In mass market, ogckml | No Comments
Investigating the location of the WUMB transmitter,
Doc Searls notes that while the Live Maps birdseye view is awesome, it’s way too hard to find and share. John Udell
picks up the thread and suggests a workaround, but that’s not the point of my mentioning this.
Personally, I haven’t had much of a problem navigating in Live Maps, but I have had no end of problems figuring out how to work with “collections”, and get GeoRSS and/or KML streams of the collections I create. I always have to go back to the blog entries I’ve bookmarked to remember how to make the site do what I want it to do, and I’m probably a more savvy user than their target audience. It’s a shame because the Virtual Earth group has been coming up with some terrific stuff in the last year or so.
So to paraphrase Godspell — via the Bible — my message to the Virtual Earth team is, stop hiding your light under a bushel and re-think that UI my friends.
rajsingh // February 3rd, 2008
In geo, mass market | No Comments
Check out Ed Parsons’, Android and LBS - in the stack at last…. I agree with him that “LBS would only really make sense as an underlining infrastructure that is available to all applications, therefore allowing much higher levels of integration.” Congrats on the release Google, and good luck, Android.
rajsingh // November 15th, 2007
In geo, mass market | 1 Comment
Michael Goodchild makes a good point in “Citizens as Voluntary Sensors: Spatial Data Infrastructure in the World of Web 2.0” as he argues that there is a “dramatic decline in the supply of geographic information worldwide”, due in large part to the reduction in funding for national mapping efforts over the last few decades. With no change in government policy on the horizon, it’s natural to look to voluntary mapping efforts like OpenStreetMap and the KML community to fill the gap. Hopefully these “citizen scientist” communities can mature to far surpass what government agencies provided in the past. Not a lot of answers here, but some good questions, and it’s only 9 pages!
rajsingh // November 11th, 2007
In georss, mass market, georest | No Comments
Joe Gregorio notes in The end of the AtomPub WG that the Atom Publishing Format and Protocol WG (atompub) in the Application Area has concluded. Developers can go into full programming mode knowing that the encodings and interfaces aren’t changing any time soon. Thanks AtomPub WG for a great standard.
rajsingh // November 5th, 2007
In georss, mass market, ogckml | No Comments
I was working on a Yahoo Pipe last night, and I noticed that Pipes will automatically figure out if you have created a geospatial pipe, and show it on a map without you having to do anything! And to top it off, you can get KML output of your pipe! Now if they drop the old-fashioned W3C Geo point-only format and support real GeoRSS they’ll really have something (hint, hint).
What this means is that you can create and export KML content from Google, Microsoft and Yahoo! now. The mind bubbles at the possibilities…
By the way, if you’re actually interested the content of my Cambridge, MA Happenings pipe and not just the technology, you should know that there are a lot of good events that aren’t getting properly geo-located, so read the feed, not just the map.
rajsingh // October 31st, 2007