Simple, yet interesting: search Twitter for a place name, bundle returned tweets in a new stream and watch what’s going on there.
Compared to a pure geographic search, the semantic search returns tweets about that place, instead of tweets located nearby. The content of geotagged tweets isn’t necessarily directly related to the place, as the geographic search results show. A combination of both methods might be useful though.
The map development team at Flickr released some interesting new additions to their geo API: shapes – not yet real ESRI Shapefiles, even though they’re on their way (see code.flickr for more information on that).
Flickr shapes are, as I understand it, polygons of aggregated point clouds of photo locations sharing the same location name. For geotagging, Flickr uses a very smart method: once the user has placed a photo on the map, the system sets a place name next to the photo. At the same time Flickr offers name modifications if the user isn’t happy with the proposed name. A list of name alternatives shows up where the user can pick the one which sounds best. That way Flickr constantly receives user feedback on its geodata and can continuously refine its geoname system.
On the other end Flickr makes the collected data through its API available again (see flickr.places.getInfo). I queried Vienna and some neighborhoods to see what the shapes look like in the city I know best. Surprisingly the city boundary is more accurate than I’d have thought. Keep in mind that it’s just the result of people geotagging photos and not surveying an administrative border.
The red line is the Flickr shape, the white line is the city boundary in Google Earth.
To obtain proper Flickr shapes on smaller neighborhoods, a certain critical mass of geotags needs to be achieved. Especially tourist hotpots turn out to be a potential pitfall: there is a high share of users geotagging without good local knowledge. Locals, who usually know the area better, won’t move around tourist attractions and take pictures that much. The relatively small amount of more accurate geotags done by locals will vanish in the mass of inaccurate geotags.
The yellow shape is Stephansdom, probably mostly tagged by thousands of tourists. Although Stephansdom is supposed to be the city center, it’s still only a square around a church within the neighborhood Innere Stadt, the green shape. As the picture shows, the relation and location of both shapes is slightly shifted.
I think some sort of ranking mechanisms can help here – a proper method to determine how accurate and trustworthy a name and corresponding geotag are.
Anyways, the idea of crowdsourced geonames on Flickr is interesting and it’s generally fascinating to watch the development a photo gallery has gone through over the last years. [via geobloggers]
What was wrong with the old Flickr map?
Maybe it’s just me, but I think the continent spanning words (tags) on the new Flickr map are a step backwards regarding usability, compared to the really nicely done photo-dots-generalization the previous version of the map had. The only interactivity on the new map is clicking tags, right? Or did I miss something? I really preferred the old version where I could zoom down to photo-dots and browse through photos directly on the location.
Well, it must be my dot-fetish, but on the new user maps the generalized dots are gone too. Now you see the most recent (or interesting) photographs placed on the map, which is just another exploring approach. If you scroll through the pictures on the bar, the map changes too, unfortunately not vice versa. When you pan the map, the photos aren’t updated in the bar. Would be something nice to have too.
Whereas the new Places feature is awesome. One page per place, containing excellently chosen photographs, active groups and people on that location. Very well done. Even though I wish I could navigate to other places more easily. With some interactivity on the small map or links to popular neighboring places for instance. Currently I have to go up and down in regional hierarchy or use the location search.
Even Flickr’s “Safe Search” works in Places. Although there are some properly tagged photos (and a whole lot more!) for an unluckily named Austrian village on Flickr, it remains for some reasons banned in Places…
Well, I didn’t jump on the Twitter bandwagon – the last days my feed reader was quite cluttered with blog posts starting with t and ending in witter – but the twittervision map mashup nicely demonstrates visualization of rapidly changing geotagged content.
As far as I can tell, after having a quick look at the Twitter API, the map solely relies on geocoding services. There is only a <location> element containing place names in the Twitter data stream, no GeoRSS or any other geotagging method has been applied yet.
Alex and I have started working on an Internet draft for a geo Uniform Resource Identifier (URI) scheme. Basically a geoURI should identify locations by specifying latitude, longitude and (optional) elevation like geo:48.20833,16.37278,171. By adding query arguments, like geo:48.20833,16.37278,171?type=cathedral, it’s possible to extend the identifier and provide more information or call applications where to visualize the location (e.g. a GIS application, Google Earth, etc.). Words and text fragments within HTML documents can be labeled as place (geotagged) for instance: St. Stephen’s Cathedral (Nothing will happen when you click on the link…).
Our intention is to keep the URI as simple as possible and to make information about locations for internet users as easy accessible as writing an email after clicking a ‘mailto:’-link.
However, today a first draft was submitted by us to the IETF and it will be presented to the geopriv working group at the next IETF meeting held in Prague March 18-23.
We are still in the middle of ongoing discussions and too many ideas around possible geoURI-applications, -neighbors, -examples and -services need to be structured and sorted out. But if you are interested you can track the geoURI development and share your opinions with us at geouri.org (feed).
