If anyone has ever played with MSN’s Virtual Earth, and in particular, the Microsoft Location Finder, you may have stumbled upon one of the more ingenious things in wifi technology.

Although LF can trace an IP address well, most users are not actually at the location of their IP address. IPs are assigned to the ISP so, for instance, my address traces to Upper Marlboro, MD where my Comcast IP is assigned from. However, if you’re on WiFi, VE can triangulate your location to within 60-80m of your acctual location.

As an example, when I was in NYC, Jeremy and I were playing with the tool. Here is how VE located us:

That’s about 100 yards off. Not too bad at all.

What kind of good blogger would I be if I didn’t have an idea for this? My idea would be to triangulate location when posting via WiFi and have it included in a blog post.

After looking at the VE API, I realized this would not be possible. I wrote to the team looking for some guidance. Jeremy, who knows Microsoft fairly well, seemed to think the VE team would be fairly responsive but it has been a few days now. I think this would be a fantastic piece of the API should they choose to implement it.

We’ll see.

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