Angus Fox, one of the organisers of the DevNest, had first got in touch with me last year after the launch of the Yahoo! Placemaker web platform that allows recognition of place references in unstructured text. Placemaker plus Twitter status feeds seemed an ideal candidate for a mashup and Angus was keen to get me to talk to his hard-core Twitter and social media literate developer audience.

Then in November 2009 Twitter announced their use of WOEIDs, the language neutral geographic identifiers that underpin Placemaker and the other Yahoo! Geo Technologies platforms, in their new Trends API. Naturally all of the Geo group at Yahoo! were excited, verging on ecstatic, at this. But getting our respective schedules in synch with each other wasn’t the easiest of things and 2009 came to a close without getting a firm date in the diary.

2010 arrived and Twitter launched their Trends API and exposed WOEIDs to the world and Angus got in touch again and we both put the seventh DevNest in our respective schedules.

Come the evening of Wednesday March 10th and I made my way to the Sun Microsystem’s Customer Briefing Center, just north of London Bridge where I was joined by Ewan MacLeod, the straight talking and highly entertaining and informing editor of Mobile Industry Review,  Paul Kinlan, Developer Programmes Engineer at Google and a plentiful supply of beer and pizza.

Ewan went first and you knew he was tapping into a rich vein of mobile geekery when a slide of his tee shirt drew such loud chuckles and guffaws from the audience, myself included.

Ewan’s deck is on SlideShare.net here and it speaks for itself even without an accompanying video; I strongly urge you to browse through his deck for some fascinating stats on mobile phone usage, breakdown and penetration and for the low down on exactly how much impact the iPhone is, and more importantly, isn’t making.

I was up next and gave a talk on (Almost) Everything You Ever Wanted To Know About Geo (with WOEIDs), which attempted to give this tech savvy audience a background on what geocoding, reverse geocoding and geoparsing are, why this isn’t a trivial task, what WOEIDs are and why they’re important for geo and for deriving meaning from content, such as Twitter status updates.

My deck accompanying the talk is above and there’s also a (slightly shakey) video to accompany it as well.

Closing the talks was Google’s Paul Kinlan who gave us the low down on Google’s Buzz and showed that the adage of never work with children, animals and live demos still has life it in.

Accompanied throughout by beer and pizza courtesy of the event’s sponsors, the Twitter DevNest was thoroughly enjoyable, a bit of a revelation in places and showed that Twitter has a deep and very enthusiastic developer following.

• Hamburg airport + Lufthansa plane + storm = a flight I’d really prefer not to be on.
• Dennys publicise their Twitter stream only to discover that it’s not actually theirs and Dennys Hsieh in Taiwan gets a lot more attention than he bargained for.
• Geek Joke of the Week: My cat is escaped.
• Pacifica, Stayathomia, Socalistan … Facebook social network connections mapped.
• John McKerrell‘s rather wonderful mapme.at gets place based locating.

Written and posted from home (51.427051, -0.333344)

So far, so geo but Twitter has noticed what I’ve been saying in my talks and accompanying decks for the last two years or so.

“We’re using Yahoo!’s Where on Earth IDs (WOEIDs) to name each location that we have information for — we’re doing so because those IDs give not only language-agnostic, but also permanent, stable, and unique identifiers for geographic locations.  For example, San Francisco has a permanent and unique WOEID of 2487956, London has 44418, and the Earth has WOEID 1.”

Whilst there have been other uses of WOEIDs in the wild, including Alex Housley’s Total Hotspots, Twitter picking on WOEIDs rather than another of the competing geo-identifiers is a massive credibility boost for the WOEID as a geographic standard for identifying and describing place.

Using WOEIDs to geotag your content, be it Twitter status messages, blog posts or photos, automagically gives you access to an ever increasing range of data and web services that understand WOEIDs as well as those that still only understand longitude and latitude. Long/lat coordinates are an attribute of WOEIDs in case you were wondering. Proof of this is visible in the elegant and oddly addictive game of Noticings.

Noticings is “a game of noticing things about you” jointly created by Tom Taylor. Tom was responsible for Boundaries, the amazing visualisation of Aaron Cope’s Flickr Alpha shapes which allows geographies, such neighbourhoods, for which no formal definition exists, to be represented and viewed.

Basically you tag Flickr photos with the “noticings” tag and the photo’s location, either from an onboard GPS or on Flickr and then you score points for your photo of something you noticed. Which doesn’t do it justice. The rules are in a constant state of flux but all to the better making it a Mornington Crescent for geotagged photos.

Using WOEIDs as a stable and consistent geoidentifier is the glue that allows such a super-web-mash-up to be created. Flickr uses WOEIDs as a geotagging mechanism, either from the EXIF data embedded in a photo or by dragging and dropping the photo on a Map; these WOEIDs are then exposed via the Flickr API. The same Flickr API can be used to look for photos meeting certain criteria, such as the noticings tag and to discover photos taken in the same location, a fundamental part of Noticings. As Tom puts it …

“(WOEIDs and GeoPlanet) gives us the opportunity to use colloquial geography rather than bounding boxes and radial searches and the like. I banged on about this in my talk at the AGI conference recently. I am such a geography bore. Anyway, we couldn’t have built Noticings without it.”

For those who like the technical gory details, Tom’s put up an excellent blog post to explain it all.

