Maps

The past two weeks haven’t really left time to compile my selected links, though there have been many. A few days at SxSWi (on which more, later) followed by travelling with the family and the inevitable work backlog moved blogging way down the priority list. So here’s a mammoth selection to get me caught up. Particularly interesting has been the discussion around the future of newspapers (represented here by Clay Shirky, Steven Johnson and Russell Davies), which seem to have finally pushed beyond “how t ind a good business model for papers” to looking at where the real value for society lies and how we can preserve and extend that in a changing landscape. ...

When I blogged last month about abstracting mapping with YM4R I commented: What I’ve not yet discovered (and may not be implemented) is a way to automatically center and zoom a map. It would be very nice to be able to add a batch of points to a map and have the plugin automatically work out their mid-point. Maybe I need to work on that a little… What I was missing was the center_zoom_on_bounds_init method. There are various ways to interact with it, but I’ve chosen: ...

Back from Greenbelt last night, I spent some time this morning trying out flickr’s new support for ‘geotagging’ by placing all my photos on a map. The interface is nice and hopefully as the API is updated and more uses for the geodata emerge, more and more users will geotag their photos. I’m imagining a map of the Greenbelt site that lets visitors see photos based on when and where on the site they were taken, opening up all sorts of navigational possibilities. ...

One of the projects demonstrated by Andy Turner at BarCamp Grand Rapids was Mapufacture. Developed by Andy, with Guilhem Vellut and Mikel Maron, the site functions as an RSS aggregator with a difference. As well as pulling in the latest content from feeds, it also extracts GeoRSS data from those feeds and plots the results on a google map. You can read an announcement here. Mapufacture is one of a number of apps that are demonstrating one of the key ways that I hope the web is going to move on from the ‘Web 2.0’ phenomenon, showing how open data can begin to be leveraged using tools designed for average users. Open APIs are all well and good, but it’s only as their potential is opened up to non-traditional users that I think we’ll really begin to see the potential. ...