Posts tagged as "geoplanet"

RIP FireEagle. You Shall Share Location No More

Back in 2010, when I left Yahoo! to go and join Nokia, I wrote some words that at the time seemed full of hope for the future of the Geotechnologies group I'd left.

I’ll continue to use my core set of Yahoo! products, tools and APIs … YQL, Placemaker, GeoPlanet, WOEIDs, YUI, Flickr and Delicious. Not because I used to work for Yahoo! but because they’re superb products.

Time and changes of corporate heart have not been kind here. Maybe it's time to take a look at the state of the geo union.

GeoPlanet Data Resurfaces For Download; On The Internet Archive

Although I can't find the originator of the saying that there's no delete button for the internet, it's a saying that's very true. If you put something up on a web site, be it a photo, some text or perhaps a file of geographic data there's a very good chance that someone else has a copy, even if you subsequently take the original down. It's a sort of digital whack-a-mole.

This is all too apparent in the story of Yahoo's GeoPlanet Data download. When I was part of the Yahoo! Geo Technologies team, we released a public download of the Yahoo! WOEID data set, under the CC BY 3.0 license, in 2009 at Where 2.0. More about that license in a moment.

As Yahoo! continues to undergo change under the leadership of Marissa Meyer, the current data file and all earlier versions were taken offline. Visit the GeoPlanet Data page on Yahoo's Developer Network site and instead of a set of download links, you see "We are currently making the data non-downloadable while we determine a better way to surface the data as a part of the service.".

The Opposite Of Geolocation Is ... Relocation?

First a disclaimer; there's one elsewhere on this blog but this post merits another. I used to work for Yahoo! as part of the Geo Technologies group. I now work for Nokia as part of their Location group. The opinions and ideas expressed in this post are absolutely just my own, and should not be confused with, or taken for, those of my current or past employers. It's just me here.

You may not have realised it but Friday May 27th. was a sad day for the Geo industry in London. Even without the benefit of knowing what was going on from ex-colleagues inside the company, the signs were there if you knew where to look for them and how to read them.

Before the Internet, companies, teams and projects could fade quietly into anonymity and into oblivion. But on the Internet, everything is in public and it's much harder to hide the tell tale signs. API updates and bug fixes cease. A web site or blog stops being updated or goes down altogether. A Twitter feed stops being an active living thing and becomes merely a historical record. Ex-colleagues start following you on Twitter or you start getting connection requests on LinkedIn whilst other colleagues start polishing and updating their LinkedIn profiles.

And May 27th. 2011? That was the day that the last of the remaining members of my old team at Yahoo! Geo Technologies left the Yahoo! office in London and that was the day that Yahoo! ceased to have a Geo presence in the UK.

Know Your Place; Adding Geographic Intelligence to your Content

Day two of the AGI GeoCommunity conference and the conference as a whole has ended. We discussed neogeography, paleogeography and pretty much all points in between, finally agreeing that labels such as these get in the way of the geography itself. I was fortunate enough to have my paper submission accepted and presented a talk on how to Know Your Place at the end of the morning's geoweb track. The paper is reproduced below and the deck that accompanies it is on SlideShare.