School of Everywhere

The School of Everything went international yesterday. We launched in New York at the NY Tech Meetup, which is terribly glamorous of course, but the exciting bit for me was the process back at Everything HQ of getting our new international locations system working. We've implemented the open gazetteer source Geonames as our locations database, so rather than using the very UK-specific "postcode" lookup we're now handling everything based on names of localities. You enter your location, such as "Clapham" or "Felixstowe", we look it up in Geonames and assign you a location on the map. If Geonames picks the wrong Clapham, we've added a neat disambiguation tool so you can choose which Clapham is right for you.

The data is easy to change in the Geonames database (via their site), which means if your location isn't listed currently, you can add it. We're hoping that over time we can encourage lots of web projects to standardise on Geonames, so that in time we can refine it to be a really comprehensive, open geolocations system for everyone to share.

Take a look at www.schoolofeverything.com now, create a teacher profile, have a play with it and let me know what you think. And if you've got friends around the world who have something to teach, tell them about us!