Sometimes you need to say something anonymously or under a pseudonym, and until now it’s felt fairly safe to do that when blogging or commenting on blogs, secure in the knowledge that neither your name nor your location can be easily traced.

But now, it seems that those days are coming to an end as WordPress introduce ‘geotags’: see A Blog Near You and the Geotag Support Page to find out all about it. Thankfully they’ve made it an opt-in service, otherwise every time you posted or commented, you’d find not only the date and time but also your location neatly appended to your post.

Perhaps I’m being paranoid, but to me this seems a tag too far: it feels far too much like spyware and I’ll be leaving it turned off for all my blogs. Thanks, WordPress people, but no thanks.

這次新增功能加了現在流行的人臉辨識、在Google Map Tag…..

這次新增功能加了現在流行的人臉辨識、在Google Map Tag…..你拍照的位置及在相片中Multi Tags(可Tag下多個分類標記)，暫時只有英文版，中文要稍後才有。

http://picasa.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=93773

Every so often, as regular as the arrival of yet another UK non-Summer, comes news of another apparent government IT project ‘failure’.

Much in the same way as people seem to be greeting the current travails of the Newspaper industry with some sadistic relish, news that a few million has been spiffed on a grand project that has failed to do what it was supposed to, delivers a similar public response.

Everybody feigns surprise at the news at first and then has a good old moan about how all technology is useless, misuse of public funds and modern life being rubbish. And then promptly forgets about it until the next time it happens.

The first government IT project in this country was not exactly a roaring success either. The government saw a fantastic demo given by an enthusiastic entrepreneur, bought into the panacea described and dropped a fair wodge of public cash with a start-up, who promptly burned through the cash in a few months and delivered absolutely nothing back in return.

Another take of modern life being rubbish ? Not really. This was 1822. The entrepreneur ? Charles Babbage. The product ? The Difference Engine.

When Microsoft by-lined Bing as ‘The Decision Engine’, I winced slightly with Babbage in mind. Last weekend, before is was formally available, I wrote of my hope that we might finally see a proper search ‘product’ that utilised some of the best practice you can find in the vertical search market. Then it launched. My shoulders slumped after a few minutes of play and I went back to hoping again.

‘Google Squared’ – another beta arrival from the Google’s big house of endless betas – popped up in the second half of the week and was at least entertaining in its inability to handle fairly basic complex linguistic searches (especially if you add a geographical element to the search query).

This weeks crop of betas has not been all uninspiring though. From the folks at MySociety (and paid for by Channel 4’s 4ip investment fund) comes ‘Mapumental‘. Whilst it’s in invite-only beta right now, there is an introductory video to watch whilst you wait for an invitation to run up in your inbox.

The principle is pretty simple. Let’s say you’re considering a new job, simply enter the postcode of the location you will be working at (UK only I’m afraid) and by selecting a map location, it will tell you the estimated journey time by public transport (using public data).

The map itself can be manipulated in a couple of other ways. By setting a maximum time that you are prepared to drag yourself out of bed in the morning, the map will show you the places that you can realistically live and still be at your desk by 9am. You can then set a property value – based on the average sale price, itself public data again – and the map will further refine the areas showing you where you can afford to live.

Finally, to gild the lily further, you can set a final control called ‘Scenicness’, which can be set to show only those places remaining that have been scored as being having varying degrees of ‘prettiness’ (via the MySociety’s photo scoring site ‘Scenic’). Ok, this bit isn’t especially scientific, especially when the places voted as being most scenic tend to be those without actual houses or places of work. Still, nice idea in principle.

The tool itself is a great deal of fun to play with and the results are a useful guide… however, if MySociety are suggesting that it is possible to commute into Central Southampton from Sandown, IOW in 2 hours by public transport, then I suggest that they’ve never attempted that journey (train, ferry, train) for real. However good the tool is, it’s still relying on the quality of the data that supplies the abstraction.

Given our national obsession with property and property prices, it is no wonder that  some of the best vertical search tools of this type come from the UK. Looking at Globrix – a UK-based property search tool – is a good example of how using the detailed data that can be extracted from text can provide a high quality of user experience.

In my recent search trilogy I discussed the idea of ‘Aboutness’, basically the understanding of what information a piece of content contains, and how we can use that information (‘Metadata’) to drive the sort of user experiences that keep people on our sites longer. Globrix uses some of these ideas – for instance finding linguistic  ‘concepts’ within the property detail text – and allowing those to be used to refine search. Location information via Postcode drives a map abstraction of these results produced in real time. It’s an impressive effort.

Obviously this sort of mapping and the use of ‘geodata’ is a key for organisations for whom property is their key business, but how can other content-heavy organisations like Newspapers use some of this technology to help develop their own user experience ?

News content is often heavy with geographical information. Many of the most persuasive ‘keywords’ – those terms we use intuitively to make our split-second decisions on whether to read or ignore – are those that tell us how ‘close’ this content is to us. This is not the just high level terms like country, but more distinct…. city, town, district, even landmark.

As previously discussed, manually adding relevant tags to content quickly becomes difficult when you are dealing with large scale operations. Add into that the requirements of geographic information and the task becomes even more daunting. What are these requirements ?

