish article in english for me, so here it is:
Jabber World Map
Make yourself visible to the world
Various visualisation projects have appeared recently. There are maps of the Internet, Linux kernel schemes, and a Debian Users World Map. Now the time has come for Jabber.
Jabber World Map is a project in stage of development. Its aim is to show Jabber users on a map with lightbulb-signs. Of course the map is interactive, so after registration your status and description will be shown on it. If in an area there are too many Jabber-maniacs, it becomes marked as "crowded area". After clicking on it, you'll see a more detailed map. For example, Northern England.
How to find yourself on that map? It's simple as that. At first, you have to know your geographical coordinates. You can find them at heavens-above.com, www.astro.com or www.calle.com. Then, you have to send them to the project's coordinator (ralphm@ik.nu). After some time you'll get an authorization request from notify@ik.nu, which you have to agree with, and since then you'll be a nice yellow lightbulb (it means you're online) on the Jabber World Map.