Trevor F. Smith: Exterior

Virtual Earth

Map geeks are murmuring about Bill G's recent demo of Microsoft's answer to Google Maps, Virtual Earth.  The demo looked as slick as their competitors' offerings, but there was one bit that they got right where nobody else has: a "blog it" function.

While you're searching out places in Virtual Earth, you can easily keep a running list of locations.  When you have a list you like, you use a "blog it" link to automatically create a Microsoft Spaces post with links back to Virtual Earth maps for each of those locations.

Instead of just having links back, they could include detail maps for each location (served from Virtual Earth) or popup/inset browsable maps.

One funny thing: In the video interview of the Mapquest/Virtual Earth dev team, they brag about how MS has had a decade of experience with mapping products, which is nothing to brag about when you're playing catch-up to a company which entered the game less than a year ago.

93 Photo Street going OSS

I am in the (slow) process of reworking the Transmutable site to support open development of 93 Photo Street (as seen in Mapping Hacks), but in the mean time I've posted the code under the Apache 2.0 license in the new 93 Photo Street Sourceforge project, which at the moment contains all of the working bits but no documentation on building and wrapping your own version.

That said, if you know how to use cvs and ant then you can easily check out the source and build a Mac OS X app bundle (for Panther or Tiger) or an all-in-one executable jar which will run on Windows machines with Java 1.4+ and the JAI libs.

Where 2.0: "not a technologist conference"

So, I'm a bit surprised to hear the the Where 2.0 conference is for geo hackers, as Nat recently posted on the O'Reilly blog.  At ETech05 in March he was in the IRC channel when they announced Where 2.0, and he wrote that they're trying to avoid the geo-hackers and go for the geo-companies (which aren't totally separate sets, I realize).  He wrote that "it's not a technologist conference" and if you look at the list of speakers it doesn't  inspire confidence that there will be much in the way of interest for GIS or social map geeks working outside of corporations.  Also, registration costs are well beyond what an individual will pay.

Here is the IRC log from #ETech (gnat is Nat):

[9:47:08] gnat: so the premise of the where conference is that cheap location hardware, mature location manipulation technology, and maturity of the basic maps from NavTeq and TeleAtlas means location tech is now in reach of every company.  we cover what you do for any business (logistics, business analytics) and how to make a new business (local search, mobile tech, telematics, cool mergers of online and physical worlds like amazon's pick up in store)
[9:47:11] crysflame: gnat!
[9:47:54] TrevorFSmith: gnat: I'm so very pleased about Where.   
[9:47:55] gnat: crysflame! 
[9:47:56] jbond: This seat is getting hard.
[9:48:17] marksimpkins: back again, new and improved
[9:48:54] gnat: trevor: I'm glad to hear that.  It's been hell for me to get up to speed :)
[9:49:31] TrevorFSmith: gnat: You know about the geowankers list?
[9:49:46] mikel_maron: hi mark, trevor!
[9:49:56] MattJones: gnat: Where++
[9:49:58] TrevorFSmith: Hi, Mikel. 
[9:49:58] gnat: Trevor: I do, but I've deliberately steered clear.  I don't want wank.  This has to appeal to businesspeople, it's not a technologist conference.
[9:50:14] Knekk: Morning
[9:50:15] TrevorFSmith: gnat: But you know we'll come, anyway. :-)
[9:50:24] Knekk: KevinMarks: morning
[9:50:29] gnat: Trevor: so I want to pick brains one-on-one rather than running the risk of being seduced by the geowankers and end up filling th eprogram with RDF semantic map talks :)
[9:50:40] gnat: Trevor: I just hope you won't throw tomatoes :)
[9:50:42] rich_gib2on: that was harsh :-)
[9:50:58] mikel_maron: how will where work? is it accepting presentation proposals? or not that kinda thing?
[9:51:05] TrevorFSmith: gnat: Oh, that's only some of us.  Or, rather, that's only some of us all of the time.
[9:51:08] MattJones: gnat : there's a whole other bunch of people as an audience apart from technologists and business people: designers... :-)
[9:51:25] crysflame: gnat: the next time you get to san francisco, find me and say hi :) i work/live here now.
[9:51:30] marksimpkins: gnat: civic uses of location information, we are doing stuff on bike crime ..
[9:51:51] TrevorFSmith: gnat: How about a BOF about Where for interested ETech folks?
[9:52:20] ChrisDodo: there's probably 10 designers here!
[9:52:20] gnat: mike: the CFP will go out in early april
[9:52:20] gnat: mike: redact that
[9:52:20] gnat: no CFP
[9:52:20] gnat: I'm building the program with Dave Sonnen, a GIS guy who goes way back.
[9:52:31] gnat: So you need to bend my ear if you have things that you think should be on the program.