A part of the Viennese Flickr community is apparently active enough to play semantical tricks on the algorithm behind Yahoo!’s TagMap World Explorer, a mapping application based on Flickr’s geotags and associated other tags (read more here).
If you see the map below (or open up that map) you’ll find the tag guessedvienna as large as some other popular place names, mostly sightseeing attractions where probably many different users apply the same tag for their photo taken at that particular place (assuming that this is, in short, the idea how TagMap World Explorer works).
Guessedvienna results from the Guess Where Wien (Vienna) Flickr group, a very popular group among local Flickr users here. Basically it’s a game where users post a picture and other users have to guess where it has been taken. All guessed photos are tagged with guessedvienna. It’s fun to play because it lets you discover many unknown and interesting spots in Vienna. Geotagging is of course a welcome feature in this group, it makes it a lot easier to indicate exactly where the photo was taken.
Btw, the tag Zentralfriedhof (the main cemetery of Vienna) surprises me too. I knew of some conspirative Flickr meet ups there, but didn’t expect it as one of the most popular tags in Vienna.
However, I think it’s a good example where folksonomy makes sense for certain users, while it can be completely useless information for other applications or people.
Today I had some time to have a closer look at Platial’s recently released MapKit.
Basically it’s a fantastic collaborative mapping tool for your website where you or your visitors can mark, describe, comment and share places. MapKit’s integration is pretty straight-forward: just provide some information about the map and the website where you plan to embed it and within a few minutes everything is up and running and your mapping tool is online. Great!
The map shown in MapKit is linked back to your Platial account. So you can control the map content out of your Platial account, or make it public in Platial and let other Platial users participate through Platial’s interface.
One drawback I noticed already at my MapKit registration was that localhost isn’t a valid MapKit domain name. So in order to get a quick view on MapKit I had to go through a edit-upload-test workflow, which is ok for a quick view, but impossible if you plan to do some more development. I usually work and test things on my local machine before putting them online, and I guess I’m not the only one who does so.
Another point is that you can only add places by addresses. Since my region isn’t covered by Google’s geocoder it’s impossible to create a single place through MapKit. So I have to login to Platial and add my places to the MapKit there, then they’ll show up. I wish I could pinpoint places in MapKit the same way I can in Platial.
Finally, some more design options would be nice. For instance if I set the map width to 100% I get a cinema scope map, which looks a bit strange. It’s clear, and proven by myspace, that too much design liberty for users isn’t recommendable either. But some more options like defining map-height or maybe title color and background would be appreciated.
As much as I appreciate the recently updated European roads in Yahoo! maps, and therefore also in the Flickr map, I hardly use the built-in geotagging feature of Flickr.
If you want to geotag an entire photo set it works great. Once you’ve opened up the map organizer you can easily drag & drop all photos onto the map. But if you upload just a single photo and want to geotag it, the loc.alize bookmarklet gets the job easier and faster done.
In Flickr you need to go through Organize > wait > Map > wait > select photo > drag to location. It’s one click too much and therefore takes too long. The usability of loc.alize is much more convenient, it allows you to access the map and assign the location directly in the photo page: loc.alize > wait > select location > save.
Considering the amount of geotagged photos in Flickr I’m maybe wrong and most user’s are happily geotagging with the help of Flickr’s map. On the other hand you read the default loc.alize link “See where this picture was taken.” quite a lot under Flickr photos…
Finally I figured out how to get the GeoPress plugin working in WordPress: the API keys are not optional, you MUST register at least to one (either Yahoo! or Google) in order to successfully add a location to your post. Otherwise the geocoder (the Yahoo! geocoder) won’t work or the map (the Google Map) won’t show up in the Admin-panel in WordPress.
So I now have some of my posts geotagged and the GeoRSS Microformat embedded in my feed, but now? Does it make any sense?
First obvious idea that came to my mind was that it would be nice to have a (optional) map somewhere in my news reader showing the geographic location of the posts I’m reading. It would allow me to select, for instance, all post referring to Vienna, in addition to browse the new posts by topic, tags, author, etc. as it does already.
Mapufacture and My Local Guru are the first GeoRSS aggregators I found. They still lack of content, but IMHO they hit into the right direction.
Though it doesn’t support geotagged blog posts so far, Platial’s Today Nearby section shows nicely how various types of geotagged information can be bundled and made accessible in combination with a map.
However, until major blogging and news platforms won’t integrate GeoRSS by default it will remain as a geek toy. Flickr (and loc.alize.us) showed the huge potential of users willing to geotag their content. It all depends on how easy and usable the feature is implemented.
There is a good chance that this is probably one of the most useful mashups ever:
On UseAMap.com you can mark and tag a location, add a short description and share the human readable link (e.g. usamap.com/mylocation) with anyone you want to.
Just 2 steps to mark and share your location.
Simply brilliant!
I wonder how they deal with geospam, since there is no registration, tag moderation or any other barrier to add tags and locations. To me, the site seems very vulnerable to spam robots.