This site keeps track of a large number of ships in near realtime, using GPS as the source of positon data. There are facilities for finding ships by name, call sign, and more. I’m not sure what fraction of ships are participating, but when you look at the world map it’s clearly quite a large number of vessels.
Having spent time at sea myself (in the U.S. Navy), I can easily imagine how wonderful this web site must be for the friends and relatives of the cargo ships' crew members. Anytime they want to, they can see exactly where their loved ones are.
And of course there are numerous practical uses as well: identifying ships in the way of storms, or those nearby someone who needs help, and so on.
This is a terrific example of several technologies (GPS, web, radio in this case) being used together in a novel way to provide a capability I’m sure nobody anticipated even just a few years ago…
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