Yahoo’s Fire Eagle, launched in beta a few weeks ago at SXSW, can accept, store and share location data with a growing number of applications including zonetag, dopplr, movabletype and twitter.
I haven’t had much time to play around with it and, as one of my twitter friends put it, had failed to have a "wow moment" with fire eagle until a few minutes ago when I came across wikinear which could prove pretty useful, particularly at times when I unexpectedly find myself with a few free minutes or hours to do some sightseeing when someplace unfamiliar.
Wikinear, as I understand it, picks up (after I’ve authorised it to do so) my location data from fire eagle. It then pulls in the entries for the five wikipedia entries closest to that location. The pages are optimised for viewing on a mobile phone screen.
In the screenshot below, you can see my location at the Broadcast Centre, BBC White City Media Village in London, along with five wikipedia entries, all for places that are, or previously existed, within a few hundred feet of that location:
