Gary Gale

Posts about google

With the Demise of Google Maps Engine, What Next For GME Users?

At the beginning of 2013 Google launched Google Maps Engine Lite, a simpler and easier to use version of their commercial Maps Engine, which was designed as a successor to Google's My Maps feature. In essence, My Maps and GME were web based, simplified GIS tools, allowing a user to create maps with overlays of their own data. Call it GIS for people who don't know about GIS if you will. Maybe GME never got the traction Google hoped for but they have now announced that GME will be shutting down in a year's time. What happens next for GME users and what alternatives are there? Who will benefit from the demise of GME?

There's 3 likely contenders to the throne of the GIS-lite approach of GME; ArcGIS Online, CartoDB and MapBox via their new Turf product.

There’s much irony here, given that GME was originally positioned as a web savvy alternative to traditional GIS platforms. Both Esri and Mapbox will need a significant advertising push and awareness campaign to attract GME emigres. CartoDB on the other hand is positioning itself as the official successor to GME with the launch of CartoDB for Google Maps Platform, apparently developed in conjunction with Google.

cartodb

I don’t think they’ll be any one winner and all of these wannabe successors to GME will likely benefit though CartoDB's official seal of Google approval will tip the balance in their favour.

But there other contenders here as well …

There's iSpatial, a Google Maps and Google Earth based product, which may make this attractive for people who want to continue the Google experience and look and feel.

The similarly named eSpatial is another Google Maps powered mapping platform with GME style functionality

At one end of the spectrum is uMap, an OSM based layering tool and platform, while pricier options include Maptitude and Mango.

Finally honourable mention should be made of Geojson.io, very much GeoJSON focused as the name suggests, but an easy visualisation tool for GeoJSON data.

Whilst these products may get some customers, they’ve already been competing with GME for users and for business, so I don’t see a massive uptake for these.

Finally of course, there’s Google themselves … users with some technical ability could replicate some of the functionality of GME with Google’s other maps and geo APIs and products.

While GME may be biting the dust, there's a whole host of alternatives available for users looking to emigrate from Google's platform and who will carry on visualising their spatial data, blissfully unable that they're actually using a GIS platform.

Dead End by Alan English, CC-BY-NA

Test Drive The New Google Maps Preview; With A Little Bit Of Cookie Hacking

request an invite and not everyone gets one of those it seems. But if you're impatient or curious and don't mind a tiny amount of technical hackery you can get to test drive the new version without the need to be one of those blessed with a preview invite.

If you go to Google Maps right now, you'll still see the current incarnation of Google's map. This is what the map of my home town looks like. The new preview version is there, you just can't see it.

There's a new version of Google Maps for the web but so far it's not for everyone. You need to request an invite and not everyone gets one of those it seems. But if you're impatient or curious and don't mind a tiny amount of technical hackery you can get to test drive the new version without the need to be one of those blessed with a preview invite.

If you go to Google Maps right now, you'll still see the current incarnation of Google's map. This is what the map of my home town looks like. The new preview version is there, you just can't see it.

Google Maps

The key to unlocking the new preview is held in a cookie called NID. If you change the cookie's value from one impenetrable string of characters to another, equally impenetrable string of characters, the preview will automagically get unlocked. There's several ways to modify a cookie; as I use Chrome on a daily basis I used the Edit This Cookie extension, but there's other ways to do this depending on your browser of choice. Once you've found the NID cookie, change its value to ...

67=MzRdy0T16I7lw9REhtIF5N5lkuoSy1s7cJGFa24wZ6pRK0kRpU9SqiTWy9r_DQ4UxdmHjSeMImvsqgrVUbC0T9FhuESvl__dlkZwRBTxkzxWcdq8vDcpuvnuve6yI78LeqFFK21yc0_6Bp3cHS4Z3a6nwwBQm_fW8DfHF7lv6OrkDosmMa-GaDOLVXR2ewK5-xAk

... and reload the page. Hey presto. Welcome to the new Google Maps.

Google Maps Preview One final word of warning; this is a hack. It's likely to change or go away at any time. If you're a Chrome user, it also seems to wreak havoc with Chrome's omnibox searches as well. Your mileage, as they say, may vary.

After The Missing Manual For OpenStreetMap, Here's The Google Map Maker Version

OpenStreetMap, HERE's Map Creator (which I work on) and Google's Map Maker, anyone with a modern web browser and an internet connection can now help to make maps where previously there were none and to improve and keep maps up to date, which still remains one of the biggest challenges to map making.

There's already been a book about OpenStreetMap, which I wrote about in April of 2011. As far as I know, no-one's written about HERE's Map Creator but for Google's Map Maker there's Limoke Oscar's Instant Google Map Maker Starter.

The growth and uptake of today's internet and web allows us to do a lot of things that were previously the preserve of the professional. You can see this in the rise of words which now have citizen prepended to them. We don't just write blog posts, we're citizen journalists. We don't just take photographs, we're citizen photographers. To this list, we can now add citizen cartographer as well.

With the help of OpenStreetMap, HERE's Map Creator (which I work on) and Google's Map Maker, anyone with a modern web browser and an internet connection can now help to make maps where previously there were none and to improve and keep maps up to date, which still remains one of the biggest challenges to map making.

There's already been a book about OpenStreetMap, which I wrote about in April of 2011. As far as I know, no-one's written about HERE's Map Creator but for Google's Map Maker there's Limoke Oscar's Instant Google Map Maker Starter.

When I wrote about OpenStreetMap; Using and Enhancing the Free Map of the World, one of the reasons I liked reading about making maps with OSM in a book was because ...

OpenStreetMap is easy to use, graphical (on the website), comes with multiple discussion and documentation sites and well supported mailing lists; you can always find the answer to your question. But sometimes you don’t know what the question is. Sometimes you just want to read a book.

The same can be said of Instant Google Map Maker Starter. The e-book edition I've just finished reading doesn't appear to have the physical weight and depth of the OSM tome, but that's only to be expected of a book that clearly sets out to be a starter.

