BarCampSheffield: Geocaching

May 26th, 2007 by Alistair MacDonald Leave a reply »

Today I am attending BarCampSheffield being hosted by PlusNet. It is naturally good to catch up with Tom, Dave, and a few other familiar faces, but it is great to meet new people who are new to the BarCamp game.

I decided to do my presentation on the hi-tech treasure hunt game Geocaching. The broad concept of the game is to hide a “cache” with a log book and publish the GPS coordinates online, then someone uses this information for find it.

The most common place to publish the location of your cache and find others is Geocaching.com. This site is operated by Groudspeak in the United States. There are a number of caches around PlusNet that we may go look for later.

There are a number of other resources that are worth noting. The most useful to the UK based cacher is GeocacheUK.com that collates statistics about caching and allows advanced searching. Trigpointing is also a site that appeals to may people who are drawn to caching. Waymarking.com is another GPS site that evolved from Geocaching.com and is also operated by Groudspeak. There is also an organisation called the Geocaching Association of Great Britain that consists of UK Geocachers and helps with may things including getting permission to place caches on private land.

A big well done and thank you to the team who put together BarCampSheffield, and thanks to Stuart Grimshaw for taking the photograph above and releasing it under the creative commons. All my BarCamp images are released under Creative Commons.

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3 comments

  1. I enjoyed your talk Alistair, mainly because it was something new, all my favorites today were about things I hadn’t heard before.

    I particularly enjoyed the card game, and Sue’s talk about online psychology & social networks.

    Looking forward to tomorrows demos too, but having seen some of the other stuff, I just hope my effort stands up to the competition ;-)

  2. Jezu says:

    Good stuff, Al. I have really enjoyed it… And thanks for attending my presentation!

  3. Tom Scott says:

    I really enjoyed the talk, and it was good to catch up. See you at another BarCamp soon, hopefully!

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