Posts about places • Gary Gale

Vagamente Maleducato; The Vaguely Rude Places Map Goes International

2015-03-22 16:51

Vaguely Rude Places Map in February of 2013 I had no idea what was going to happen. Since then it's gone viral multiple times, been the subject of three conference talks, talked about on two radio stations, been covered in loads of newspapers and viewed millions of times. I still find it wryly amusing that the most successful map I've made to date has had nothing to do with my day job.

When I first made the Vaguely Rude Places Map in February of 2013 I had no idea what was going to happen. Since then it's gone viral multiple times, been the subject of three conference talks, talked about on two radio stations, been covered in loads of newspapers and viewed millions of times. I still find it wryly amusing that the most successful map I've made to date has had nothing to do with my day job.

But two years is a long time in geo-technology and the original map just feels ... tired. So I decided it was time for a face lift and while I was at it, to incorporate the Italian version of the map that Simone Cortesi forked from the original one. Apparently places can be rude in languages besides (British) English.

So I reforked Simone's Italian version and updated the Rude Places map based on Bryan McBride's excellent Bootleaf. The resultant reworking of the map is now up and live and looks a whole lot slicker than the original did. Thanks to Bryan's code, it's now browsable and searchable and you can flick between the original set of English places and their Italian counterparts with a single click of the mouse or tap of the screen.

I've mentioned this before but sincere thanks and credit is due to the following people for helping make the map, both deliberately and inadvertently.

Mark Iliffe for saying to me once that "you should make a map out of that"
Simone Cortesi for forking the original map code and producing the Mappa dei luoghi il cui nome suona vagamente volgare o bizzarro
Bryan McBride for making Bootleaf
All the contributors to the map, on GitHub, by Twitter and by email; thank you one and all

To paraphrase the late, great Terry Pratchett, sometimes making a map is the most fun you can have by yourself.

(P)rude(ntial) by Vladimer Shioshvili on Flickr, CC-BY-SA

I Am Not At State Of The Map 2013 But There Is A Viral Map

2013-09-07 09:00

Maptember 2013 and that means I should be in Birmingham for the OpenStreetMap State Of The Map conference. But I'm not; I'm still at home in the suburbs of South West London. But I will still be appearing at SOTM. Virtually.

Due to the age old cliche of circumstances beyond my control, I can't be in Birmingham this weekend, despite submitting How To Make A Map Go Viral (In 8 Easy Steps) as a talk for the SOTM conference. But thanks to the wonders of modern digital technology, in other words, a screencast, my talk is still on the conference schedule, even if I'm not.

The talk is an update to one of the same title that I gave at London's GeoMob back in April of this year and was submitted to the SOTM committee with this abstract ...

In February of 2013 I mashed up a geocoded list of global place names and made a map of them using nothing more than Stamen's OSM based Toner tile-set and the Leaflet maps API. I then promptly forgot about it. But Twitter had other ideas and the Vaguely Rude Place Names map went viral resulting in a month's worth of media madness. This is the story of how the map came to be and what happened when traditional media met social media ... on a map. It's also the story of how the combination of rude names, innuendo and maps briefly appealed to people the world over.

When I learned that I wouldn't be able to go to Birmingham, the conference organisers kindly suggested that maybe I might want to pre-record my talk instead. Which is just what I've done. You'll see it embedded below.

Today is the 7th. of Maptember 2013 and that means I should be in Birmingham for the OpenStreetMap State Of The Map conference. But I'm not; I'm still at home in the suburbs of South West London. But I will still be appearing at SOTM. Virtually.

The talk is an update to one of the same title that I gave at London's GeoMob back in April of this year and was submitted to the SOTM committee with this abstract ...

In February of 2013 I mashed up a geocoded list of global place names and made a map of them using nothing more than Stamen's OSM based Toner tile-set and the Leaflet maps API. I then promptly forgot about it. But Twitter had other ideas and the Vaguely Rude Place Names map went viral resulting in a month's worth of media madness. This is the story of how the map came to be and what happened when traditional media met social media ... on a map. It's also the story of how the combination of rude names, innuendo and maps briefly appealed to people the world over.

State Of The Map 2013 - How A Map Can Go Viral (In 8 Simple Steps) from Gary Gale on Vimeo.

Apart from a few cosmetic changes and updates, it's the same talk as I gave in April and if you're interested in my notes and slides, you'll find them in my write up from April.

If you were lucky enough to have been at SOTM this year, I hope you enjoyed the conference and I hope you enjoyed my talk and that my disembodied voice wasn't too off putting. This is the first screencast I've put together, so be gentle. See you all at SOTM next year. Hopefully.