But it doesn’t stop at photos and Flickr, once you have a WOEID you can pass it to any of the ever growing number of web APIs that know how to handle WOEIDs, Yahoo’s GeoPlanet, Placemaker, Fire Eagle, YQL as well as services that speak long/lat. That’s a lot of services, and the number’s growing. Plus you get access to the horizontal and vertical relationships, parents, children and neighbours that a WOEID has as well as more obtuse colloquial geographies, all in multiple languages.

All of which is somewhat apt as I’m writing this in Munich at the back of the Telematics 2009 conference. While Munich is fine for the English speaking world, it’s München in Germany and Monaco di Baviera to the Italians. But it may also be spelt as Muenchen and Munchen if special characters or accents aren’t used. All of these names are simply multiple versions of the same place, and so are mapped to a single WOEID, 676757.

Now go and notice something.

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• Today I was caught red handed trying to blow up the world … mwah hah hah hah.
• A well known Irish budget airline found that its blue and yellow “harp” logo had suffered an, unasked for, logo makeover.
• The London Underground Tube map regains the River Thames and gets a version for tourists.
• Are you the sort of person who shouts at the screen “that’s not right” when watching a film? You’re not alone.
• Looking for a nearby wifi hotspot? A low tech approach can help.
• Microsoft’s new Windows 7 OS has inbuilt location services; but are they up to the challenge of managing location safely, securely and with sufficient flexibility?
• Submitting a paper abstract for a conference? This might help.
• You’ve probably heard of a Freudian Slip; now you can wear suitable slippers.
• If Jack The Ripper was alive today, would he use Twitter?

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• Yet more bacon products make it to market. Most of them are novelty value only but surely there’s scope for bacon flavoured mayo, for those moments when the perfect BLT is just out of reach?
• Twickenham Fire Station tested its’ air raid siren last week and memories of the Protect and Survive public service announcements on British TV at the height of the Cold War came flooding back.
• My talk’s at the AGI GeoCommunity conference seemed to get people talking; both seriously and somewhat tongue in cheek and I also managed to out the (neogeographer) Geoweb chair as an old school paleogeographer.
• The CEO of the company I work for finally managed to achieve the accolade of being faked on Twitter.
• And the source of all the crop circles was finally found in a town in the US with a strangely familiar name.

Posted via email from Gary’s Posterous

• Posterous recently gained themes and Twitter lost the background and avatar settings for lots of accounts, mine included. 
• Need to write München, Côte or Café with proper accents while on a Mac? Easy when you know how.
• If you live in London, apparently you’re either very rich or a loser. It also rained a lot and the world ended, at least in Old Street.
• Spotify can scrobble to Last.fm … why did I not know this?
• Want to know how Google Streetview is put together? Google Japan have a explanation.
• I reached an inspiration dead-end while preparing for this week’s AGI conference; turns out I’m not alone.

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So the Posterous FAQ at http://posterous.com/faq says this “We’ll do smarter things for photos, MP3′s, documents and video (both links AND files)”.

Link eh? In the spirit of experimentation let’s try this, firstly from the easy and obvious one … twitpic.com

… and rival yfrog.com …

… and from my Flickr photostream …

… and finally a more challenging one, from my Facebook photo album …

http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?pid=3454882&id=757562989

… there’s only one way to find out, so let’s send this to Posterous right now and see what happens; all in the spirit of experimentation naturally.

Posted via email from Gary’s Posterous

• This fad for all things bacon flavoured is getting out of hand; a few weeks back it was bacon flavoured vodka and now you can get bacon flavoured lip balm.
• There’s lots of geeks in the United Kingdom; now you can know where they are. I might be there as well.
• Someone posted the PIN number from your credit or debit card onto the interwebs.
• Twitter’s popular these days; even the birds in the trees are RT’ing.
• If Ohio was a piano, ever wondered how it’d sound? Possibly the weirdest geo and mapping visualization. Ever.
• There’s a spectrum from OMG to WTF, pasing through”I get it”, “that’s strange” and “I don’t get it” along the way.
• And finally, UNIX turned 40. It’s still younger than me though.

• Illustrating just how broken the mobile operator’s customer support is, Rummble’s CEO Andrew Scott details his 9 month battle with O2 after they refused to honour an agreed deal and MoanLog’s Gaurav Patel details the extraordinary length that 3 went to so they didn’t have to give out a PAC code to a customer.
• Twitter was brought down by a distributed denial of service attack; but some people survived thanks to a PostIt note.
• Chiswick Business Park knows how to speak to humans and to dogs.
• The world didn’t end at 12:34:56 on 07/08/09; probably because it had already happened in July to the US.
• The Londoner and the geo geek in me took a trip down memory lane with a collection of London Underground Tube maps.
• And finally, thanks to MobilePress, vicchi.org went mobile.

• After managing to acquire garygale.com I put up a personal site on the domain and cut down the subdomain proliferation that vicchi.org had acquired over the years, retiring blog.vicchi.org and where.vicchi.org amongst others.
• There’s no accounting for taste it seems and some people think it’s cute to have a small plastic dog humping the USB port of your laptop.
• Flavoured vodka; I can understand lemon, orange, vanilla and even chilli versions but bacon flavoured vodka?
• Possibly the best sign ever; “unattended children will be fed espresso and given a puppy“.
• In order to define recursion we must first define recursion; Google demonstrates the principle of recursion by offering to look up recursion when searching for recursion.
• Twitter corrected follower counts by deleting spammer’s accounts; I lost 100 followers overnight and the twitter-sphere howled in anguish.