Why should you care about Yahoo's release of Fire Eagle? Because the release of this online tool will be useful for websites that want to adjust services to your current location.

In other words, a means to determine a surfer's location is useful to commercial websites, which can offer advertisers a means of adjusting their messages to suit a particular online viewer.

We are not just talking about locating which country or city you might be in, but also your exact longitude and latitude, pinpointing what street you may be on at a particular moment.

A lot of people, including myself, believe such a service will be very useful. For example if you want to find out information about what restaurants or tourist attractions are nearby, a site can use Fire Eagle to send you a list of recommendations.

Fire Eagle is what is called a meta-application, one that uses geo-location tools, such as a cellphone or even a laptop connected to a Wi-Fi point, to determine a person's position.

The application allows you to send updates from your phone, or manually update your location through a website. You can also control who sees the data, and how much of it you share with others.

However, a geo-location tool that sits in the background of a website can be abused if Yahoo eventually removes its privacy pledge, or developers come up with a work around.

Yahoo promises: "Fire Eagle is the secure and stylish way to share your location with sites and services online while giving you unprecedented control over your data and privacy. We're here to make the whole web respond to your location and help you to discover more about the world around you."

Privacy is protected further through via a regular email from Yahoo, which asks whether you want to continue sharing your location information, or delete it.

Among the sites currently using Fire Eagle are Brightkite (location-based social network); Dash (Internet-connected GPS navigation system for traffic monitoring); Dipity (create and share interactive stories); Dopplr (allows travellers to share their itineraries with others); ekit (communications provider to international travellers); Lightpole (mobile application service provider); Movable Type (publishing platform for building interactive websites, blogs and social networks); Navizon (software-only wireless positioning system that uses Wi-Fi locations so a user can determine location); and Outside.in Radar (personalised local news).

Permission-based data collection is good, and Yahoo has made the correct moves to placate privacy concerns - for now. However I am going to wait and see how the service is used before I come to any more conclusions. Check Fire Eagle out for yourself at: http://fireeagle.yahoo.net. What do you think?

Among those, businesses might be interested in Dopplr, an online tool for frequent flyers. Business travellers and others can input their entire schedule into Dopplr, and then share it with friends.

I can imagine that a business might also be able to keep tabs on where employees are by getting them to regularly update their location online (www.dopplr.com).

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Last week I mentioned how YouTube had launched itself as a global broadcaster with the decision by the Olympic governing body to make it the official site for providing coverage of the games to countries that do not have full access to all the events.

Now it seems YouTube is actively deepening such a development. In September YouTube will be asking professional and aspiring journalists to submit a profile of someone in their community that the "world should know about".

The site identifies the competition as part of its new "journalism programme". What journalism programme? Each submission must be under three minutes long and in English. All content must be original and created by the reporter.

The competition will be launched in September, says Journalism.co.uk, quoting an email from Olivia Ma, who has the title of "news manager" at YouTube.

"Technology has fundamentally changed the way we produce, gather, share, and consume news - and thousands of people from every corner of the globe are using YouTube to share important stories with the rest of the world," said Ma in the email

"The goal of this project is to provide everyday citizens with a platform to tell stories that aren't traditionally covered in the mainstream media."

The three-minute video will be the first assignment of the new service. Citizen journalism has just got a big boost! Time for me to retire? Say it is not so.

If you have any comments, contact Ahmed at elamin.ahmed@gmail.com