How A Map Can Go Viral (In 8 Simple Steps)

2013-04-26 10:46

Vaguely Rude Places Map, Ed Freyfogle from London's #geomob meetup got in touch and asked me to come and tell the story behind the map. This is that story.

And so last night, in the Chadwick Lecture Theatre in the basement of London's UCL, after listening to some amazing presentations on building a map of mobile cell tower coverage, of building a seismically powered alternative to GPS and a whole host of other great talks, I took my place on the podium and started where any good story needs to start ... at the beginning.

Back in February of this year, at the height of the madness that was the Vaguely Rude Places Map, Ed Freyfogle from London's #geomob meetup got in touch and asked me to come and tell the story behind the map. This is that story.

So, hello, I’m Gary and I’m from the Internet. I’m a self-confessed map addict, a geo-technologist and a geographer. I’m Director of Global Community Programs for HERE Maps, formerly known as Nokia Location & Commerce. Prior to Nokia I led Yahoo’s Geotechnologies group in the United Kingdom. I’m a founder of the Location Forum, a co-founder of WhereCamp EU, I sit on the Council for the AGI, the UK’s Association for Geographic Information, I’m the chair of the W3G conference and I’m also a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society.

There’s a lot of URLs in the slides to follow and rather than try to frantically jot them down, this is the only URL you really need to know about. If you go there right now, this link will 404 on you but sometime tomorrow this where my slides and all my talk notes will appear here.

https://vtny.org/mo

In today’s global market place when you choose a brand name you normally do some research to make sure that the name you choose doesn’t mean something unfortunate in another language. Most brands succeed at this …

… some don’t

But the names of most of the places in the world came about long before globalisation and the reach of today’s interwebs. A name that can have totally innocent or meaningless connotations in one language can appear amusing when viewed in another language

Naming a village at the bottom of a hill half way along a traditional 12 mile race from the town of Newmarket seemed perfectly rational in the 1840’s and it’s only today that the name probably induces a snigger or two

The same probably goes for a town believed to be named after Focko, a Bavarian nobleman in the 6th century. Today this Austrian town is more noted for having it’s signs regularly stolen and vain, but apocryphal efforts to rename the town to Fugging

The word ‘intercourse’ used to mean ‘fellowship’ and ‘social interaction’. It still does, but there’s another colloquial meaning that makes English language speakers snigger. Of course, it’s the former meaning of the word that forms the etymology of the Lancaster County Pennsylvania town.

And if you live near an area of coastline which relies on fishing, it’s totally natural to name your town after a suggestively shaped piece of wood that you would use to pivot the oar on your fishing boat. At least that’s what people would commonly understand the name of this town in Newfoundland to mean in 1711 which is the first recorded instance of this name for this town in this area.

There’s a lot more of them … I know of at least 250 more, some more prosaic than others and some more profane than others.

For a long time I’ve had a list of these, sitting in a file on my laptop. The product of a Friday afternoon when someone I worked with thought that cataloguing the rude place names in our geographic data set would be a really good idea. And there the file sat, taking up a small amount of disk space.

And then someone, actually this someone, said some fateful words to me …

And so I did … in 8 easy steps

Step 1. Make coffee. An essential element to any form of geographic or cartographic endeavour.

Thus fortified I moved onto step 2; trying to geocode the raw data and weed out those places which seemed to be more a product of wishful thinking than any geographical reality. I now had a basic list of place names, long/lat coordinates and the full name of the place according to the geocoder.

Step 3 was to convert this raw list of names and coordinates into something that I could manipulate easily and so with the help of a couple of hacked together command line scripts which made use of PHP’s built in JSON encoding, I was able to spit out a file in GeoJSON

… which looked something like this. a FeatureCollection array containing a the coordinates and formatted labels for each place name.

Step 4 was to select a mapping API which could easily handle GeoJSON. Most modern APIs do but I’d wanted an excuse to play with Leaflet and this seemed like an ideal opportunity to do so. Leaflet also has a simple and flexible way to convert GeoJSON into a series of push pins or polygons on a map canvas. The only thing I was less than happy with was the map tiles that I’d initially used.

Enter Step 5; using a custom OSM derived tile set called Toner from San Francisco’s Stamen.

Thus armed with my data in GeoJSON format, my map tiles of choice and a custom push pin icon, all it took was 35 odd lines of JavaScript, plus some supporting HTML and the Vaguely Rude Place Names map was born. But this was still sitting on my laptop …

Thankfully I’d registered the geotastic.org domain a while back and this seemed like the ideal place to put the map

So to step 6. Open up an SSH connection to one of my web hosts, this one kindly donated as payment in kind for some WordPress hacking for a friend, and push the whole lot onto the public internet.

Step 7 was sharing the code and underlying data on GitHub in the vague notion that someone might like this as a working example of a map.

