Dizzysoft Software

Way back in the nineties the world was consumed with looking for a man named Waldo. He was a goofy character with funny glasses who couldn’t seem to stay in one place. You might say the same about U2’s famous front man- Bono. As an avid U2 fan, I enjoy keeping up with the exploits of their outspoken lead sinner. But there is a problem- how can I keep up with such a globetrotter? Where’s Bono?

Thanks to the power of RSS, U2 fans can always keep up with Bono- not in a big-brother/creepy stalker way. Let me show you how.

Follow up:

Is there a place we can go, that is constantly updated with the latest information from all over the world, that might be able to tell us where Bono is? Hey, let’s try a search engine. The next question becomes, “what should we search for?” We want to know where Bono is. What would a statement declaring Bono’s location look like? “Bono is in Dublin,” for example. That means we’ll need to search for the phrase “Bono is in” and let the web supply the remaining part of the sentence. The quotes on the phrase are important- without them the search will return any result with any combination of those words, not necessarily in that order. Looking at the search results, we need to tweak the phrase a little. For one, we are getting a lot of out of date and irrelevant results (such as “in my cell phone” or about Sonny Bono). Let’s tweak the search phrase to include “U2″ and change the verb to the past tense- “was". That means our specific search phrase becomes:
U2 "Bono was in"
Again, the quotes are important. If we were to include the band’s name in the quotes, we would only get results that have that exact phrase. Since we are just looking for articles that mention the band but also specifically state where Bono was, this will work just fine. Unfortunately that will mean we are always a step behind Bono- since the results will always be in the past tense, but who do we think we are that we could keep up with him anyway? Chuck Norris?

Next, we’ll need an RSS feed that tells us where Bono was. Yahoo! is great for this since its search results are accessible in an RSS format. An RSS feed helps us because it will automatically inform us when Google finds something new in the given search parameter. Without an RSS feed we would have to constantly enter our search parameter into the Yahoo! search engine and check for new results ourself. So enter the search phrase in Yahoo! and grab the RSS feed that results.

With our RSS feed we will constantly be able to keep track of where Bono has been. That’s great and all but it’s a very plain way to describe such an interesting guy. Let’s try to wash our new RSS feed through the GeoRSS converter. If we were to visit http://www.geonames.org/rss-to-georss-converter.html we could supply a RSS feed and get the results placed on a map for us. That way we can see all the places Bono has been.

There are lots of options on that site. The best one I found with this endeavor is the Acme GeoRSS Viewer. It says this was the first, but it seems to work the best. Just supply your new “Where’s Bono” RSS feed to the textbox and press the “Convert and View on ACME viewer” button and now you can see all the places Bono’s been. Come back to this map any time you want to see there Bono’s been lately and it will automatically be updated with the latest news from the Web.

If you want to take this a step further, you can select the “via google maps” tag at the bottom of the page. This will take you directly to the Google Maps site where you can view the results through their interface. From the Google Map page you can find the code to embed the current (and constantly updated) map on your own website. If you select “Street View.” Zoom down to a place Bono’s been and you might even be able to walk the same streets he walked- except those streets will have names.