Latest From Twitter
Nominations for the Realex supported Irish Web Awards 2010 have been announced and I’m delighted to see that Lost and Found Pets Ireland have been nominated in three categories no less, two of them big surprises to me, ‘Best Facebook Page for a Business or Organisation’, ‘Best SME/Small Business Website’ and ‘Most Useful Website in Ireland’. Given that they had about 700 unique websites nominated by over 600 people and a few 1000 sites in total nominated, to make it into the nominations already feels like an achievement for ‘the little site that could’ and we wear our ‘nominated’ badge with pride.
A big thanks to all who took the time to go nominate us. Its also great to see some of my own pet nominations on the list. Best of luck to all of you as judging commences!
Well the title says it all. Today we started providing the facility to geotag the lost and found pet listings posted to the site via a simple map interface in our listing submission wizard.
While we are not the first Irish site to do this (though it could be a first that we’re not the first doing something 
), I think we push this technology significantly beyond what others are doing with it as we are adding the geolocation information to each listing page in machine readable micro format which should help with rankings for location based searches via Google and the other search engines. In addition we are geotagging our listing tweets on Twitter and our pet photo posts to Flickr where they will automagically appear on our map. We are also including the geolocation information in our lost and found pets listings RSS feeds.
With Facebook (where we recently welcomed our 1,000th fan) rumoured to be on the verge of allowing users and developers to leverage geolocation information in apps and posts, and with the latest version of Firefox and those with GPS equipped phones now able to share their location with websites, we see a great opportunity to provide more relevant information to our users.
The site now features an map view of all current lost and found pet listings in Ireland on our site for a bird’s eye view and each geotagged listing comes complete with its own map.
As with all new features, your feedback is more than welcome.
The Lost and Found Pets Ireland Latest Listing gadget is now published for all those using a customised iGoogle homepage. The gadget automatically lists up to 5 of the latest listings on the site and the listings displayed can be filtered by status (lost or found), county and pet type.
It is also worth mentioning that this kind of Google gadget can be embedded in any other web page with just a couple of lines of cut n’ paste code.
For more see The Lost and Found Latest Listings Gadget page in the iGoogle Content Directory.
Live Gadget Preview
