I learned about Google Latitude the day it was introduced but didn’t see it as particularly a news-worthy item primarily because other companies have already done this before, that being to "see where your friends are in real time".

What is news-worthy is that privacy advocates have already stated (yelled would actually be more appropriate) that the system it could could be a potential privacy minefield.

I can see the potential benefits of tracking where people are but I can also see its drawbacks.

An example benefit would be for tracking your children. Your child has a smartphone and you want to have an easy way to know where they are. Latitude would serve you well in that respect.

An example drawback: Google knows physically where you are whenever you use it. That’s a bit scary. I don’t see this technology as "cool" or innovative in that respect.

Hopefully people will understand the difference between "cool" and personal privacy when using this service.

There’s more than a few PCMech readers that are weather geeks (and some of you even have a PWS broadcasted on the internet).

My preferred weather web site of choice is Weather Underground. The best part about that place is that it remains consistent, meaning no wild new changes, no "total redesigns", etc. They have a formula and it works.

Part of what WU offers is semi-live NEXRAD radar reports (it’s updated roughly once every half-hour).

You can in fact put the crosshair on the radar directly over your house if you know your longitude and latitude coordinates.

Here’s how it’s done:

Go get the latitude/longitude coordinates for where you live. This is easily done at geocoder.us. Type in your address there and you’ll get the information you need. Keep this page open as you’ll need to refer back to it in a moment. For my example I’ll use the address of a 7-Eleven in Clearwater, Florida.

Go to WU. At the top where it states "Search", type in your latitude/longitude coordinates instead, like this:

The latitude is first, then a comma, then the longitude. No spaces. (Note: If the longitude as a minus sign in front of it, it must be included as that denotes "West".)

After entering it in, click the "Go" button.

On the next screen, click the small radar map.

You’ll notice the crosshair is directly over your house, pinned down to the exact coordinates.

For further customization, you can animate the map. Under the radar map, try setting "Animate" to 6 frames, the frame delay as medium or slow (makes it easier to see), then click the "Update Radar Map" button at the bottom.

When finished, BOOKMARK it so you don’t have to type in all that coordinate stuff or set your map view preferences all over again.

Here’s an example result. Note the crosshair in the middle; it’s where I want it to be.

Reasons why this is better than a standard radar report:

When a town is listed in the US on a map on the internet, the marker is placed on the center of town. But maybe you don’t live in the center of town (and you most likely don’t). What happens is that when you look up a radar report, the crosshair is not displayed where you physically live, so you have to guess where you are roughly.

If you go by coordinates, this makes it much easier to track what’s going on. For example, if a big storm is coming your way, you can track it almost down to the minute. And being you can zoom the map you can see if you’re going to run into it (such as on a daily commute).

It’s very handy to have something like this bookmarked.

I also recommend doing this for other locations that you frequent (such as where you work, addresses of family members, etc.)

Upon recent acquisition of a Garmin nüvi 270 I found that I had the ability to manually enter in longitude and latitude coordinates for locations. This is a very convenient feature because you can enter in coordinates directly without having to connect the GPS to the computer at all.

For those that would ask “Why can’t I just enter in a street address instead?” You could do that, but this is useful when you’re browsing the map in Google Earth and don’t know what the street address is (but do know the coordinates).

See video below for details.