I’ve been messing with a lot of DNS stuff lately, and thought I’d point out http://www.ckdhr.com/dns-loc/. This is a site that encourages people to add LOC records to their DNS zones. Basically, this adds latitude and longitude data to a domain’s information. While the design of the internet makes physical location pretty much irrelevant, it can be handy. It is useful for visual traceroute applications, logging internet trends, and just plain old curiosity. In the future it could be used for many things, such as smart mirror selection. Rather than being presented with a page of 50 links and instructions to “Choose the closest server”, it could compare your location to the servers’ locations and choose for you.

It’s easy to add a LOC record to your DNS zone. ZoneEdit even includes an entry for it. If you don’t have your own GPS receiver, you can use Geocode Eagle to determine the coordinates for your address. If you’re not concerned with being perfectly accurate or don’t want to give away the exact location of your server for security reasons, AirNav lists the locations of US airports. Simply pick one in your city and use its coordinates. You haven’t given away anything about your server that some simple snooping on the IP range wouldn’t turn up, but you’ve made it much easier for the average person to know where on the globe your server sits.

If you have access to your own DNS zone and no extremely good reason not to, I’d like to encourage you to add a LOC record. It’s one of those things that requires very little effort but can provide great benefits. The more people use LOC records, the more useful they become as well. Maybe some day we’ll be able to create a geographical map of the internet because of this little bit of effort…