And finally step 8 was writing a blog post, tweeting about it and then moving on with life and forgetting about the map.

All of this happened on February the 6th. I forgot about the map, forgot about the blog post, forgot about the tweet and got on with my day job

But then …

Someone pinged me an email which basically said ...

you need to look at Twitter, search for the URL of that map of rude places, see what's happening

So I did. People seemed to like the map, or maybe they liked what the map was showing, or both. Who knows? All I know is that it started proliferating across Twitter at a frantic speed. This wasn’t what I expected. This wasn’t what I intended. You put stuff onto the internet to satisfy whatever motive you have, whether it’s to blog, to tweet, to release code on GitHub or any other of the multitude of reasons. Most times it gets ignored. But sometimes, just sometimes, something strikes a chord and you find yourself on the receiving end of the phrase ‘going viral’.

Of course, it’s not just individuals who read Twitter. It’s individuals who work for companies that read Twitter as well. Before I knew it the map was appearing in the traditional media as well as social media

From the Huffington Post …

… the Daily Telegraph

… the Independent

... and further afield, such as the Sidney Morning Herald

… into regional publications such as Germany’s Der Spiegel

… and Denmark’s Ekstra Bladet, even if this is a Danish Equivalent of the UK’s red-top tabloids. There’s loads more examples of this that I won’t bore you with, most of them unoriginal pieces that copied and pasted other articles. I even ended up getting interviewed on US and Irish radio chat shows

But talking of the tabloids …

This also got picked up by the Daily Mail which provided the only negative view of the whole episode. It would have been nice it the journalist responsible could have spelt my name correctly and if you’re going to lift the copy and paste my blog post wholesale, ignore the Creative Commons license that specifies attribution and don’t rewrite it, littering it with other spelling and grammatical errors. But we live in an imperfect world.

So what lessons have I learned by making the Vaguely Rude Places map?

Firstly, if something’s going to go viral on the interwebs it happens very very quickly and without you necessarily noticing it initially

From a minimal number of hits, presumably from Twitter followers and connections on other social networks, things started to take off around February the 10th, peaking on the evening of February 19th with, to me, a staggering 48,000 hits an hour, totally 310,000 hits for that day.

Having bandwidth really helps if the equivalent of being Slashdotted happens to you. Thankfully, the geotastic.org domain lives on a server with absolutely no bandwidth restrictions. If I’d have hosted this on my main, paid for, web host, I would have ended up using a year’s worth of bandwidth allocation in less than 48 hours.

Since February, my web server's analytics tell me the map has been viewed almost 30 million times; 22.2 million of those in February alone and most people stay and explore for around 5 minutes. Roughly 75% of traffic came from referrals. Surprisingly the lion’s share of referrals were not from Twitter or Facebook but from key worded Google searches. Maybe word of mouth is still more powerful than social media.

By March, traffic had ramped down to around 2.2 million hits

And this month has so far produced around 96,000 hits, at least when I took this snapshot at the start of the week. Extrapolating this out, it’s not unreasonable to predict around 1 million hits this month but I fully expect this to tail off even further

None of this surprises me now, today’s viral hit is quickly forgotten as the next big thing happens and people’s attention goes elsewhere. I’m more than happy about this. I never set out for this to go viral. I never set out to make something that made social media briefly buzz or to get written about in the more traditional press or to end up speaking to people on radio shows. It’s been fun.

In fact this has been the most successful thing on the internet I’ve ever done, which probably says something about what I do and about what people seem to like. But now the fuss has died down I’m glad to go back to being someone who makes maps for a living and writes the occasional blog post or PHP or JavaScript code which is usually maps based. The Vaguely Rude Places map turned my life upside down for a few brief weeks. Life goes on and it was good to get back to normal again. And now I leave you with the last word on the subject …

… which my old friend and ex-colleague from our time at Yahoo had to say. I think this tweet and the animated GIF of Bert and Ernie sums it all up rather neatly. You can see the full animated GIF here.

Thank you for listening

Work+ - A Fantastic Idea For A Location Based App; Shame About The Metadata Though

2012-10-01 15:26

mistaking the context (location) for the end game and that location is (also) a key context, but most people don't know this. Two years or so after I wrote those posts, the concept of location based mobile services and location based apps shows no sign of dying off. I see lots of new location based apps and whilst they're almost always nice and glossy, not that many of them really grab you as a neat and innovative idea. But every so often, one does come along which makes you slap your forehead, like the scientists in the 80's ads for Tefal, and mutter under your breath ... that's so obvious, why didn't I think of that?