Well, with a normal tag, it is just the descriptive term itself that might be required (e.g. simple : ‘politics’ or complex : ‘council elections’). If we want to start utilising geographical tag data, then this this needs to be far more distinct, especially if we want to start tying this together with mapping applications. Aside from the ‘disambiguation’ that we discussed before with reference to ‘People’ (but is equally valid with ‘Places’ as placenames are far from unique) to be able to map the stories we need to know where they actually are, with a great deal of precision.

In Nstein’s Text Mining Engine (TME), we automatically apply additional geodata to those ‘Places’ that TME automatically detects within text. This geodata is supplied in two forms:

- Co-ordinates : The traditional longitude/latitude ‘Sexagesimal’ information.
- WGS-84 : The same data as your car’s GPS / Sat Nav uses to build maps and that used by almost all online mapping applications.

Adding this information turns your ‘tags’ into ‘geotags‘. Once you have this information, you can display your content not only by subject maps (like our previously discussed ‘Topic Pages’), but geographical maps. For a demonstration using Nstein’s WCM product, we built a a simple widget using Google Maps, which showed editorial staff at a glance the geographical ‘Aboutness’ spread of their content, using the geotags generated by TME, displayed on a Google Maps globe.

Google Maps of course is just a start. For example if Google Latitude starts to get real user adoption  – the upcoming iPhone version will surely help that process – then ‘News content about where I am right now’ will be a viable option for mobile users. Ally this with (user opt-in) advertising content…. and there are some interesting applications on the horizon.

Matt Mullen is an Industry Consultant at Nstein Technologies [http://www.nstein.com].

“… at an airport the individual is defined, not by the tangible ground mortgaged into his soul for the next 40 years, but the indeterminate flicker of flight numbers trembling on an annunciator screen. We are no longer citizens with civic obligations, but passengers for whom all destinations are theoretically open, our lightness of baggage mandated by the system. Airports have become a new kind of discontinuous city, whose vast populations, measured by annual passenger throughputs, are entirely transient, purposeful and, for the most part, happy.”

J.G. Ballard 1930 – 2009

Airports hold a particular fascination, dystopian near-miss 1950s futures forked somewhere back in 1967. Like miniature Metropolises, with shops and gyms and showers and bars, utilities, police forces and mail services, museums, hotels and meeting rooms, magic moving walkways with phasing soundtracks all of their own. Towering brave architecture, archingly high ceilings hinting at wind blown Tallships setting sail out towards exotic lands and the sinking horizon. Or slabs of post-military-undustrial concrete, smoothed to the curves needed to accommodates the passing hordes of a yet unwritten Romero movie.

So what of these mini cities?

Dopplr sends me emails, citing when my friends are traveling around the world. At any one time, give or take a few days, there’s generally someone I know passing through an airport. Millions of other people are flowing through these citadels to modern travel each day.

Crunching down time, overlapping those days, collapsing each airport to its own naked singularity, we all have the same general experiences, move in unison on the same magic walkways, each taking our own 2.5 hours to pass through the system.

When I see that someone is flying to Chicago, I can instantly hear the distinctive clack clack clack sound of suitcase wheels on the O’Hare tiles. London Heathrow, Terminal 4, the long distant but still present dull bitter tang of worn Silk Cut imbued carpets. SFO, the monorail symmetry and looping arrival/departure roads.

Back to Flickr.

Flickr (to me) is about more than just photos (and videos) it’s about sharing experiences. People take photos to record their story of passing though a location or event. Flickr collects and collates those stories. That’s kinda where the Places idea grew from.

Places pages are for Cities, and Towns and Villages … and now even neighborhoods, for people treading the same footsteps but at different times. For many of us, the Airport is also a Place …

… and yet, a while back if you geotagged a photo taken at Heathrow Airport (for example) Flickr would say it was taken in the London Borough of Hounslow. When you arrive, depart or pass through Heathrow Airport, you don’t really think “My, that London Borough of Hounslow is a terribly busy place” while at the same time Hounslow probably doesn’t think of itself as having 1/4 million people passing through it each day … even though this is true.

Which is why, at some point, it changed, to this…

http://www.flickr.com/places/LHR
… and this …
http://www.flickr.com/places/LAX
… and this …
http://www.flickr.com/places/FRA
… and this …
http://www.flickr.com/places/CDG
… and this …
http://www.flickr.com/places/AMS
… and this …
http://www.flickr.com/places/HKG
… and this …
http://www.flickr.com/places/ORD
… and this …
http://www.flickr.com/places/SFO

Well, you get the idea …

Collecting together our transient, purposeful and, for the most part, happy airport experiences.

Photos from Daniel H. Agostini aka dhammza, Telstar Logistics, heather and straup.

Quanto mais eu uso o Flickr, mais fico espantado com a quantidade de ferramentas e possibilidades que ele nos oferece. Alguns preferem se ater ao básico: fazer o upload, mandar o link para os amigos e família e deu. Ficam por aí. Tudo depende da necessidade do usuário. Eu vejo como uma tremenda ferramenta de pesquisa para idéias, conceitos, linguagens e uma excelente fonte de informação sobre fotografia.