Instant Google Map Maker Starter

As a starter, the book describes itself on the cover as short, fast, focused and on all these counts it succeeds admirably. Making, creating and editing a digital map is now massively easier than it was 5 years ago, but it's still not simplicity itself.

When you're setting out, you need to have explained what the difference is between what's in the map, the spatial data of the map itself, and what's on the map, the places or points of interest. You need to know how to use your software tool of choice, be it OpenStreetMap, Map Creator or Map Maker. You need to be shown the shortcuts and how to avoid the inevitable pitfalls.

Limoke obviously knows how to use Google Map Maker and it shows in the clear, concise prose, which educates from the ground up and doesn't once stray into making the reader feel patronised or being lectured.

Maybe I've been spoilt with the depth and coverage of this book's OpenStreetMap counterpart and even though the book is clearly labelled and pitched as a high level starter guide, it left me wanting more. But that's not the fault of the author. Most of what I wanted more of is information that only Google would be able to provide; about why Google Map Maker is open for editing in some countries and about why you have to ask Google to get the data you put in back out. But I would have liked to have seen the author touching on the why of map making as much as the how, which he's admirably written about. Why do people make maps and what motivates them?

Maybe there's a book to be written about this; maybe one day I might even do that.

Map Push Pins vs. Dots? Google Map Engine vs. Dotspotting?

Google launched their Maps Engine Lite beta; a way of quickly and easily visualising small scale geographic data sets on (unsurprisingly) a Google map. The service allows you to upload a CSV file containing geographic information and style the resulting map with the data added to it. I thought I'd give it a try.

I turned to my tried and trusted data set for things like this; a data set I derived from a Flickr set of geotagged photos I'd taken of the London Elephant Parade in 2010. It's a known data source and I know what the results of this data set will give me; it lets me do a reasonably meaningful visual comparison of how a particular product or service interprets and displays the data.

Yesterday, Google launched their Maps Engine Lite beta; a way of quickly and easily visualising small scale geographic data sets on (unsurprisingly) a Google map. The service allows you to upload a CSV file containing geographic information and style the resulting map with the data added to it. I thought I'd give it a try.

I turned to my tried and trusted data set for things like this; a data set I derived from a Flickr set of geotagged photos I'd taken of the London Elephant Parade in 2010. It's a known data source and I know what the results of this data set will give me; it lets me do a reasonably meaningful visual comparison of how a particular product or service interprets and displays the data.

Google Maps Engine

Reading up on Map Engine Lite, I noted that I could only upload a maximum of 100 data points into a layer on the map, which wasn't a problem as my data set is localised to London and contains only 10 pieces of information, one for each photo I'd taken. Once I'd uploaded the data I could style the colours of the push pins and the background style of the map. It looks pretty good, even if you are limited to 100 points per layer and it's for strictly personal and non commercial use only.

But I was sure I'd seen this sort of thing before and I had, in the form of Stamen's Dotspotting. I already had an account with Dotspotting and, even though I'd forgotten about it, I'd previously made a map from my London Elephants data set.

DotSpotting

The parallels are many. Both Map Engine and Dotspotting allow you to upload data in CSV format. Both services try to work out coordinates from the data, if there's no lat/long coordinates already. Both services allow you to style the resultant map.

There are differences. Dotspotting allows you to download your data; it doesn't appear that Google does. Map Engine allows you to style the map markers; it doesn't seem that Dotspotting allows this. Dotspotting supports Excel spreadsheets, CSV files, Flickr and Google My Maps feeds; Map Engine only supports CSV files.

There's also one other key difference; Map Engine was launched yesterday, whilst Dotspotting was launched 2 years ago.

But there's an old saying that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.

Map Wars; Are Apple's Maps Really That Bad?

Making Maps Underground

James Fee and Tyler Bell hangout The One Where Tyler Bell Defines Big Data as a proof point. But for the sake of this post, just assume that Places and maps are synonymous.

It's never been easier to make a map. Correction. It's never been easier to contribute to a map. Today we seem to be makingcontributing to maps everywhere, even underground, or should I say Underground?

To makecontribute to a map, you used to have to be a professional map maker, with easy access to an arsenal of surveying or an industrial grade GPS.

Warning. This post contains a sweeping generalisation. Yes, I know that Places are not just part of today's digital maps; see the James Fee and Tyler Bell hangout The One Where Tyler Bell Defines Big Data as a proof point. But for the sake of this post, just assume that Places and maps are synonymous.

It's never been easier to make a map. Correction. It's never been easier to contribute to a map. Today we seem to be makingcontributing to maps everywhere, even underground, or should I say Underground?

To makecontribute to a map, you used to have to be a professional map maker, with easy access to an arsenal of surveying or an industrial grade GPS.

Then came the notion of community mapping. Be it OpenStreetMap, Navteq's and Nokia's Map Creator or Google's Map Maker, anyone armed with a GPS enabled smartphone, hell, anyone without a GPS, could help make a map.

And now it seems, all you need to do to help make a map is to be somewhere unmapped with some form of internet access, be it a 3G or 4G cellular data connection, or a wifi connection. As part of the London 2012 Olympic Games, some London Underground stations (finally) got wifi access and sure enough, where wifi goes, so does mapping, even platforms on the London Underground.

With apologies to Steve Karmeinsky for exposing part of his Foursquare check-in history.

Foursquare Checkins, Maps And WordPress; Now With MOAR Maps

WP Quadratum plugin. Foursquare, checkins and maps ... what more could you ask for? Maybe the answer is more maps.

Version 1.1 of the WP Quadratum plugin, which went live this morning, now has added maps. The previous versions of the plugin used Nokia's maps, because I work for Nokia's Location & Commerce group and I wanted to use the maps that I work on. But if Nokia's maps aren't the maps for you then how about Google's, or maybe CloudMade's OpenStreetMap maps or perhaps OpenLayers' OpenStreetMap maps.

