Gary's Bloggage » newyork

Where’s The Map? … Here’s The Map

Gary — Wed, 15 Sep 2010 18:46:02 +0000

I’m currently at the Location Business Summit USA in the Crowne Plaza Hotel in San Jose, California where yesterday I gave a talk on “Of Data Silos, Geo-Babel and Other Geo Malaises“. More about that in a later post, but one of the points I raised seemed to strike a chord with the audience … in 2010, where’s the map?

In spite of today’s joyous rush to location based services and location based mobile services, the map seems to take a back seat, if it’s even present at all. This point was taken up again on one of the opening panels with one of the panelists commenting that “many services don’t use maps as an interface“.

But there are times when the map is precisely the interface you want to use, especially when you’re trying to visualize the impact of a data set on a location and serendipitously my morning trawl of my RSS feeds provided two examples of where the map is and just how effective it can be.

Firstly there’s Vacant NYC, a crowd-sourced data set of vacant buildings, lots and condominiums in New York. The underlying data set is rich and complex but a simple, map based visualization, provides an immediate view onto the data, as can be seen from the screen-shot below.

Closer to home, there’s the London Murder Map, which whilst potentially ghoulish, again effectively shows how, and more importantly where, people have lost their lives in the UK’s capital. As with the New York example, the data set is rich, as shown by the colour coded key above the map, but the map takes centre stage and yields an immediate overview of London, with the option to dig down deeper into the data and into the map.

In 2010, the map may be strangely absent from a lot of today’s location based and themed services but it’s good to see that the map is very much alive, well and serving a purpose.

Written and posted from the Crowne Plaza Hotel, San Jose, California (37.330123, -121.891079)

The Trinity of Geo (Both Redux and Somewhat Late)

Gary — Mon, 22 Mar 2010 13:52:46 +0000

In October of 2009 I wrote that the trinity of geo was going to hit New York City. Translated, this meant that myself, Tom Coates (the man behind the creation of Fire Eagle and now roving Yahoo! Product Manager for User Location) and Aaron Cope (then chief geo wrangler and trouble maker at Flickr and now trouble maker at Stamen Design) were going to be descending on New York City for the Yahoo! Open Hack developer’s conference. I also speculated that is was going to be geotastic. It was.

Now some 5 months later, the video footage that was shot in the Millennium Broadway Hotel, just off of Times Square has finally emerged blinking into the light of day so now would be a suitable time to revisit my talk, Place not Space; There’s More to Geo than just Maps.

It would also be a suitable time to pair the slide deck with added video footage featuring genuine fatigue and jetlag.

Written at home (51.427051, -0.333344) and posted from the Yahoo! London office (51.5141985, -0.1292006)

Through the Window Redux

Gary — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 12:49:38 +0000

The view from my window has changed a lot of recent. Through my office window there’s been St. Giles and Covent Garden in the snow …

… and Hanger One on Moffett Field, one of the world’s largest free-standing structures.

Through my hotel window I’ve seen the Chrysler Building in New York at sunrise …

… and Silicon Valley on a cold, foggy and damp morning …

But of all the view I’ve seen through my window, I think I prefer this one most of all, because it’s home.

Written and posted from home (51.427051, -0.333344)

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NYC Beware : The Trinity of Geo Is Coming

Gary — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 21:41:41 +0000

Ever noticed how you never see some people in the same room together? Various conspiracy theories abound on this theme; that they’re really the same person or that they’re mortal enemies. All complete rubbish of course but maybe there’s some truth in this after all … I’ve never been publicly seen in the same room as Aaron Cope and Tom Coates before.

Benedictus de Spinoza said that nature abhors a vaccum and Heisenberg calculated the critical mass needed for a nuclear reaction so maybe there’s a halfway stage between these two extremes, a geocritical mass if you will.

I really should explain …

When people ask me what it is that I do for Yahoo!, I explain that I help use geography to describe people, places and things.

A rather jovial looking Tom.

People are knowing where users are and the things that are important to them. Fire Eagle, Yahoo’s location brokerage platform allows users to share their location on the web, to update anywhere and to choose what you share and don’t share. Tom is the man behind the creation of Fire Eagle and was responsible for leading the (now defunct) Yahoo! Brickhouse team to produce the best location service there is on the ‘net.

Wherecamp ’09 in Palo Alto; that’s “geotechnologist and ATM user” Tyler Bell on the left, myself in the middle and Aaron on the right.

Places are knowing geographic locations and the names of places. That’s the remit of Geo Technologies, my group at Yahoo! and you can see this in the public web service platforms we produce such as GeoPlanet and Placemaker, all linked using the geoidentifier we call WOEIDs.

Things are knowing the geographic context of content. Flickr allows you to geotag your photos, using my group’s technology and in February of this year broke the amazing 100 million geotagged photo mark. If you’ve seen him speak at Where 2.0, Wherecamp or previous Hack Days, you’ll know that Aaron knows the power of geo and has used it to produce something rather unique and special at Flickr.

Geocritical mass (which doesn’t currently show us in any search engine, so you saw it first here) may well be reached next week in the Millennium Broadway hotel in Times Square, New York when all three of us will be in the same place, at the same time for Open Hack NYC, 48 hours of hacking goodness with a generous helping of geo. Who knows what will happen, all I can say is that a trinity of geopeople are coming to NYC and that it’ll be geotastic.

Posted via email from Gary’s Posterous