Existem algumas ferramentas que podem te ajudar a extrair mais do site. Dá uma olhada: 

Multicolr Search Lab – Desenvolvido pela Idée Labs, esta ferramenta permite pesquisar imagens dentro do Flickr através de similaridade de cores. É possível selecionar até dez tonalidades de cores diferentes na paleta do site para que a pesquisa seja iniciada ou alterada. Você pode até adicionar a mesma cor várias vezes, para que esta tonalidade se sobressaia em relação as outras. Clicando em uma das imagens do resultado da pesquisa, você irá diretamente para a página do autor.

Compfight – Tags são muito importantes. A maioria das pessoas não se dá ao trabalho de adicioná-las aos arquivos. É uma pena, pois elas aumentam seus views a disponibilizam sua imagem para pesquisas em sites de busca, no próprio Flickr ou em ferramentas específicas como o Compfight. Nele você pesquisa imagens por temas, através de tags. Basta digitar um tema e o resultado aparece. No exemplo acima, digitei a tag “blumenau”.

FlickrRiver - Semelhante ao Compfight. A diferença é que nele, além das tags, é possível pesquisar por usuário, por grupos ou ainda temas genéricos. É legal para navegar de uma forma dinâmica entre temas específicos.

Geotags - Quem não usa, deveria pelo menos tentar. Quando se posta uma foto, tem uma opção que se chama “Adicionar a seu mapa“. Lá você marca uma referência geográfica, que fica indexada ao arquivo. Algumas câmeras mais novas já fazem isso automaticamente, mas a maioria tem que adicionar na mão mesmo. Isso facilita bastante na hora de procurar fotos de uma determinada região, mas sem ser necessariamente uma foto da cidade. Exemplo: posso pesquisar sobre fotos que foram tiradas em Londres, mas não da cidade em si, que não possuam a tag “Londres/London”.

Faça alguns testes! Pesquise e extraia o máximo possível do Flickr. Você vai se impressionar com os resultados.

Zie hier een Google map van Lissabon. Ik heb er alvast de bestemmingen van onze eerste dag ingezet. Klik door naar de kaart om ze te bekijken! Je kunt de kaart naar keuze afbeelden als luchtfoto of als kaart, je kunt inzoomen voor de details, en uitzoomen voor het overzicht.

I’ve just made a post over at the Flickr Code Blog: Panda Tuesday; The History of the Panda, New APIs, Explore and You about the new Panda APIs, mainly flickr.panda.getPhotos.

Why, you may ask, is this of interest to your general geoblogger?

Well, when you call the flickr.panda.getPhotos method you pass in the name of one of the Flickr Pandas. In our case we’re interested in Wang Wang the GeoPanda^[*], who supplies us with a stream of geotagged photos. Here’s the API call you’d make …

http://api.flickr.com/services/rest/?method=flickr.panda.getPhotos&api_key=[your API key]&panda_name=wang+wang

… and this is the response …

<rsp stat="ok">
<photos interval="60000" lastupdate="1236129430784" total="80" panda="wang wang">
	<photo title="Evening Vision" id="3326982620" secret="8626d95cb9" server="3373" farm="4" owner="11704283@N07" ownername="njscott-H" latitude="40.54133" longitude="-74.51065" accuracy="11" />
	<photo title="Getting off the Hydrofoil in Paros, Greece" id="3300861831" secret="d29a150e21" server="3338" farm="4" owner="33848747@N02" ownername="micromanager" latitude="37.138424" longitude="25.224609" accuracy="8" />
	<photo title="Paros, Greece" id="3300861823" secret="0d5a05b3c3" server="3568" farm="4" owner="33848747@N02" ownername="micromanager" latitude="37.138424" longitude="25.224609" accuracy="8" />
	<photo title="Beach in Paros, Greece" id="3300861839" secret="ceea8a3bec" server="3561" farm="4" owner="33848747@N02" ownername="micromanager" latitude="37.138424" longitude="25.224609" accuracy="8" />
	<photo title="Juvenile Flathead" id="3327026432" secret="3362f150d0" server="3653" farm="4" owner="28607385@N04" ownername="funkyfoton" latitude="-38.358315" longitude="144.772596" accuracy="12" />
	<photo title="Paros, Greece" id="3300861813" secret="343a068166" server="3645" farm="4" owner="33848747@N02" ownername="micromanager" latitude="37.138424" longitude="25.224609" accuracy="8" />
	... and so on ...
</photos>
</rsp>

… latitudes and longitudes are at the end, if you need to scroll.

This gives you the geotagged photos from the last 60 seconds. If you wanted to show geotagged photos on a map as they (pretty much) get geotagged, this is a good source of them.

The interval and lastupdate values tell you when the information was last updated, and how often it’s updated. So you can tune your application accordingly … i.e. at the moment asking once every 60 seconds should be good enough.

You never know, one day with may even get a XMPP stream going for it.

^*I was hoping to coin the phrase GeoPanda, but alas, it’s been done.

Telégrafo

Ministrei entres os dias 21 e 23 de janeiro a oficina Poéticas da Rede na VI Bienal da Une em Salvador, na Faculdade de Belas Artes – UFBA.

A oficina foi dividida em duas partes, uma teórica e uma prática.

Orson Welles narrando "A Guerra dos Mundos", 1938.

