Join Maps with Photography: Urbanista Diaries for all!

Remember The Urbanista Diaries? Basically a blogger global relay race where one blogger is dropped off somewhere in the world where he or she encounters challenges along the way. The bloggers than had to use the N82 + Sports Tracker combo to document and share the experience as well as using it as a tool to find his or her way to the next blogger who will continue the journey. A few key parts to the Urbanista Diaries has been the N82 + Sports Tracker which helped to pin-point your location using the N82’s built-in GPS and Sports Tracker that recorded all of this in real-time and later uploads it to the web. We can’t forget about the full-size map on the Urbanista site and of course the Urbanista Widget, which displayed your route and pictures on an interactive map. Personally I found the widget handy s you could easily place it on your site or blog and your readers keep track of your location.

Nokia has now released this widget to all, allowing you to customize the look and place it not only on your site or blog, but also on your profile in various social media sites. But the biggest change however is that this time you don’t follow The Urbanist Dairists, but anyone with a Sports Tracker account. You can choose among 20 different colors and even give the widget a name. You are asked to enter the Sports Tracker username you’d like to follow and currently you can choose between Facebook or Blogger widgets. But where is the Wordpress, Typepad and MySpace support? And wouldn’t it be cool if they could create an app specifically for Nseries devices? Or how about a Vista Side Bar Gadget? These are what I think are essential things that they kind of forgot about and I hope they add them fast. The final result can be seen here on the left, with our own customized The Nokia Guide Widget.

Despite the lack of support for Typepad, I used the Blogger app and that worked just fine. Despite these small shortcomings, the addition of having a customizable widget as an add-on to Sports Tracker is excellent idea showing the different evolutionary directions Location-aware application are going. This should be a fun way of keeping track of what friends and family are doing, but also a great way to share your travels or even your daily routine with others. The Widget can be downloaded right here.