Something i was just thinking about as I searched the web for information from a past event… why aren’t event planners taking advantage of tags? A note to anyone planning conference and events, when you issue your PR and publish your event website I suggest you considefr using an “official” tags that you suggest people use when referencing and publishing material about your event. It sounds like a no-brainer but not many folks are doing it — except maybe O’reilly. I recall Where 2.0 last June (or was it May) and the conference organizer maded it very clear that if you were blogging or publishing material about the event they suggest you use the tag “where2006”. With all the people blogging, using flickr, indexing material on digg, technorati, and del.icio.us it would make life much easier if everyone was on the same page and using the same tags rather than making up their own. As an example, last year I moblogged loads of photos from AU in Orlando. they were tagged with many tags, including “au2005”. Searching flickr using this tag yielded many hits, however, what about photos from the event that didn’t have that tag? See http://flickr.com/search/?q=au2005 as a sample search. Curiously, nothing on digg is found using au2005. Imagine… “AU2006” the official tag of Autodesk University… sounds like a great idea to me!
Archives for October 14, 2006
$2 million to update and maintain USGS website!
Oh man, talk about a nice score… the USGS has recently awarded a contract for $2 mill to a company to revamp and maintain their website… maybe I’m missing something here but holy crap, sounds like alot of dough… I’m sure somme of you would like to have a piece of this one! Mind-you, they do operate numerous sites so no doubt there’s much more to this than simply designing and updating a little website. I’ll be really curious to see what $2 million worth of website will provide… no doubt some skookum webmapping services etc… more on this at FCW – see also the PR here
Testing geocoder US and the Yahoo! Maps Web Services – AJAX API
Killing a bit of time here while watching a little NCAA football this morning, I ran into some info from the Yahoo Local weblog. I decided to request an application ID and test out how long it would take for me to create a simple little map using ylocal. The App Id request took me about 5 seconds once I signed into my yahoo account (don’t have one yet??? where have you been!) I then grab a little bit of sample code provided by a tutorial describing how to get started with the Yahoo! AJAX API – see here. In no time I simply substitute my ID for the generic one listed in the sample and voila. I can now easily resize and re-center my map and the updates are reflected on my web page. All I need now is to geocode an address and reposition my map… this is easily done using the app provided at http://geocoder.us/. Let’s see now if I can place the map here within the blog… hopefully blogger will accept the code… oops.. looks like I can’t embed the map within the blog post, however, I do have an html page that I could easily add to a website. I have to wonder if Google doesn’t allow Yahoo! maps to be embedded within their apps.. ie. like this blogger weblog!Given that it took me about one minute to create I could easily start messing around and customizing the map if i was to dig deeper into the sample code and tutorials. See http://ylocalblog.com and try for yourself. Register your API app and get a code
zonetag your photos and blast em to flickr – a project from Yahoo! Research
More on flickr as I recently installed and tested ZoneTag. This cool and free application (from Yahoo!) enables users to automatically have their photos tagged with geographic information (geotag) based on cell ID. I’m still on the fence as to this app is really goint to be that useful, however, I’m sure some savvy programmers will come up with some cool uses of data that has been zonetagged so I’ll hold out until then until I comment further. Using the app was very simple and the install and configuration was no problemmo. I noticed that I seem to be the only one using the service from canada so far (try this search for zonetagged photos from Canada – http://zonetag.research.yahoo.com/photos/index.php?time=7&city=&zip=&country=Canada&flickrname=&tag=&showmine=1&group=everyone) . Notice that my photo has been automatically tagged with the following:
Zonetag
cameraphone
Canada
celltagged
cell:network=
cell:mcc=302
cell:mnc=720
cell:lac=9800
cell:cellid=53361
cameraphone
Canada
celltagged
cell:network=
cell:mcc=302
cell:mnc=720
cell:lac=9800
cell:cellid=53361
How it works is the app depends on the users to add additional information and then the cell ID is updated with the information provided. So, if I add a postal code or city name (Nanaimo) to my tags zonetag will incorporate that information in future uploads. I nice starting point from Yahoo! Research – see http://zonetag.research.yahoo.com/. Something I haven’t figured out yet though is how I can use the functionality of Shozu with zonetag? Will they compete with each other? Obviously, with so many flickr users depending on shozu to save on data throughput and those nasty charges I would think that incorporating zonetag while using shozu would be critical. You can see my zonetagged photo at http://www.flickr.com/photos/gisuser/268909916/
Saving cash photo blogging with shozu
More mobile tips for you.. well I finally got Shozu loaded correctly on my mobile.. woohoo! I’ve been trying to get it right for several months now. The problem I had was with the WAP download service setup on my device. I managed to get around it by getting a .SIS file downloaded directly to my PC and then installing from there rather than directly from the device OTA. Anyway, if you use flickr, or moblog photos from your camera phone (you do have a camera phone right???) then Shozu is a must have. The application is free and it crunches your data for efficient distribution to community sites like flickr, Kodak easyshare, webshots and others. You can even configure shozu for efficient sending to FTP sites, your blog or via email. Of note, I have noticed recently that configuring apps like this for Blogger (Beta) is not possible. The problem seems to be that with Beta a user (like me) can own a number of blogs. The configuration setup of third party apps seems to freak out when trying to ping Blogger Beta for the setup… darn! Just as well I guess as the last time I was uploading photos directly to the blog from my phone the planet geospatial news feed was totally freaking out (a guaranteed way to get James out of bed ;0). So, the long and short of it is check out shozu.com to save on those nasty data charges from your mobile provider… it cost me about $100 in roaming data charges last time I photo blogged from the ESRI UC.. ouch! You can check out my flickr blog at http://www.flickr.com/photos/gisuser/