Na teórica, apresentei um panorama das intervenções artisticas em meios de comunicação, ao que chamei de “Poéticas da transmissão”*. Dentre estas intervenções, apresentei primeiramente as experiências pioneiras, que compreendiam intervenções em rádio, televisão, vídeo e telefone, com os artistas Walter Ruttman, Ernie Kovacs, Orson Wells, Nam June Paik, entre outros trabalhos que lidam com as transmissões de ponto a ponto, ou seja, que ainda não se configuravam em rede, como veremos no contemporâneo.

Eduardo Kac - Teleporting An Unknown State, 1994-2003

Na segunda parte, sobre as experiências contemporâneas, os trabalhos passaram pela netart, geolocalização, biocibernética, “artes locativas”, entre outros, a partir de artistas como Eduardo Kac (Teleporting An Unknow State), Antoni Muntadas (www.thefileroom.org), Gilbertto Prado (Desertesejo), Antoni Abad (Canal Motoboy – www.zexe.net), entre muitos outros projetos que configuram seus trabalhos a partir das transmissões em rede.

Vista para o mar a partir do Largo do Campo Grande em Salvador na Bahia. A imagem foi aplicada sobre o mapa da praça a fim de denunciar a perda desta vista por conta das grandes construções ao seu redor.

Já na atividade prática, sugeri que os participantes pensassem sobre a cidade de Salvador, principalmente sobre a arquitetura. Um dos pontos importantes que surgiu, foi que, por conta da especulação imobiliária, prédios foram construídos no alto de grandes avenidas e praças de Salvador, fechando toda e qualquer vista para o mar a partir destes pontos. Desta maneira, entendemos que a fim de privilegiar a vista de 50 ou 100 pessoas, fecharam e introduziram bruscamente prédios nestas áreas com vista para o mar e do alto.

As oficinas aconteceram próximo ao Largo do Campo Grande, portanto, foi ali o local escolhido para criarmos a nossa atividade prática e crítica. Saímos para as ruas e fotografamos tanto o largo, quanto a sua possível vista para o mar, entrando na garagem de um destes prédios que se colocam na frente desta vista. Após estudarmos as imagens, decidimos que como uma espécie de resgate crítico sobre aquela vista, publicaríamos no álbum de fotos geolocalizadas online “Picasa”, a imagem do mar sobre a praça. Como se alguém que fosse navegar por aquela área do mapa, pudesse ter acesso a esta vista, que não existe mais nos últimos anos.

Veja a inserção da imagem no mapa:
http://tinyurl.com/c2yan8

A oficina foi muito produtiva e contou com participantes do Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, Paraíba e Amapá.

* Parte da apresentação “Poéticas da Transmissão” foi construída e orientada pela Profa. Dra. Christine Mello. Em treinamento de ação cultural ao Sesc SP.

The great people of Koinup has released a new feature on their page, Places project.

Some time ago, in a chat with Koinup Burt, one of the founders of Koinup, we were talking about you can geotag RL pics in Flickr… but not SL pics. After some time they developed this Geotagging system for Second Life, using the SLurl system. With this system if you post a pic sending it from SL as a postcard then it will be geotagged automatically, anyway, if you prefer to edit a bit the picture, you can add an SLurl later. The system will group the pics taken in the same region in Widgets one can post in his blog, Facebook, etc…

Anyway, go to Koinup and take a look, they are doing a great job in that page.

The ability to generate a surge of interest in your website can be easily applied from the well documented social news site – Digg

Now the site’s appears to be looking into tying this to geographical locations.

Taken from Webware.com post from Caroline McCarthey on one of Digg’s events;

“A few genuinely good ideas came up: one question suggested “geotagging” for stories to group them into local news stories, something that could make the site legitimately compete with sites like Outside.in and city blog networks like Gothamist. “Yes,” [Kevin] Rose said. “We’ve thought about this as well and it would be really cool if we could start to group different events around you.” Adelson added that Digg has “a few projects on the way…think 2009, realistically, for some of this stuff.”

Once more this indicates a move towards embedding geographic data into posts which is likely to have a long lasting effect on press release copy.

It’s a little odd posting over there but now that Flickr does have a Dev Blog, it kinda makes sense to mostly post Flickr related geo-stuff there. And more comment here, even if I’m still stuck with an utterly dorky theme.

Anyway, recently I made a few posts about our new “corrections” stuff, you can read about it in more general terms on the main Flickr Blog: Introducing a new way to geotag and nerdy terms in the dev blog: Location, keeping it real on the streets, yo! with the first follow up here; Defining the boundaries we are all within.

In the Location, keeping it real on the streets, yo! post there’s a couple of paragraphs where I manage to nearly sum up why I think it’s important …

“For us, it’s a first small step into an experiment, and actually a pretty big experiment as we’re potentially accepting “corrections” from our millions and millions of users. We’re not quite sure how it’ll all turn out, but we’re armed with Maths, Algorithms and kitten photos.”

… and …

“On a slightly more philosophical level, it’s a never ending process. We’ll never reach a point where we can say “Right that’s in, all borders between places have been decided”. But what we should end up with are boundaries as defined by Flickr users.”

But what does it all really mean (to me)? Well, at a very basic level it means we’ve taken the descriptive geo-data on Flickr down to the next granular level. Instead of only going down to Town and City levels, we now go down to neighborhoods, and this is now reflected in the API.