If you're an avid Foursquare user you can already display your last checkin, visualised on a map, in the sidebar of your WordPress powered site with the WP Quadratum plugin. Foursquare, checkins and maps ... what more could you ask for? Maybe the answer is more maps.

Version 1.1 of the WP Quadratum plugin, which went live this morning, now has added maps. The previous versions of the plugin used Nokia's maps, because I work for Nokia's Location & Commerce group and I wanted to use the maps that I work on. But if Nokia's maps aren't the maps for you then how about Google's, or maybe CloudMade's OpenStreetMap maps or perhaps OpenLayers' OpenStreetMap maps.

Thanks to the Mapstraction JavaScript mapping API, WP Quadratum now allows you to choose which mapping provider you'd like to see your checkins appear on. And if you don't want a map on the sidebar of your site, you can embed the checkin map in any post or page with the plugin's shortcode too.

As usual, the plugin is free to download and use, either from the official WordPress plugin repository or from GitHub.

As a fully paid up and self confessed map geek I may be somewhat biased but surely most things can be improved with the simple addition of more maps.

Is This Apple's New Map? (It Doesn't Look Like Google's)

Updated 8/3/12 at 12.20 GMT

Judging by comments to this blog post, on Twitter and on Google Plus, the consensus seems to be that yes, Apple is using OSM data from 2010 outside of the US; inside of the US it's (probably) TIGER data and no, there doesn't seem to be attribution and Apple may well be getting a communiqué from OSM to that effect. Other sources of information on this include * The iPhoto for iOS Not Using Google Maps thread on the OSM-Talk mailing list * Iván Sánchez Ortega has put up a nice map comparison between OSM and iPhoto's map tiles. * There's also another comparison between Apple's, OSM's and Google's map tiles. * Jonas. K has put up a blog post which comes right out and says that iPhoto is using OSM and other public domain mapping sources. * Finally, as a nice touch, this post seems to have made it into OSM Community Blogs.

... and now, back to the original post.

We live in a world dominated by and surrounded by brands. One of the hallmarks of a successful brand is whether it's able to be immediately recognised as that brand, without necessarily looking too deeply for a brand label. Look at a car and you'll probably be able to tell whether it's a Ford or not. Look at a laptop and you'll probably be able to tell whether it's Apple's or one of those faceless, grey, consumer models. Look at an espresso cup and you'll probably be able to tell whether it's got coffee from Illy in it.

As it is in the real, offline world, so it is in the digital, online world and nowhere is this more prevalent than in the world of digital maps. Each mapping provider has an immediately recognisable look, feel and style to it. You can tell whether the map is from Nokia or NAVTEQ, from Google, from Mapquest or from OpenStreetMap. Now granted, a digital map is the product of lots of data sources but the map's style is unique; although OpenStreetMap's style is almost the exception as there's several styles you can use.

Ever since the launch of the original iPhone, for Apple that look and feel of their maps have been Google's. Even before you look to the bottom right hand corner of the map and see the Google logo you'll know it's a Google map. There's also been lots of rumours that with Apple's acquisitions in the mapping space, C3 and Placebase to name but a few, it wouldn't be too long before Apple had their own map.

Maybe that time has now come, for iPhoto on iOS at least. Take a look at the screen grabs above. These maps aren't, at least at face value, Google's. The map style isn't Google's and even more interestingly, there's no immediately apparent copyright or brand notice anywhere on the map. Is this Apple's new map or is it another map provider's under a license that doesn't need branding?

Thanks must go to follow Nokian Andrea Trasatti for spotting this on MacRumors; there's also commentary on this over at 512 Pixels as well. Photo Credits courtesy of MacRumors.

Foursquare Goes With OpenStreetMap; On The Web

little announcement" of the location based, check-in, company's decision to oust Google Maps and instead to go with OpenStreetMap data, by way of MapBox.

From reading a lot of the coverage you'd be forgiven for thinking that Foursquare has completely severed ties with Google's mapping APIs, but this isn't quite the story. As ReadWriteWeb notes in the last paragraph of its coverage, "Foursquare's iPhone and Android apps won't be affected" as the move is for Foursquare's home on the web, foursquare.com, only.

In web and location circles, much has been made of Foursquare's recent "little announcement" of the location based, check-in, company's decision to oust Google Maps and instead to go with OpenStreetMap data, by way of MapBox.

From reading a lot of the coverage you'd be forgiven for thinking that Foursquare has completely severed ties with Google's mapping APIs, but this isn't quite the story. As ReadWriteWeb notes in the last paragraph of its coverage, "Foursquare's iPhone and Android apps won't be affected" as the move is for Foursquare's home on the web, foursquare.com, only.

Indeed, the current set of Foursquare smartphone apps continue to use a variety of mapping platforms. On Android and on iOS, it's still Google Maps, not unsurprisingly given Android is effectively a Google mobile OS, and Google is still Apple's mapping platform of choice, for now at least.

On Blackberry it's also business as usual for Google Maps, whilst on Symbian, it's Nokia's mapping platform and on Windows Phone 7 it's (currently) the Bing mapping platform.

So while this move is great news for both the OpenStreetMap community and for MapBox and, as ReadWriteWeb notes, "when you use Foursquare Explore on the Web to search for places, you'll be taking eyeballs away from Google", this is a move that affects Foursquare's web presence only, not their mobile apps. Given that in order to actually use Foursquare effectively, in other words, to check-in, you need to be on a smartphone, I wonder how many eyeballs will actually be taken away from Google. Furthermore, whilst those in the location industry are looking at this keenly, I have to wonder how many users of Foursquare will actually notice the change on the web.

For Foursquare on the web this is probably a smart move and for most users of the Foursquare website, OpenStreetMap data is, as Muki Haklay noted in a paper published in 20101, "good enough".

But not good enough apparently for some Foursquare users, who are fairly outspoken about blank or incomplete maps on the comments to Foursquare's announcement blog post.

