Mobile Media Toolkit

Background: Adding Location Information to Mobile Content

What does this article cover?

This Mobile Media Toolkit section covers how reporters can add location information to content on their mobile phones. It will help citizen journalists and reporters understand how location information can add value to content and what technologies make location-aware reporting possible.

Who is this article for?

This article is for anyone who may want to add location information to content. This includes reporters who report on specific communities, reporters who record venue-specific multimedia, or reporters covering events or stories in which the notion of location is relevant. Adding location-based information to content has become so easy that, in many ways, this article is really for any enterprising individual who can think of new ways to organize information using location.

Why should you add location information to mobile content?

First, adding location information to content created from mobile phones is very easy. Second, adding location information to content can make it more valuable. Here are some advantages of location information:

• It provides more context. Location information provides additional context, especially with multimedia.
• It helps you find an interested audience. Users searching for information around specific locations will most easily find information that is tagged with location.
• It lends itself to aggregation. Content with location information can be put on maps and other visualizations, which makes it more appealing for audiences to examine.
• It can be used in pattern-finding. Location information can be easily aggregated in maps and other displays. These aggregations may show interesting patterns that would not be evident from individual reports.
• It can leverage social media. Location-based social media platforms really took off in late 2009 and early 2010. There are opportunities for journalists to leverage such platforms.

Description: Adding Location Information to Mobile Content

In this Mobile Media Toolkit section: Adding location information to photos, videos, and other content uploaded from mobile phones, how location technology works, some of the dangers of location-tagged content.

Landscape: How is Content Tagged with Location Information Significant in Journalism and News Production Today?

Location-based reports are arguably most interesting when viewed in aggregate. As a result, most examples of location-based reporting focus on the aggregation rather than the collection of content.

However, location information as seen from the viewpoint of the creator has also been covered:

• Paul Bradshaw showcases possibilities of using location reporting through Google latitude to present a geographic chronology of a parade.
• Al Jazeera's Baiba Ould Mhadi and May Ying Welsh traveled into the heart of the Sahara desert, and used location tagging to tell a photo story of conflict, uranium, the environment, and ethnic self-determination.
• Chicago Columbia College's Mobile Journalism class had a project called One Year Later where they put up testimonies of what Chicagoans think of Obama one year after the election on a map. Some of the details of how it was done are shared on the class's website.
• The Washington Post has used location-based social media Foursquare in some experiments, using the platform for sharing news about Times Square bombings (and bombing scares), as well as restaurant reviews.
• The Nieman Journalism Lab analyzes the usage, and asks whether such location-based news will become commonplace in the future. Other possibilities of how journalists could use Foursquare (or other such location-based social media) are presented by Journalism professor Jeremy Littau and New Media Editor Paul Balcerak.

More often, however, location-based journalism is presented from the angle of the publisher. Below are some more examples of location-based journalism presented from the perspective of a content publisher who aggregates this information, rather than the individual content creator:

• Locast is a location-based storytelling platform in which reporters and tourists tell their stories about a location using video and other tools. Locast superimposes layers of collectively generated information within the physical space to paint an online picture of a space through many lenses.
• Neighbordhoood narratives invites students to share stories using cell phones, GPS devices, and social network games to change students' knowledge related to physical space.
• Ushahidi is a tool that was originally created to map post-election violence in Kenya, and since then has been used in many different contexts to illuminate situations by aggregating location-based information. The project has a strong focus on enabling mobile phones to contribute to the information that is being aggregated.

Similar examples are collected on LoJoConnect.com, a site set up by students in 2008 exploring the intersections of location and journalism, and MobileStoryTelling.net, set up by former journalist Brett Oppegard, who has been collecting examples related to mobile storytelling.

How To Use a Mobile Phone to Report Location-based Information

In this Toolkit section, we will focus on the tools and techniques that you can use to add location-based information to content. We will first go through the simplest way to tag content with location -- using a physical address. The more technical ways, such as using GPS or triangulation techniques, will be next. We will cover the technology behind location-based services, including several examples of how these technologies can be made accessible to reporters or citizen reporters creating location-tagged reports.

Option 1: Geocoding addresses

Accessing location-based services on a mobile phone usually requires a smartphone that is programmable, and has GPS and a data connection.

For those without, the simplest way of adding location information to content is to just use addresses and other geospatial information. Street addresses, zip codes, and other geographical data can be converted to geographic coordinates using a process called "geocoding." There are many services that will let you geocode addresses worldwide (better resources are available for the U.S.), although we have found none that a mobile without data access can use. On a mobile web browser, GeoNames worked well for us. There are several other geocoding APIs available, which allow web and SMS applications to be built on top of them.

Option 2: Locating the mobile phone automatically

The other option is to let software on your mobile phone automatically find your location. Doing this requires a phone that has GPS hardware, or one that can run software which can access your network setting. The following subsections will explain why (including how the underlying technology works) and how to use automatic location.