Rereading Yahoo Woe (Where On Earth, that is) IDs but imagine it talks about going down to the next level will do the trick.

Before if you used flickr.photos.getInfo on a photo that had location information you’d get something like this …

<location latitude="37.772156" longitude="-122.430726" accuracy="14" place_id="kH8dLOubBZRvX_YZ" woeid="2487956">
	<locality place_id="kH8dLOubBZRvX_YZ" woeid="2487956">San Francisco</locality>
	<county place_id="hCca8XSYA5nn0X1Sfw" woeid="12587707">San Francisco</county>
	<region place_id="SVrAMtCbAphCLAtP" woeid="2347563">California</region>
	<country place_id="4KO02SibApitvSBieQ" woeid="23424977">United States</country>
</location>

… but now you get (scroll right if you’re viewing this on the web) …

<location latitude="37.772156" longitude="-122.430726" accuracy="14" place_id="69uQyQCbCZ5svKzBvA" woeid="28288710">
	<neighbourhood place_id="69uQyQCbCZ5svKzBvA" woeid="28288710">Lower Haight</neighbourhood>
	<locality place_id="kH8dLOubBZRvX_YZ" woeid="2487956">San Francisco</locality>
	<county place_id="hCca8XSYA5nn0X1Sfw" woeid="12587707">San Francisco</county>
	<region place_id="SVrAMtCbAphCLAtP" woeid="2347563">California</region>
	<country place_id="4KO02SibApitvSBieQ" woeid="23424977">United States</country>
</location>

The neighborhood node thingy being the new bit.

How’s this useful? Well in a hacky kind of way you can now pair up a couple of flickr api calls to do reverse geocoding …

• flickr.photos.geo.setLocation
• flickr.photos.getInfo

Use the first one with a sacrificial photo you have write permission on (i.e. your own). Set it’s location with a Lat/Long and then go get the information for that photo to find out where Flickr thinks that photo was taken. There’s a couple of other ways of doing it, but that’s probably the easiest to understand.

The advantage to Flickr and the whole ecosystem that builds up around it of doing this is, as we feed back user submitted corrections into the backend, the neighborhoods Flickr assigns to a Lat/Long will slowly evolve over time to our user’s view of the world … and we have quite a lot of them, so in major cities this should be quite good.

This is hopefully converting a “database” view of an area (for want of a better term) into how real people on the ground view of an area.

On that subject, it’s also possible that users of FireEagle (now public), websites that integrate with FireEagle and users of websites that intergrate with FireEagle will also gain the benefit of potentially millions of people make updates to location, depending on how far back into WOE we can roll the data.

That to me is the magic part, people taking photos over here and saying “Oh no, that photo wasn’t taken in such-and-such, but actually here” can have a positive effect on someone’s experience with a totally unrelated website who happens to be using FireEagle to update their location. Suddenly that website gains the local knowledge from thousands of photographers

Well, that’s kinda the theory anyway, but it’s always interesting being able to take that kind of theory and attempt to put it into practice.

http://flickrvision.com/

David Troy hat die Seite Flickrvision entwickelt. Hier werden auf einer Google-Maps-Weltkarte Bilder, die kurz zuvor auf Flickr hochgeladen wurden und mit Geotags ausgezeichnet sind, angezeigt und verortet.

Wählt man die 3D-Ansicht, werden die Bilder auf einem sich drehenden Globus angezeigt. Bei der klassischen Ansicht kann man sich außerdem per Mouseover das Bild größer anzeigen lassen. Durch Anklicken des Namens des Nutzers, der das Bild hochgeladen hat, gelangt man schließlich zur Flickr-Seite des Bildes.

Diese Anwendung veranschaulicht zum einen eindrucksvoll, dass ständig unterschiedlichste Bilder auf Flickr hochgeladen werden, zum anderen wird bei der 3D-Ansicht sehr deutlich, dass Flickr weltweit genutzt wird! Eine wirklich tolle Seite, auf der man viel Zeit verbringen kann.

Google-Maps-Weltkarte (Beispiel):

3D-Ansicht (Beispiel):

Gefunden bei: Apfel(B)log

It seems as though Nokia’s Sports Tracker is just a neat little training tool for runners and cyclists… however…

Do you ever go on holiday, wander around, take some photos and then forget where you went and how you got there? This could be the tool for you! Sports Tracker records your journey using GPS (kind of the opposite of sat nav… tells you where you have been rather than where you are going!) and you can then upload your journey to the Sports Tracker site where it marries your GPS data with Google Maps. You can add photos of your route using geotags. So Sports Tracker is really a Journey Tracker. Pretty cool.

Google has recently made some very interesting developments in their map content(from Cnet).  Along with the user created maps, geo-tagged photographs, and related local ads; users can now find Wikipedia entries relating to geographically linked sites.  Once you are in the general area of the location you are curious about, simply hit the “more” tab to see Wikipedia entries and photos.  The short informational blurbs are taken from the Wikipedia entry and allow users to seamlessly browse into more information.