It would be good to think that Foursquare's use of OpenStreetMap data will encourage their users to contribute to the underlying open spatial data set that is OSM; after all, all you really need is a GPS device, which is what most smartphones are these days. The optimist in me hopes that this will be the case. The pessimist in me, or maybe it's the realist in me, tempers that hope with the realisation that Foursquare still makes the address of a new Place optional, that a geocode from a GPS device probably isn't enough and that most Foursquare users neither know or care about the underlying map, caring far more about getting to the top of the leaderboard, becoming Mayor and earning badges.

Time alone will tell whether my optimistic side is right.

Costa Rica And Nicaragua; A Border Dispute In The Age Of Web Maps

The popular press and media likes nothing better to poke fun at people who seem to ignore their own senses and instead rely on their GPS sat-nav systems, which frequently results in people ending up in the middle of fields, in the middle of rivers or even, in extreme cases, almost driving off of the edge of a cliff.

But the strangest example of this sort of behaviour was in the first reports of recent events on the border of Costa Rica and Nicaragua that seemed to implicate Google Maps as justification for Nicaraguan troops crossing the border into Costa Rica and raising the Nicaraguan flag on Costa Rican territory. The dispute seems to hark back to the 1850's where the contested border between the two countries followed the course of the San Juan River, the course of which has since moved somewhat, as rivers are wont to do. Costa Rica asserts their sovereignty on the disputed land based on the 1850's arbitrated border which follows the course of the river and Nicaragua asserts theirs based on the fact that the river has moved so some land must be theirs.

The reference to Google Maps turns out to be a bit of a red herring as well, originating from an opportunistic sound bite rather than fact. Granted Google have based their data set on admittedly sparse data, some of it originating from the US State Department, which had got it wrong. But other mapping data vendors, who should know better and who at the time were having a great laugh at Google's expense on various forms of social media, turn out to be just as incorrect as Google's.

While this is probably the most extreme example of "but I found it on the internet so it must be true", the whole story is less about whose map is right, less about blaming map error on an online map and more about how some parts of the world are less well mapped than others. Not all map data is created equal.

The twists and turns of the story are best followed on the original post from Jonathan Crowe's excellent The Map Room blog and its follow up as well as an in-depth article on the subject from Ogle Earth.

More Location Tracking; This Time From Foursquare

deliberately tracking my journey by using Google's Latitude and unexpectedly tracking the same journey by looking at the history of my Foursquare and Gowalla check-ins.

By using the history function from Google Latitude I was able to put together a quick and dirty visualisation of the locations I'd been to but my check-in history added not only the location but also the place that was at each location.

During last week's Geo-Loco conference in San Francisco, Fred Wilson (no, not the guy from the B-52's) mentioned that you could feed your Foursquare check-in history into Google Maps and produce another quick and dirty visualisation of not only the places you'd checked into but also where those places were.

Back in March of this year I wrote about deliberately tracking my journey by using Google's Latitude and unexpectedly tracking the same journey by looking at the history of my Foursquare and Gowalla check-ins.

By using the history function from Google Latitude I was able to put together a quick and dirty visualisation of the locations I'd been to but my check-in history added not only the location but also the place that was at each location.

During last week's Geo-Loco conference in San Francisco, Fred Wilson (no, not the guy from the B-52's) mentioned that you could feed your Foursquare check-in history into Google Maps and produce another quick and dirty visualisation of not only the places you'd checked into but also where those places were.

Simply login to your Foursquare account and visit your feeds page at https://foursquare.com/feeds/ and copy the RSS check-in history link but don't click on the link. Open up Google Maps and paste in the link and add ?count=200 to the end of the URL to make Foursquare return a reasonable amount of check-ins. Hey presto, one instant map of your check-ins, which shows me that I've been checking in in the Bay Area in the USA, in and around London in the UK and in and around Berlin in Germany. Not that I didn't know this already but it's always good to see this visualised on a map.

Foursquare History - Global

Of course, Google Maps is a full slippy maps implementation, so I can click, drag and zoom in to see my check-ins from the Geo-Loco conference in San Francisco in the Bay Area, south through Palo Alto to San Jose.

Foursquare History - Bay Area

I can also jump across the Atlantic Ocean, straight over the United Kingdom, to Berlin and see Berlin's Tegel Airport in the west and the Nokia Gate5 office in the Mitte district of the city.

Foursquare History - Berlin

With a little bit of time, effort and GIS know-how I could have probably come up with a slick animated trail of my check-ins but sometimes a quick and dirty way of seeing where I've been on a map is all that's needed.

Latitude Inconsistitude

Latitude location sharing platform; there's ample coverage and commentary on ReadWriteWeb and on TechCrunch and that's just fine because that's not what I want to write about.

When it was launched in early 2009, Latitude was the receipt of some fairly harsh press from the informed tech media and from the uninformed traditional media and I argued for some latitude in the discussions on, err, Latitude.

In the midst of yesterday's I/O event, Google announced the launch of the long rumoured API for their Latitude location sharing platform; there's ample coverage and commentary on ReadWriteWeb and on TechCrunch and that's just fine because that's not what I want to write about.

When it was launched in early 2009, Latitude was the receipt of some fairly harsh press from the informed tech media and from the uninformed traditional media and I argued for some latitude in the discussions on, err, Latitude.

Latitude kept on getting compared to Yahoo's Fire Eagle and the main gripes seemed to be:

  1. Latitude is a consumer application built into Google Maps, not a platform
  2. Latitude doesn't have an API
  3. Latitide's privacy model is opt-in but all or nothing

So now Latitude has an API and everyone's happy. Right?

Unofficial Google Latitude T-Shirt

Wrong. The previous gripes have been done away with and replaced with three more gripes. 1. Latitude needs to run in the background and so will either drain battery life or won't run in the background on an iPhone at all. 2. Latitude now has granular privacy controls but these are on the back-end so Google will know your location prior to federating it to location consumers via the API. 3. Latitude needs a Google account to use.