(That's the straight dope from the IRC channel, though for clarity I edited out the system messages about who was joining and leaving)

Mikel maps Yahoo! 360

In the continued trend of people doing amazing things with Greasemonkey, Mikel Maron has added dynamic maps to Yahoo!'s previously map-free blog service.  It all happens in your browser (meaning that he didn't have to change the Yahoo! servers) via the magic of Firefox and worldKit:

Mikel is really on a roll with his mapping hacks.

Geotools + MySQL + TIGER/Line

This weekend I spent a bit of time learning about the GeoTools libraries for geographical systems and as a test I picked the arbitrary task of reading in TIGER/Line data, putting it into a MySQL database using the new spatial types, and then rendering it using the GeoTools renderers.

After a bit of reading, it took very little time (less than an hour) to write the code, though it brings up more questions than answers.  I understand the basic abstractions which GeoTools uses to represent sources of data and how to draw them, but I don't yet understand how to do higher level tasks, like drawing road names along the right paths.  I am also not impressed with the quality of the render in terms of antialiasing, but I assume that this is because I haven't looked into settings other than the defaults.

Anyway, I think that my next step is to do a little research on how the MySQL data source works so that I can design a schema with all of the meta data I'll need for my particular projects.  An intermediary step is to write out MySQL scripts which create the tables and populate the data, which I'll post if they get to a state where anyone else might use them.

Worldkit 2.0

If you are looking for a dead simple way to put live maps on you web pages, you should try the new worldKit 2.0:

worldKit is an easy to use and flexible mapping application for the Web. Light weight GIS. It's a SWF based app, configured by XML, data fed by RSS. Stand-alone use or integration in larger projects.

While you're there, swing by the excellent geocoder, providing lat/lon information by US street address, city, zip code, or by clicking on a zoomable map.

Map Shorts II

I've had the most terrible cold/sinus infection.  But this afternoon I'm feeling about 3/4 human so I'll continue with the map shorts from a few posts ago:

• Single file dynamic maps: If we want to approach maps which can be used in online conversations at least as well as images, one approach would be to let users of your service encapsulate dynamic maps in a single file (flash, applet, ...) so they can move it around like they do JPEGs and GIFs.
• Drag and Drop Publish: If you make a rich client with an online backend, let your users drag a map view from your client onto their web forms and email editors to create links to similar views on the web.
• View source: Implied by the rampant google map hacking (part II) is the idea that if you make your system a tiny bit legible, hackers will glom their projects on top of yours.  You must be willing to lose some control, but the return in terms of publicity and network effects might be worth it.

Map shorts

I was going to write, diagram, and post the ideas I have for a web based conversational map service, but I am in a low energy state this evening due to lack of sleep.

Instead, here is a grab bag of conversational map ideas which have been kicking around the Transmutable offices since early this summer:

• Permalinks: For the same reasons that permalinks are necessary in order to converse online about specific blog posts, conversational mapping services should provide easily cut-n-pastable links to every map image, feature, and search which their service provides.
• Feeds: For mapping services which evolve over time there should be RSS or Atom feeds with the latest additions and updates at all levels of details.  For example, a photo mapping service should provide feeds for new photo maps, new photo mappers, new images, and users should be able to select arbitrary regions and receive feeds for new photos for that region.  In addition, the feeds should be metadata rich and easily parsed to encourage third party integration, with links to the above mentioned permalinks.  Save yourself some bandwidth which would be used by screen scrapers and just provide good feeds.
• Map rolling: Provide cut-n-pastable javascript for people's personal pages (be they blog, phlog, or vlog) which fetches and nicely renders any of the above mentioned feeds into a narrow column.  People will place this in the same places in which they now place their blog rolls and friends lists.
• Integrate with open source rich text editing UIs like Kupu or the Mozilla WYSIWYG textarea so that people can pop open a smallish pan/zoom window with feature searches in order to find a permalink to a map or feature to quickly include in their post.
• Arbitrary user submitted map layers: Though your service will of course provide excellent map layers, users will need to include their own images as a map layer.  Allow users to merge their images (and perhaps even features) into the live display using client-side javascript+css or through real-time inclusion via your service.

I have a stack of index cards filled with bullet points and mind maps of such things, but I need a grilled cheese sandwich and a nap so I'll leave off for now.

93 Photo Street V1.3.1 is up

As promised, I just posted 93 Photo Street V1.3.1 which has a fix for the "Post to blog" feature so you can once again squirt your photo maps to your TypePad or MT blogs.

I simply must give a hearty "thank you" to the ever supportive photo mapping community for finding and reporting bugs and sending links to your locative projects.

93 Photo Street V1.3.1

Thanks to a helpful bug report, it has come to my attention that 93 Photo Street's TypePad integration has been broken, thanks to a combination of changes to what characters TypePad's Atom upload system will accept in file names and 93 Photo Street's blind assumption that the filename asked for will be the file name used once uploaded.

I have a fix (which will be version 1.3.1) and as soon as I can run the installers through the test machines I'll post it to the Transmutable site and post a snippet about it here.