Understand the technology

Before you use a service to get your mobile phone's location, it is important to understand the technology behind locating a cell phone. Skyhook wireless provides an overview here, and Ryan Sarver provides another here. The main techniques use GPS, Wi-Fi triangulation, cell-tower triangulation, or hybrid methods that combine the above. GPS and Wi-Fi triangulation are handset-based, so require adequate handset support (see an incomplete list of GPS-enabled handsets here and phones with Wi-Fi here). Wi-Fi triangulation also needs a database of Wi-Fi networks and associated locations, which providers like Skyhook can provide. Cell-tower triangulation is network-based, and therefore requires support from networks or third-party vendors with access to network data.

Mobile location services

Automatically adding mobile location to your content depends on the type of content you are creating or submitting.

Publishing content to blogging or microblogging platforms is the easiest way to publish location information. In our comparisons of publishing platforms (for both mobile blogging and mobile microblogging tools), we have included location support in the list of features supported. Some publishing platforms offer support through the mobile web, while others have location support when you use their apps. Besides blogging and microblogging tools, there are also specifically location-based social networking tools like Brightkite, Google Latitude and Gypsii, Four Square, Gowalla, and many, many more. While these may not be designed for publishing (any content beyond location), they can often be creatively used for journalistic purposes.

For generic content, you might develop an application that can access your mobile's location. This can either be done by accessing the handset's GPS directly, or by using a web application that interfaces with a location-aware API (application protocol interface). For handset-based applications, our article on mobile application development will be helpful, even though the article focuses on content delivery. One particularly useful starting point may be the open source gReporter tool. Another useful starting point is a location-based platform with an open API, like Google Latitude. Google Latitude is a location-based service that lets users update their location on the Latitude servers, and share it with friends whenever they wish. By building an application using Google Latitude API, your users can leverage the existing Latitude apps and features for reporting location, and simply do something interesting with that location. Yahoo offers a similar location-based API with Fireeagle.

Option 3: The online platforms that enable it all

To have interesting location-based reporting, journalists need to think about the online platform where the information is aggregated and displayed, in addition to the mobile phone that is uploading location information. Paul Bradshaw's parade uses Google Latitude very creatively, for example. Most tools won't be built for journalism or publishing, but can be used creatively for these purposes.

Some of these tools, as well as the information on publishing and delivering content, are available in other articles in the toolkit. The article on delivering location-based news and information can be helpful in thinking about how the content is finally delivered to the user (and the tools that enable such delivery). See our article on mapping SMS-based incident reports for two tools that can aggregate location information well.

Limitations of Adding Location Information to Mobile Content

While there are some good examples of both journalists and citizen journalists reporting content with location information, location services still have a few problems associated with them:

• Citizen journalists and reporters reporting information with location information need to keep the security and privacy of anyone appearing in that content, and themselves, in mind. The EFF guide to locational privacy shows many ways in which knowing someone's location can reveal potentially sensitive information about their lives, as do sites like Please Rob Me. In repressive media environments, or in human rights reporting, the citizen journalists or the reporter in question may be in danger from the government or other sources of repression. It is essential that reporters and citizen journalists keep both these implications in mind when reporting content with embedded location information. Some techniques that are worth keeping in mind with regards to protecting locational privacy and security, while still providing information to users, are listed below.
  • Providing "fuzzy," or granular, location information: instead of recording and reporting precise location along with content, you can report or record the city or neighborhood.
  • Use anonymizing tools to de-link yourself from the content: using TOR or other anonymizing tools when uploading location-based content can dissociate citizen journalists or reporters from being verified as authors of content. If you use TOR properly, you can prevent your internet service provider from finding out what you are browsing (or uploading). With TOR, you can also prevent the website you are browsing from finding out where you are browsing from. Using TOR, you can dissociate yourself from content that doesn't have clues about you in the first place.
  • Scrubbing user location from media you upload: many mobile phones automatically append location information to photographs and videos. This includes mobile phones that have GPS as well as mobiles that can triangulate location based on cellular network or Wi-Fi data. The location data is stored in the EXIF data of your images. If this data is not removed, a user inspecting the photo can find out where (and when) the photograph was taken. It is always best to check the EXIF data on your photos before uploading them somewhere. A good tool for Windows and UNIX systems is EXIF tool, a good tool for Firefox users on any operating system is the EXIF viewer plug-in, and for macs there is EV. There is also a web-based EXIF viewer that you can use right from your mobile phone (although be careful using a web-based service for sensitive photos; the server will have access to the information, as will your Internet Service Provider). If you do notice that there is location data stored with your multimedia content that you would not like to reveal, you can modify the photograph to remove the EXIF location data. You can also choose photo-uploading services (like Flickr) that will let you choose whether to scrub the location EXIF data when you upload photographs. See also this MobileActive.org how-to guide and screencast on removing location information from content.
• Availability: location information isn't always available on basic handsets. The only option available on the mobile web and feature phones is address-based geocoding, which tends to have good support only in select countries (like the United States).
• The way to access most network triangulation and Wi-Fi triangulation services is through corporate providers. Wariness is needed in repressive environments about what is done with location information.
• Reporters or citizen journalists covering potentially sensitive material have to be very wary of location-based reporting. If the wrong individual or group has access to specific location information, they may be able to harass sources or otherwise cause problems.