There's a lot of inconsistency here. 1. Latitude, as part of Google Maps, already runs in the background on handsets that support that. The iPhone doesn't, yet, but that's an iPhone OS issue not a Latitude issue. Short battery life is a feature of almost all smartphone class handsets, Latitude or not. 2. Latitude gains granular privacy controls but they're on the back-end so this is a bad thing. Fire Eagle has granular privacy controls and they're on the back-end but this has never been a source of complaint. 3. Latitude needs a Google account to use. Correction. Latitude has always needed a Google account to use, so this is a bad thing. Fire Eagle has always needed a Yahoo! Id to use, and yet this is something not seen as a contentious issue.

One of the criticisms that was levelled at Fire Eagle was lack of a definitive consumer application at launch; a not unfair criticism. Latitude's taken the inverse approach, launching with a consumer application and then opening up an API almost a year later.

Time will tell which of these two location sharing platforms will dominate or whether they will be usurped by another unseen contender. Photo Credits: moleitau on Flickr.

Not All Satellite Imagery is Created Equal

invisible at night, still officially at war with their southern neighbour and under United Nations economic sanctions, North Korea is a blank spot on political maps of the area.

Even the satellite imagery layer in Google Maps has little additional detail to offer.

But compare and contract against the updated imagery for North Korea that Google Earth has had since December of last year.

Finally add in the Google Earth layer that the North Korea Economy Watch has created and all of a sudden North Korea springs into view. Ever wanted to see where the Hoeryong Essential Foodstuff Factory was located? Now you can.

Pretty much invisible at night, still officially at war with their southern neighbour and under United Nations economic sanctions, North Korea is a blank spot on political maps of the area.

Even the satellite imagery layer in Google Maps has little additional detail to offer.

But compare and contract against the updated imagery for North Korea that Google Earth has had since December of last year.

Finally add in the Google Earth layer that the North Korea Economy Watch has created and all of a sudden North Korea springs into view. Ever wanted to see where the Hoeryong Essential Foodstuff Factory was located? Now you can.

Near Instantaneous Trans Atlantic Travel

I've been tracking my journeys again and in doing so appear to have discovered the secret of near instantaneous trans Atlantic travel. Apart from the sporadic bad GPS locks, watch as I travel from home to the Yahoo! campus in Sunnyvale California and manage to travel from Heathrow to San Francisco in a blink of an eye.

It's all an optical illusion of course, revealed if you watch the timer in the top left hand corner jump from around 11.30 AM to 3.00 PM; due to the lack of Latitude updates whilst I'm in the air.

Deliberately (and Unexpectedly) Tracking My Journey

Ed Parsons and I drove from London to Nottingham and back to attend the one day Supporting the Contextual Footprint event run by the Horizon Digital Economy Research institute at the University of Nottingham and I had Google Latitude running on my BlackBerry, with location history enabled, as I usually do.

Unofficial Google Latitude T-Shirt

Using the pre smartphone, pre GPS, pre Latitude method of writing it down, the journey went something like this:

I've been tracking my journey and in doing so inadvertently uncovered a sea change in the way in which we view the whole thorny issue of location tracking.

Yesterday, Ed Parsons and I drove from London to Nottingham and back to attend the one day Supporting the Contextual Footprint event run by the Horizon Digital Economy Research institute at the University of Nottingham and I had Google Latitude running on my BlackBerry, with location history enabled, as I usually do.

Unofficial Google Latitude T-Shirt

Using the pre smartphone, pre GPS, pre Latitude method of writing it down, the journey went something like this:

Nothing too controversial there. Using the smartphone, with GPS and with Latitude method of using my BlackBerry, the journey becomes much more detailed and visual but also shows curious blips where I appear to dance around a location. All the more mysterious as they seem to happen when I know I'm in one place and not moving, until I realise they're probably AGPS locks from wifi or cell tower triangulation, kicking in for when my GPS can't get a satellite lock. Playing back the journey on the Google Latitude site looks like this:

Despite the fact that I i) explicitly installed Google Mobile Maps on my BlackBerry, ii) explicitly enabled Latitude in Google Mobile Maps and iii) explicitly enabled location history in my Google Latitude account, a little over 12 months ago, this would have been controversial enough to whip the tabloid media into a privacy infringing frenzy. Looking back to February 2009 in my Delicious bookmarks shows headlines such as Fears that new Google software will spy on workers and Google lets you stalk your friends (which are just plain factually wrong), together with the pointed MPs claim Google Latitude is a threat to privacy: Irony-meter explodes from cnet.

As I went about the events of the day, I checked into my accounts on both Foursquare and on Gowalla. Just take a look at where I checked in and the sequence of check ins.

Tracking my journey; Gowalla

To start with I check in at the Yahoo! UK office, followed by * Piccadilly Circus Tube Station * Terminal 1 (Heathrow) * Avis (Heathrow) * Warwick Services (M40) * Park Inn (Nottingham)

... which is pretty much a simplified version of the above two journeys. I'm tracking my journey here too but where location based social networks are concerned, the media is far more accommodating and enthusiastic; 12 months after Foursquare's launch, 500,000 users, 1.4M venues and 15.5 checkins (with Gowalla either neck and neck, out in front or lagging behind according to differing sources) the most shrill piece of negative publicity that Foursquare was able to garner was a mashup which looked for people publicising check ins on Twitter and inferred that this was an open invitation to the criminal element.

The value proposition of Google Latitude has always been in getting the consumer comfortable with sharing their location with a third party and with your social graph, which isn't good enough for most people to grasp. The value proposition of checking in, keeping tabs on your friends and seeing what they're doing is far more palatable and easier for the consumer to grasp with media coverage pretty much limited to ohh, look at the funny people obsessively checking in sort of article.

As an aside, if I was at Foursquare or Gowalla I'd be looking to mine the rich vein of stealth data that their users are generating at each check in, as it's producing a geotagged and categorised set of local business listings and points of interest. For now though, there's no public sign that either company are doing this, choosing instead to continue to grow their user base and to roll out into new cities and countries.