Granted, if you don’t trust Wikipedia this service may be more annoying than useful, but I wish that everything had a little more information on Google maps.  Now if they would just show Flickr photos on there and not just ones from Panoramio…

Maybe an institution can start working on adding not only historic photos to the mix but related historical information gleaned from other data sources and archived materials.  Hmmm sounds like we need a grant…

See also:

Stephen Francouer on Wikipedia vs. Other resources

You know, just to cover all bases

[update: Aaron talks about a similar Flickr/Dopplr/FireEagle dance over here]

Tonight twitter released their next batch of API improvements, of course the one that caught my eye was …

“[NEW] /account/update_location.[xml|json] – sets the location for the
authenticated user to the string passed in a “location” parameter.
Nothing fancy, no geocoding or normalization. Just putting this out
there so developers can start playing with how geolocation might fit
into their Twitter applications.”

… which is nice as it’s just thrown in there as a ‘what if’ type of thing. There’s no direct reason for twitter to have location stuff, (well no more than Flickr I guess) but everyone knows that everyone wants it.

As it says there’s no geocoding etc. it’s basically a free text field to put stuff in that everyone’s agreed is for location. Say you wanted to tell other developers that you were in San Francisco when you twitted a tweet, you could use a URL like this … (don’t click this link unless you want to update your location to San Francisco!)

http://www.twitter.com/account/update_location.xml?location=san+francisco

(This will pop-up a username/password box, that’s twitter asking, not this website btw, you don’t have to enter your username and password, all that’s going to happen if you do though is it’ll set your location to ’san francisco’)

… the return looks something like this …

It’d be great if you didn’t have to update twitter yourself and there was something else out there that could do it for us.

Fire Eagle seems like a great place to start. For some absurd reason I can’t fathom, too busy probably, I’ve not written about Fire Eagle. I think it’s the most wonderful thing in the world, but that aside, it is, in short, a location broker. You get things to put your location in, and allow other things to get location out.

I tend to have Zone Tag running in the background on my N95, set to ping updates to fire eagle every few minutes (or until the battery dies). I hear that navison is also very good. Frankly, I want anything that knows where I am to be able to tell Fire Eagle, if it can’t do that, then what’s the point? I fully hope to have about three hardware devices and a couple of web applications (like Dopplr) sending updates to fire eagle by the end of the year.

Ok, so assuming Fire Eagle knows where I am, I can then authorize another application to query my location (to a level of granularity I specify). When that application asks where I am, it’ll get a response back something like this (example from here) …

<rsp stat="ok">
	<user token="abcdefghijkl">
		<location-hierarchy>
			<location best-guess="true">
				<id>114031</id>
				<georss:point>37.7812461853 -122.3957595825</georss:point>
				<level>0</level>
				<level-name>exact</level-name>
				<located-at>2008-03-03T10:58:55-08:00</located-at>
				<name>500 3rd St, San Francisco, CA</name>
			</location>
			<location best-guess="false">
				<id>114041</id>
				<georss:box>
				37.7494697571 -122.40650177 37.7862281799 -122.3790893555
				</georss:box>
				<level>1</level>
				<level-name>postal</level-name>
				<located-at>2008-03-03T10:58:55-08:00</located-at>
				<name>San Francisco, CA 94107</name>
				<place-id>8Xq01wWYA5u_OEMhyQ</place-id>
				<woeid>12797158</woeid>
			</location>
			<location best-guess="false">
				<id>114051</id>
				<georss:box>
				37.7037811279 -122.5154571533 37.8545417786 -122.32472229
				</georss:box>
				<level>3</level>
				<level-name>city</level-name>
				<located-at>2008-03-03T10:58:55-08:00</located-at>
				<name>San Francisco, CA</name>
				<place-id>kH8dLOubBZRvX_YZ</place-id>
				<woeid>2487956</woeid>
			</location>
			<location best-guess="false">
				<id>114061</id>
				<georss:box>
				32.5342788696 -124.4150238037 42.0093803406 -114.1308135986
				</georss:box>
				<level>5</level>
				<level-name>state</level-name>
				<located-at>2008-03-03T10:58:55-08:00</located-at>
				<name>California</name>
				<place-id>SVrAMtCbAphCLAtP</place-id>
				<woeid>2347563</woeid>
			</location>
			<location best-guess="false">
				<id>114071</id>
				<georss:box>
				18.9108390808 -167.2764129639 72.8960571289 -66.6879425049
				</georss:box>
				<level>6</level>
				<level-name>country</level-name>
				<located-at>2008-03-03T10:58:55-08:00</located-at>
				<name>United States</name>
				<place-id>4KO02SibApitvSBieQ</place-id>
				<woeid>23424977</woeid>
			</location>
		</location-hierarchy>
	</user>
</rsp>

For the moment, let’s say I’m sharing city level data with twitter, we’d be looking at this snippet here …

<location best-guess="false">
	<id>114051</id>
	<georss:box>
	37.7037811279 -122.5154571533 37.8545417786 -122.32472229
	</georss:box>
	<level>3</level>
	<level-name>city</level-name>
	<located-at>2008-03-03T10:58:55-08:00</located-at>
	<name>San Francisco, CA</name>
	<place-id>kH8dLOubBZRvX_YZ</place-id>
	<woeid>2487956</woeid>
</location>

… there are two useful location IDs you can use, place-id and woeid, woeid is probably the best one to use going into the future. In short it’s a unique identifier that Fire Eagle uses to pin a place to a record in the database (there are several San Franciscos around and they’re really hard to disambiguate without at some point going to a unique ID).

