Geon is an information aggergator and requesting system that is centered around any location you choose in the world. Currently it aggregates feeds of information from services like Twitter, Youtube and Flickr and presents them in an organised format based around their location. Below is a quick start guide on how to get started with Geon and some of its available features.

First point your browser at https://therefinedgeek.com.au/geon-beta or click the link at the start of this page. Geon requires the latest version of Microsoft’s Silverlight to use which is available from here or you will be redirected from the Geon home page to install it. Once you have Silverlight installed you will then see the picture below when you browse to Geon (click any of the pictures below for a larger view):

Now think of a location that you’d like to see some information about, say Canberra. To get to that location you can left click anywhere on the map to move it around. To get a closer look at a location you can zoom in (highly reccomend you do!) with your mouse’s scroll wheel or the zoom bar on the left hand side of the map. Once you’ve found the location you want to look at click the location button on the left hand tool bar and then click on the location you want to watch. Once you’ve done that you’ll see a circle appear which will display the name of the location you clicked on:

The area the circle covers on is where Geon will draw the information you’re interested from. To add in information feeds click a service in the left hand side, say Twitter or Images, and near the circle you put down earlier. This will add the information feed to the location and Geon will begin aggregating the requested information for you immediately. After you do this the map should look something like this:

To see the information that Geon has gathered you now need to switch to the Information view, which you can do by clicking the button at the top left hand side of the page. Once you do this you will be presented with all the information currently available from those feeds in the area you selected:

You can add multiple locations to the map and multiple feeds to each location. This lets you build a rich information landscape of locations you are interested in and Geon will constantly search the areas for updated information. You can switch back to the map view by clicking the switch button again in the top left hand corner. Each area you select will be displayed on a separate location row on the information view, as below:

In high population areas you might find that you get quite a lot of information that might not be completely relevant to what you want. In that case you can filter a specific feed down to a particular topic, say cheese. You can do this by clicking anywhere on the information feed itself, either on the map or information view. This will bring up a dialog box that will allow you to enter in a text filter for that feed which will then trigger Geon to search the area again for your topic of choice. You can use this feature to have two of the same information feeds displaying different information from the same location. The title of the feed will also be updated to reflect that it is filtered:

If you have any questions please feel free to leave a comment below or email me at therefinedgeek@gmail.com.