In the space of a year and with a different face, location tracking has gone from being Big Brother to being one of the hottest pieces of social networking with people at the recent SXSW in Austin TX actively complaining about check-in fatigue because there's so many of these services (Foursquare, Gowalla, Loopt, Whrrl, Brightkite, Burbn,MyTown, CauseWorld, Hot Potato, Plancast) to choose from and trying to check into them all can take anything up to 10 minutes.

If all of this talk on location tracking sounds interesting and you're in San Jose CA the week after next at O'Reilly's Where 2.0 locationfest can I strongly recommend that you check out the founder of mapme.at, fellow Brit John McKerrell's session on Why I Track My Location and You Should Too. As long as it doesn't clash with my Where 2.0 session of course! Photo Credit: moleitau on Flickr. Written at the Park Inn, Nottingham (52.970538, -1.153335) and posted from home (51.427051, -0.333344)

Thinking of Linking

Webalizer or indirectly via analytics services such as Yahoo's or Google's can show you who's visiting your web site or blogs.

But who's visiting your site isn't the whole picture; following a hyperlink is an active process. To complete the picture you need to find out who's linking to your site, which is a passive process.

Hyperlink

If you're running a blog you may be able to use trackbacks or pingbacks to find out when a site links to you, but only if the linking site support the trackback or pingback protocol and then only if this is enabled on both sides of the ping relationship.

So what about those sites which don't support trackbacks or pingbacks or who don't want to be discovered that they're linking to you?

Hyperlinks in the form of web links are the lifeblood of today's internet and world wide web. Examination of your web server's log files, either directly via tools such as Webalizer or indirectly via analytics services such as Yahoo's or Google's can show you who's visiting your web site or blogs.

But who's visiting your site isn't the whole picture; following a hyperlink is an active process. To complete the picture you need to find out who's linking to your site, which is a passive process.

Hyperlink

If you're running a blog you may be able to use trackbacks or pingbacks to find out when a site links to you, but only if the linking site support the trackback or pingback protocol and then only if this is enabled on both sides of the ping relationship.

So what about those sites which don't support trackbacks or pingbacks or who don't want to be discovered that they're linking to you?

That last use case may seem overly paranoid, but as Chris Heilmann recently discovered, knowing who's linking to you is less a luxury and more an essential piece of information that can reveal unwanted content placed on your server by a third party ... and third parties placing content on your server is never a good thing.

Working for Yahoo! and working with people such as Chris, who understands how the web and the net work, has taught me a massive amount over the last 4 or so years. So in this case the answer is glaringly obvious once you stop to think about it, the major source of who's linking to who is ... a search engine.

Google Reader

So now not only do I know who's visiting my sites but also who's linked to them, by using Google's Blog Search and synching that through Google Reader to NetNewsWire, my RSS reader on my laptop. The moment someone links to me and that gets picked up by Google's spider, I get an alert. Of course, this doesn't cover all eventualities but it's always a good thing to have more than one source of information, especially when that comes for free.

NetNewsWire

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

Posterous; Paused. Possibly Permanently?

Factiva.com, but that doesn't count.

If I had have run my own search engine I would have known just how important canonical URLs are and that having multiple copies of the same content hosted on different domains would cause search engines to penalise you and loose search engine ranking, fast.

I've never run or hosted my own search engine. I've run and hosted web servers, mail servers, proxy servers and caching servers (I'm even contemplating running my own URL shortener), but never a search engine. There was a time when I ran an enterprise instance of Alta Vista back when I coded for a living and was part of the team building Factiva.com, but that doesn't count.

If I had have run my own search engine I would have known just how important canonical URLs are and that having multiple copies of the same content hosted on different domains would cause search engines to penalise you and loose search engine ranking, fast.

Playing with Posterous

But I've never run my own search engine. So I didn't know any of this. I probably should have, but I didn't. Mea culpa.

So what has any of this to do with Posterous? I use Posterous. I like Posterous, a lot. I've written about Posterous, quite a bit. I also use Posterous to not only post to my Posterous blog but also to my own WordPress powered blog, on a domain I've owned for a goodly number of years, via Posterous's autopost function ... and which nicely and neatly produces an exemplar of how to have duplicate content hosted on multiple domains, with multiple URL addressing systems, for each and every post I produce.

How could I have not noticed this? Other people have, including Ian Delaney's excellent write up, punnily entitled Past Posterous.

Sadly, it looks like despite the ease of blogging that Posterous offers, there is such a thing as too easy and so for now, with regret, I've postponed my use of Posterous, possibly in permanence. Unless of course, they offer a way of specifying canonical URLs.

And with profuse apologies for the overuse of alliteration in this post.

Photo Credit: I Bought a Mac on Flickr. Written at home (51.427051, -0.333344) and posted from the Yahoo! London office (51.5141985, -0.1292006)

Through the Window

Google-plex, west of here is the Yahoo! mothership, which is the reason I'm here and to the south is Cupertino, and 1 Infinite Loop, the home of Apple.OK, so that is fairly uninspiring and nondescript. This one is much more interesting. This is the view from my temporary cube in the middle of the Yahoo! campus, looking out over Moffett Field.That oval looking building in the middle is Hanger One which is one of the world's largest freestanding structures. It may not look that impressive but it's almost 3 miles away; it covers 8 acres, is around 1100 feet long, around 300 feet wide and around 200 feet high. It's big.And that's a much more impressive and interesting view out of the window.
Written and posted from the Yahoo! campus, Sunnyvale, California (51.5143913, -0.1287317) Posted via email from Gary's Posterous