The main point is, if everyone can agree that 2487956 is San Francisco, CA, US, and I twittered from 2487956 five minutes ago and you twittered from 2487956 two minutes ago, then we are both …

1. In the same place
2. In San Francisco, CA, US

So how would this work? Well probably something like this …

You have a twitter app running on your PC, Mac, iphone or whatever, and your iphone just so happens to be running navizon which is updating your exact lat/long position to fire eagle. You then have a twitter application that you’ve authorized with fire eagle, allowing it to see which city you’re in. When you send a twitter the application first sends a request to fire eagle for your location. It extracts the woeid (or place-id) and before it sends the tweet to twitter calls twitter’s update location method …

http://www.twitter.com/account/update_location.xml?location=2487956

… then sends the tweet. Now other applications that display your tweets can also grab your location information from twitter at the same time and maybe put your tweet in a little more context. I know that I often use twitter to home in on people for meeting up.

Now there are a few problems with this …

1) Each tweet isn’t location-stamped, it’s only your own location that’s updated, looking back you wouldn’t get a historical view of where the tweets happened, so if you twittered something in Paris last week, and then went to San Francisco, the only location an application would have access to would be the San Francisco one. Unless you had something tracking that and recording it for you, i.e. something like twitterrific could save the tweets and locations at the time it received them locally, and allow the person viewing a history of your tweets to see them on a map, or whatever. I don’t think twitterrific currently does keep a history of tweets, but if it did, etc. etc. Hopefully in the future with another nudging we’ll be able to location-stamp the tweets with something like <located_at>.

2) Saving 2487956 into the location isn’t very user friendly, it doesn’t really mean anything to someone viewing your page on twitter, So far I’ve just been looking at this from a code point of view. A solution could be to store something like “san francisco woeid:2487956″ or “san francisco place_id:kH8dLOubBZRvX_YZ”. Then whatever is looking for your location can parse the location based on those patterns. The human just deals with “parsing” the san francisco bit of it.

3) Fire Eagle currently offers no way (as far as I know) to find out where 2487956 actually is. What’d be really handy is something where you can say, hey where on earth is 2487956.

But anyway, the short is that the new update_location method in the twitter API opens up some possibly fun options. Fire Eagle is a good way to handle getting the location, because ZoneTag that knows and cares nothing for Twitter, is constantly updating fire eagle anyway. And it’s relatively trivial to have something else asking for your location back from fire eagle and pushing that too twitter. Before fire eagle you’d have to beg the people behind something like ZoneTag to also update your twitter location, and then the next thing and the next. Now all they (or any other location type thing) needs to do is send updates to the one true fire eagle service and everyone else can tap into that.

I was going to write a proof of concept myself, probably involving something cheeky like having Google Reader point to a php page that was pretending to be an RSS feed (poor persons cron job), but actually did the request to fire eagle and update to twitter. But I decided just to write a blog post about it instead.

But wait! There’s more.

Now seems to be a great time to mention a handful of new Flickr API services. We have four new Places API methods (and have had for a while now), that you can find on the services/api page, under the Places heading.

• flickr.places.find
• flickr.places.findByLatLon
• flickr.places.resolvePlaceId
• flickr.places.resolvePlaceURL

flickr.places.resolvePlaceId most closely follows the above discussion. Even though it’s called resolvePlaceId, it’ll also handle woeids. So calling it with place_id=2487956 will get flickr to tell you where it thinks that location is. Plugging the values into the API explorer will get you something like this …

So if you parsed woeid:123456 from someone’s twitter profile xml throwing it at resolvePlaceId could get you back a friendly name.

It should be noted that Flickr has no intention of becoming an all purpose general geocoder and as such all these places api methods only work down to a city level. This api call is used mainly for when you want to be able to direct a user to the Places page for a given photos. For example using the flickr API explorer for flickr.photos.getInfo enter the photo ID “2434908810″ and select “Do not sign call?”, in the XML that you get back there’s a section for location …

<location latitude="37.783142" longitude="-122.40411" accuracy="16" place_id="kH8dLOubBZRvX_YZ" woeid="2487956">
	<locality place_id="kH8dLOubBZRvX_YZ" woeid="2487956">San Francisco</locality>
	<county place_id="hCca8XSYA5nn0X1Sfw" woeid="12587707">San Francisco</county>
	<region place_id="SVrAMtCbAphCLAtP" woeid="2347563">California</region>
	<country place_id="4KO02SibApitvSBieQ" woeid="23424977">United States</country>
</location>

You can now take the woeid for this picture, plug it into flickr.places.resolvePlaceId and you have the URL for the places page.

As an aside, once you know the woeid for a photo, you can call flickr.photos.search and pass in the woeid as a parameter to find other photos in the same location, which is also a new thing. Handy for finding photos in California (2347563) where a bounding box isn’t going to help you much.

flickr.places.resolvePlaceURL takes you back the other way. If you know the Places page URL, you can use this to get back the woeid and place_id. Or you can try hand crafting them, such as “/us/ca/sf”.

flickr.places.findByLatLon for flickr type stuff is used to get the woeid at a certain point (city level and above), once you have the woeid you then go on to use flickr.photos.search to find photos in that area.

