A few days ago I shared details of a cool service enabling foursquare users to visualize their checkins and display their historical data – see the piece here. Well, another awesome application that enables you to share and display your social media data (think photos, checkins etc…) comes from the GeoCommons service. GeoCommons not only provides users with the platform to easily create and share custom maps, but you can also complement your data with a variety of basemap data (think OSM, Bing, Esri etc…) and mashup your data with other user contributed data layers containing a wealth of socio, economic, and physical data and attributes.
As social media services become more prevalent, something the end user needs to keep in mind is if his/her data is made available for further use, mashup, and sharing. Believe me, there’s nothing more disappointing than using a service to upload and share all your photos, only to find out that you have no archive of your history available or not even an RSS or, even better, a GeoRSS feed available – this is one reason why Flickr (Pro) has long been my favorite resource for archiving my photos. Using GeoCommons I can easily share details of some of my social media checkins thanks to the handy tools that they provide. I recently created a map used to visualize my checkin history over time. Not only is the data displayed in a customizable map but I can also mashup and share my history from services like foursquare, Brightkite (now defunct), and Flickr – I’m sure I could add more services as well if I spent a little more time and effort on this. See below for a map with an animated time series tool that will show you my checkins and photos over the past couple of years… quite fine! Best of all, GeoComms tools enable me to keep adding to and editing the map and I can easily share and embed my map where I want, like right here on the blog. A perfect addition to this map might be the addition of my geolocated Tweets… I’ll have to look closer at how to add that data! What’s very cool about the map below is that you can easily move around the legend and tools.. also, for a cool effect, zoom into Northern Colorado where many data points are dropped… Link directly to the map here or view below…