Looking out of my hotel window I can see into the heart of Silicon Valley in Sunnyvale. What do you mean it's fairly uninspiring? East of here is Mountain View, home of the Google-plex, west of here is the Yahoo! mothership, which is the reason I'm here and to the south is Cupertino, and 1 Infinite Loop, the home of Apple.OK, so that is fairly uninspiring and nondescript. This one is much more interesting. This is the view from my temporary cube in the middle of the Yahoo! campus, looking out over Moffett Field.That oval looking building in the middle is Hanger One which is one of the world's largest freestanding structures. It may not look that impressive but it's almost 3 miles away; it covers 8 acres, is around 1100 feet long, around 300 feet wide and around 200 feet high. It's big.And that's a much more impressive and interesting view out of the window.
Written and posted from the Yahoo! campus, Sunnyvale, California (51.5143913, -0.1287317) Posted via email from Gary's Posterous

Location Privacy Issue? I See No Location Privacy Issue

Telematics, the use of GPS and mobile technology within the automotive business, and the Web 2.0, neo and paleo aspects of location have traditionally carved parallel paths, always looking at if they would converge but somehow never quite making enough contact to cross over.But not any more.The combination of 3G mobile communications and GPS enabled smart-phones such as the iPhone and the BlackBerry means that one way or another, the Internet and the Web are coming into the car, either in your pocket or into the car itself.

Telematics, the use of GPS and mobile technology within the automotive business, and the Web 2.0, neo and paleo aspects of location have traditionally carved parallel paths, always looking at if they would converge but somehow never quite making enough contact to cross over.But not any more.The combination of 3G mobile communications and GPS enabled smart-phones such as the iPhone and the BlackBerry means that one way or another, the Internet and the Web are coming into the car, either in your pocket or into the car itself.

With this in mind, last week I was at the Telematics Munich 2009 conference, which was coincidentally in Munich, giving a talk on some of the challenges we face with location and how the world of telematics can benefit by starting to look at location technologies on the Web.One of the sessions I sat in on prior to my talk was on the eCall initiative. This is a pan European project to help motorists involved in a collision. A combination of onboard sensors, a GPS unit and a cellular unit detect when an accident has occured and sends this information to the local emergency services. The idea is that in circumstances where a vehicle's occupants are unable to call for help, the car can do it for them.So far, so public spirited and well meaning. But several things immediately stood out.Firstly, while pitched as a pan European initiative, each member state has an opt out and naturally not all states have signed up to the initiative, including the United Kingdom.Secondly, eCall is designed to be a secure black box system, but all the talk in Munich was of "monetize eCall offerings by integrating contactless card transactions like road-tolling, eco-tax and easy parking payment" or "how to geo-locate data messages to offer ubiquitous solutions". In other words, adding value added services on top of a system which is actively able to track you at all times and which you, as the vehicle owner, has limited access to or control over.But what really stood out was that there was not a single mention of location tracking and of the privacy aspects that this carries with it. Not a single mention. Not from the panel, not from the chair and not from the audience. Once rolled out, eCall as currently designed is pretty much mandatory in all new vehicles. Compare and contrast this with the outraged Daily Mail style diatribe that other, opt in, systems such as Yahoo's Fire Eagle and Google's Latitude have attracted.The convergence of the internet, the web and telematics hasn't yet happened but it will. It's also evident that when this happens, the telematics industry may have a painful awakening as the impact of location technologies and the privacy issues they carry pervade into an industry which hasn't needed to deal with this historically. Posted via email from Gary's Posterous

The (Geo) Data Dichotomy Dilemma

FreeOurData.org.uk and other pleas, before the Internet itself, things used to be so much simpler for geo data. You were either an end user and accessed the data as a map or you were a GIS Professional and accessed the data via a (frequently very expensive and very specialised) Geographical Information System. But now we have geo data, lots of geo data, some of it free, some of it far from free, both in terms of usage and cost and a fundamental problem has replaced the paucity of data.

Everyone wants free, open, high quality geo data and no one wants to pay for it. But it's not quite that simple. The recent acquisitions of Tele Atlas and Navteq, the two big global geo data providers, by TomTom and Nokia respectively show the inherent value in owning data. But owning the data isn't enough any more as the market for licensing the data is a shrinking one, despite the phenomenal growth of the satnav market, both in car and on mobile handsets. Why is the market shrinking? Because no one wants to pay for it, at least directly. TomTom, primarily a hardware vendor, are differentiating into the software and data market,  seems to be concentrating on the PND usage of the data, although we've yet to see how the outlay necessary to acquire Tele Atlas coupled with the overall economic downturn will effect their overall 2009 earnings. Their Q1 2009 report somewhat dryly notes that "market conditions were challenging" and that "we are making clear progress with the transformation of Tele Atlas into a focused business to business digital content and services production company". There may be other aspirations at play here but for now at least, the company is keeping quiet.

Before Web 2.0, before mashups, before FreeOurData.org.uk and other pleas, before the Internet itself, things used to be so much simpler for geo data. You were either an end user and accessed the data as a map or you were a GIS Professional and accessed the data via a (frequently very expensive and very specialised) Geographical Information System. But now we have geo data, lots of geo data, some of it free, some of it far from free, both in terms of usage and cost and a fundamental problem has replaced the paucity of data.

Everyone wants free, open, high quality geo data and no one wants to pay for it. But it's not quite that simple. The recent acquisitions of Tele Atlas and Navteq, the two big global geo data providers, by TomTom and Nokia respectively show the inherent value in owning data. But owning the data isn't enough any more as the market for licensing the data is a shrinking one, despite the phenomenal growth of the satnav market, both in car and on mobile handsets. Why is the market shrinking? Because no one wants to pay for it, at least directly. TomTom, primarily a hardware vendor, are differentiating into the software and data market,  seems to be concentrating on the PND usage of the data, although we've yet to see how the outlay necessary to acquire Tele Atlas coupled with the overall economic downturn will effect their overall 2009 earnings. Their Q1 2009 report somewhat dryly notes that "market conditions were challenging" and that "we are making clear progress with the transformation of Tele Atlas into a focused business to business digital content and services production company". There may be other aspirations at play here but for now at least, the company is keeping quiet.

