Dear Google Earth Team,
Please add geoRSS (or w3c geo Point in rss feeds) support to Google Earth.
k thkx,
Dan
xoxox
PS. Make it like a RSS reader so it checks for updated feeds once an hour or so, cheers.
Rev Dan Catt
Sporadically posts from someone who still does occasional 'blogging'
Dear Google Earth Team.
Flickr: Two new subtle geo updates
Mainly being a geoRSS update and more location information goodness for you in the flickr.photo.getInfo call.
1. Location stuff in flickr.photo.getInfo
An API call like this …
http://api.flickr.com/services/rest/?method=flickr.photos.getInfo
&api_key=6eb260f1a6e2ceb357fc2e3bdc5432f7
&photo_id=456949415
… will get you some XML that includes new location goodness …
… we now let you know the locality, region and country if we can figure them out. If the photo has been dropped onto the map from a fairly high level you may only get region or country.
We’re still recording the neighborhood but for various reasons we’re not showing it at the moment. Mainly because sometimes it’s wrong and people seem to be more upset about a photo being put into the “wrong” neighborhood than it not saying it at all. Which is pretty understandable. We have a couple of plans of attack for this, so I’m pretty sure neighborhoods will be back in at some point.
Anyway, useful extra info for developers to play with.
2. geoRSS and geo in RSS.
It’s been said in a couple [Dan Karran] of places [Sam Ruby] that the geoRSS we [flickr] were using was incorrect. Those reports are clearly wrong as whatever we do it totally right ;-) however just incase we’ve made it righter. I hope.
If we take Simon Willison‘s (Stinky) Cheese feed, with a georss=1 on the end.
We get his rss feed with geo information, al la …
Where we now support both the wsg84_pos and georss format thingy. Take your pick.
That is all.
Flickr: *just* hit 20 Million geotagged photos
Quick update:
Public geotagged photos: 14,500,174
All geotagged photos: 20,076,235
Tweaking some things, looking at other stuff. Oh and should have posted something about geoRSS and geo in RSS, will get round to that in a short while.
How We Watch the City, Paper from Microsoft Research.
Danyel Fisher over at Microsoft Research has a workshop paper up called How We Watch the City: Popularity and Online Maps (280kb PDF). The methodology is interesting, the ‘heat’ is generated from how many times a map tile is requested from Microsoft’s maps.live.com. The data was taken from 8 months worth of Virtual Earth tile server logs over 2006.
Therefor what is being displayed is where people are looking on the map. This was also done at different zoom levels, meaning that it’s also possible to see where people are looking within cities, here’s Seattle …
Although I’m kinda curious as to why people look at tiles along bridges, perhaps that’s just the average eyes-per-tile but they stand out against the water. Be interesting to see what the data looks like near realtime, or how much less than 8 months worth of data you’d need for the results to look pretty much the same.
For me what this shows, yet again, is that once maps are present, that after a certain time you can start to get rid of the original maps and just display the usage data for them to still be useful as maps (at the very general level).
Thanks Tom