Latitude, Longitude, and Address... the Dummy Comparison

It's sad, but true, that a great many people out there writing for pennies have abso-lute-ly no idea what they're talking about (not unlike many a political commentator). We catch these faking freelancers making some of the most bizarre misstatements and misconceptions, which certainly makes it hard to believe anything else in that particular snippet of content. Take, for instance, eHow.com's Matt McGew, whom we caught attempting to tell people unlucky enough to read GoneOutdoors.com "How to Find Addresses Using Latitude Longitude."¹

What tipped off our researcher that McGew's post might be a viable DotD candidate (besides the J-school graduate's previous award) was the ham-fisted daffynition of latitude and longitude in his introduction:

"Latitude is the horizontal measurement used to describe a point on the earth's surface. Longitude, on the other hand, is the vertical measurement used to describe a point on the earth's surface."

Poor Matt apparently thinks only in terms of the world map on the wall of his fifth-grade classroom: "horizontal"? "vertical"? No, Matt, vertical means "up from the surface," not "north-south." Once McGew got that bit of claptrap out of the way, though, he sent people to a cluster of  online mapping applications. No problem there, although one of his references is a little on the "general" site. All of them use publicly available geocoding databases (the technical term for matching an address to a location).
Where Matt blew it, however, is that he never mentioned the easiest way for most people to match an address to lat-long coordinates, one that you can even use on a mobile device: use Google Maps.

• Type the latitude and longitude in the search bar, separated by a comma. South latitudes and west longitudes are assigned negative values, e.g., 39.982637, -87.056628
• Search
• Zoom in on the red balloon, known as a "pin" to Google Maps.
• Touch or click on the balloon. 
• Read the address from the popup: (near) 107 Main Cross Street, Alamo, Indiana, USA 47916

There: wasn't that easier than using one of McGew's references, especially on your smartphone? Not to mention that it's as easy (if not easier) to perform the same lat-long search in MapQuest. Did our Dumbass of the Day know about that? Apparently Matt did not...

¹ The original has been deleted by Leaf Group, but can still be accessed using the Wayback machine at archive.org. Its URL was   goneoutdoors.com/how-to-find-addresses-using-latitude-longitude-12488894.html

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