Nokia, also primarily a hardware vendor in the form of mobile and cellular handsets, are also moving away from their roots and into a wider market, hopefully in an attempt to stop the encroachment of upstarts such as HTC, Apple and RIM into Nokia's traditionally strong smartphone heartland. Again, Nokia has yet to make a public play into this arena but all the composite elements are in place to enable this to happen. Taking the opposite route, Google, which started off as a software player are now moving to being a player in the data market by gathering high quality geo and mapping data under the smokescreen of gathering Street View. This has allowed them to gather sufficient data to supplant Tele Atlas as a data provider, at least in the Continental United States. All three companies are either making or have the prospect of making determined plays in the location space but all three of them have ways of leveraging the value inherent in their data. Google has their unique users, their search index and a vast amount of advertising inventory; TomTom their satnav customers; Nokia their handset customers, albeit one level removed with the Mobile Network Operators as an uneasy partner and intermediary. So what of the open data providers? It's important to remember here that open doesn't always mean free, it means the ability to create derived works and to use the data in ways that the originator may not have immediately foreseen. True, a lot of open data is free, but even then it's the Free Software Foundation's definition of the word. "Free (software) is a matter of liberty, not price. To understand the concept, you should think of free as in free speech, not as in free beer." The poster child of open geo data is OpenStreetMap, the "free editable map of the world". Founded in 2004 by Steve Coast, OSM has enjoyed phenomenal growth in users and in contributions of data that can be used anywhere and by anyone and which espouses the values of free as in speech and as in beer. As with all community or crowd sourced collaborative projects, OSM's challenge is to sustain that growth and once complete coverage of a region is reached, in keeping that coverage fresh, current and valid. We'll leave aside that fact that complete coverage is an extremely subjective concept and means many things to many people. Traditionally strongest in urban regions, one of OSM's other key challenges is to match the expectations of their user community who consume that data rather than those who create it. Both internationalisation of the data and expansion out of the urban conurbations will potentially prove challenging in the years to come. That's not to say OSM isn't a significant player in this space and the quality of the data, though varying and in some places duplicated, is for the majority of use cases, good enough. This was backed up by research undertaken by Muki Haklay of UCL which answered the perennial question of "how good is OSM data" with a pithy "good enough". Attempts to capitalise on and monetize the success and data corpus of OSM through the Venture Capital funded Cloudmade have yet to deliver on the promise and with the exception of a set of APIs, Cloudmade has announced the loss of their OpenStreetMap Community Ambassadors and the closure of their London office. All of which lends credence to the fact that simply owning the data isn't enough. So how to solve the dichotomy of geo data? Everyone wants it but no one's willing to pay for it with the exception of the big players, the Googles, the Yahoos and the Microsofts of the world and control of the proprietary data sources has centralised into TomTom and Nokia, both of whom are well placed to capitalise on their data assets but who haven't yet delivered on that promise. Maybe the answer is twofold. Firstly develop an open attribution model whereby the provenance of an atom of data can be tagged and preserved; this would remove a lot of the prohibitions on creating derived works at the original data provenance could still be maintained. Secondly allow limited usage of proprietary data at varying levels of granularity, accuracy and currency, thus creating a freemium model for the data and stimulate developer involvement in donating data to the community as a whole. It's too early to see whether this will come to pass or whether an already tight hold on the data will become tighter still.

Posted via email from Gary's Posterous

Deliciousness: data, licensing, WordPress autosaves, cheese in space and lots of Nutella

Ed Parsons, my opposite number at Google, wrote a great blog post on the knots that data licensing can tie you up in and why you end up paying more for a leased digital version than you do for the physical paper version.
  • WordPress started bugging me about an auto-saved version of a blog post I didn't want to keep but couldn't get rid of. Turns out there's no way to do this from the WordPress dashboard but some MySQL hackery did the trick.
  • "I am, and am VERY badly affected by being in close proximity to WiFi and other microwave transmission sources. Not that I’d expect you or anyone else who isn’t adversely affected to believe me". The rest of the story on the Daily Telegraph blog is priceless.
  • Ofcom confirmed what anyone with the UK ADSL line already knows, that the average UK broadband speed is just over half of what's being advertised and paid for.
  • A US highway exit sign got every word misspelled, apart from the word "exit".
  • Forget putting men on Mars or getting the Space Shuttle working; we put cheese into space, tracked it, lost it and found it again. Makes you proud to be British.
  • Someone likes Nutella. A lot.
  • And finally, if your iPhone gets a text message containing a single square character. Turn it off. Turn it off now.

    • More intriguing, interesting and just plain bonkers stuff from the information hose pipe we call the internet:

    • Starting off with a serious note, Ed Parsons, my opposite number at Google, wrote a great blog post on the knots that data licensing can tie you up in and why you end up paying more for a leased digital version than you do for the physical paper version.
    • WordPress started bugging me about an auto-saved version of a blog post I didn't want to keep but couldn't get rid of. Turns out there's no way to do this from the WordPress dashboard but some MySQL hackery did the trick.
    • "I am, and am VERY badly affected by being in close proximity to WiFi and other microwave transmission sources. Not that I’d expect you or anyone else who isn’t adversely affected to believe me". The rest of the story on the Daily Telegraph blog is priceless.
    • Ofcom confirmed what anyone with the UK ADSL line already knows, that the average UK broadband speed is just over half of what's being advertised and paid for.
    • A US highway exit sign got every word misspelled, apart from the word "exit".
    • Forget putting men on Mars or getting the Space Shuttle working; we put cheese into space, tracked it, lost it and found it again. Makes you proud to be British.
    • Someone likes Nutella. A lot.
    • And finally, if your iPhone gets a text message containing a single square character. Turn it off. Turn it off now.

    First #geomob Meetup

    Last night I presented a deck on Fire Eagle at the first London Geo/Mobile Developers Meetup, held at Google’s UK headquarters in Victoria; the full write up is here.

    Talking on Fire Eagle thumbnailLast night I presented a deck on Fire Eagle at the first London Geo/Mobile Developers Meetup, held at Google’s UK headquarters in Victoria; the full write up is here.