In the context of updating your twitter location above without fire eagle, then you could pass your current lat/long to this method, get the woeid back out and update your location with that. Another application could then read your woeid back out of your location and using flickr.places.resolvePlaceId convert it back to a human readable format.

Round trip example …

Plug, lat/long 37.783,-122.404 into flickr.places.findByLatLon, gives you …

<rsp stat="ok">
	<places latitude="37.783" longitude="-122.404" accuracy="16" total="1">
		<place place_id="kH8dLOubBZRvX_YZ" woeid="2487956" place_url="/United+States/California/San+Francisco" place_type="locality"/>
	</places>
</rsp>

So now you have the woeid. You can either parse the place_url to get the human readable format, or push it back into flickr.places.resolvePlaceURL, doing that for “/United+States/California/San+Francisco” gives you back …

<rsp stat="ok">
	<location name="San Francisco" woeid="2487956" place_id="kH8dLOubBZRvX_YZ" place_url="/United+States/California/San+Francisco">
		<locality place_id="kH8dLOubBZRvX_YZ" woeid="2487956">San Francisco</locality>
		<county place_id="hCca8XSYA5nn0X1Sfw" woeid="12587707">San Francisco</county>
		<region place_id="SVrAMtCbAphCLAtP" woeid="2347563">California</region>
		<country place_id="4KO02SibApitvSBieQ" woeid="23424977">United States</country>
	</location>
</rsp>

Which gives you a little bit more to work with. Then you can throw that at twitter’s API …

http://www.twitter.com/account/update_location.xml?location=san+francisco+woeid:2487956

Other people can grab your location using the twitter API, parse out the woeid and throw it back into flickr.places.resolvePlaceId to get the human readable form. Of course as it also gives you the state, and country, you can find out that even if you’re not twittering in the same city, you may be in the same state or country. You could also probably work out which timezone they are in, to put some twitters into context.

Oh and you’ll probably want to watch your flickr API rate limit too (hint: local caching) before your key gets turned off.

So there we have it, a quick poke at one of twitters new API methods, a look at how fire eagle could easily be used to keep twitter updated with your current location, without having to go to all the trouble of updating twitter itself. And a quick run through of some of Flickr’s new API methods.

Hopefully if you add into the fray Upcoming.org that uses place_ids such as this http://upcoming.yahoo.com/place/kH8dLOubBZRvX_YZ (spotting that’s the place_id for San Francisco from all the examples above) you should be able to see how fire eagle can be really great for pulling all these things together.

If you use it to keep your twitter location updated, you can start to pull in events from upcoming that happened at that time, see if your contacts/friends were also at the same events, check out flickr photos for that location from your contacts for the timespan of the event. Or go the other way round and have it so that posting a flickr photo to an upcoming.org event, sets your location in fire eagle for twitter to poll for your location, and so on. And if other websites also use the same woeid for news events, and so on and so on, you can see how all these things can be pulled together and support one another.

Obviously its all a little geeky at the moment, but the idea is to make it all nicely seamful as someone might say.

Un lector me ha preguntado cómo editar las geotags, para que se vean los vídeos de youtube en GoogleEarth, aquí va la explicación:

1)

Lo primero que tenemos que hacer es loguearnos y entrar en la siguiente dirección:

http://www.youtube.com/my_videos

Veremos una imagen exáctamente igual a ésta, sobre la que debemos presionar Edit video Info:

Hacemos scrolling hacia abajo, y nos dirigimos hasta Date and Map Options , y clickamos Change Options:

Ahora sólo nos quedará movel la flecha roja al lugar donde se tomó el vídeo y el día en el que se tomó:”yo he puesto este vídeo cerca de mi casa, como ejemplo”

Le damos a Update Video Info y ya estará!!!

Mirad el resultado

(posting a bit early early this week as I’m off to Panama for the FIABCI Congress of the Americas tomorrow)

Andy Denton Experiments with Real Estate Video:
Nice start.  We like when people experiment with real estate video.
http://www.andydenton.com/2007/10/23/realtycom-featured-city-videos/

Bloodhound TV Coming Soon
We like the Bloodhound blog and we especially like his idea for implementation of real estate video. Is that even possible to say as a vendor?
http://www.bloodhoundrealty.com/BloodhoundBlog/?p=2104

Youtube GeoTagging With Google Earth
But does it geotag everywhere? Funny, we have been geotagging our videos in an automated fashion everywhere in Latin America for a year now even places where Google Maps doesnt.
http://www.realestateblogsites.com/public/item/186411

Reliberation Real Estate Blog Asks if Video Is Better Than Virtual Tours
The age old question comes back to life.
http://www.reliberation.com/blogs/beckytroutt/archive/2007/10/26/video-tours-vs-virtual-tours.aspx

Vidlisting.com To Provide Real Estate Video Training To 3000 South Florida REALTORS
The REALTOR Association of Greater Miami and the Beaches (RAMB) “gets” real estate video….especially video that appeals to international buyers. They asked to train REALTORS in real estate video during their upcoming MLX rollout.
http://forsalebylocals.wordpress.com/2007/10/26/vidlistingcom-to-lead-4-days-of-real-estate-video-workshops/