I once wrote two posts saying that people are mistaking the context (location) for the end game and that location is (also) a key context, but most people don't know this. Two years or so after I wrote those posts, the concept of location based mobile services and location based apps shows no sign of dying off. I see lots of new location based apps and whilst they're almost always nice and glossy, not that many of them really grab you as a neat and innovative idea. But every so often, one does come along which makes you slap your forehead, like the scientists in the 80's ads for Tefal, and mutter under your breath ... that's so obvious, why didn't I think of that?

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mWWbUd2CGCM&rel=0]

These days I tend to work as much out of the office than I do in the office. My needs for this are relatively few; somewhere to plug my laptop in, free wifi and a half-way decent cup of espresso now and again. Using local location based search services I can find places near me that meet these needs but it's a disjointed experience, using multiple apps to find free wifi, good espresso and so on. Maybe the recently launched Work+ can help me out here?

First impressions are good. I launch the app and connect it to my Foursquare account (the check-in feature within Work+ is a nice touch). Work+ also passes the first hurdle than many location based apps fail at; it actually works outside of the United States.

I install the app, tap on Work and then Go to launch the easy to use search interface. I need wifi ... tap. I need a table to put my laptop on ... tap. I need coffee ... tap.

Ideally I'd also like to see a search setting that says "by coffee I mean decent espresso and no, I don't mean Starbucks" but maybe I'm being overly picky here.

So I tap on Search and I get a list of places that are close by to me that meet my needs or I can view those places on (Apple's new) map. This is great. What is there not to like?

But wait, do all of these places actually meet my needs? The search results seem good, there's no duplicates or places that either don't exist or have since closed; problems which can plague location based services and which are by no means simple to solve. The results are also pretty close to where I am. But ...

The two hits for Costa Coffee are pretty good; as the name implies they both sell (reasonably passable) coffee and have (free-ish but time limited) wifi. Score, 2/7.
The same goes for Caffe Nero, another one of the big UK coffee chains. Score, 3/7.
Caffe Toscana is my local neighbourhood cafe. Great food and coffee ... but no wifi, at least not when I visited last week. Score, 3/7
Astrora Coffee isn't a cafe. They sell coffee in the raw, roasted beans and ground beans. No wifi and not really somewhere you can work; I'd imagine the staff getting somewhat bemused if someone turned up and tried to work there. Score, still 3/7.
Diner's Delight is as the name suggests, a local diner. No wifi here either. Score, 3/7 again.
Finally, The Nearest Cafe is a cafe and they do sell pretty good coffee. But again, no wifi here.

The final score ends up as 3 hits that really meet my needs, out of a possible 7.

It would be easy to take what I've just written as an indictment of Work+ but nothing could be further from the truth. Local search is not an easy thing to do. Tightly focused local search across a wide range of attributes that you can assign to a place (wifi, coffee and so on) is insanely difficult to do. It's true that Work+ doesn't score as highly as I'd have hoped in what is admittedly a very subjective search on a very limited local area. But Work+ shows the direction that local search is headed in. It's no longer enough to ask find me what's around me, we need to be able to ask find me what's around me that fits what I need to know now and more importantly get good answers to that question.

What makes the Work+ experience not quite as good as it could be isn't down to the app, which makes local search a pain free and simple process. What lets Work+ down is the lack of a complete local data set which contains not just the accepted standard place attributes of name, address, location and category but also which adds in more detailed, almost ambient or fuzzy, attributes, such as wifi, capacity (can I fit a large group of people in here?), beverage types (coffee or tea?), noise level and ambience.

Make no mistake, Work+ is a precursor to the local search and location based experiences we can expect to see in the very near future; whether the back-end data with all of the rich attributes that people want to search on will keep up with demand remains to be seen.

Through The (New Office) Window

2010-11-17 07:04

Mitte district of Berlin to a new office in Schönhauser Allee in the Prenzlauer Berg district. While the office coffee hasn't improved, the view from my desk certainly has.

From left to right the view takes in the Fernsehturm, (East) Berlin's TV tower, Schönhauser Allee, looking towards Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz U-Bahn station on the U2 line and the dome of the Berlin Cathedral, better known as the Berliner Dom. I could get used to this view.

At the weekend myself and the rest of the Ovi Places team found ourselves re-geolocated from the Nokia office in Invalidenstraße in the Mitte district of Berlin to a new office in Schönhauser Allee in the Prenzlauer Berg district. While the office coffee hasn't improved, the view from my desk certainly has.

Facebook Places; Haven't We Been Here Before?

2010-08-31 19:00

A week and a half ago Facebook finally launched their Places feature to a predictable media furore over location privacy, regardless of whether it's justified or not and, to location industry watchers at least, a strong sense of deja vu. Haven't we been here before?

Let's look at the key issues that seem to be getting people hot, bothered and generally up in arms.

Deja vu the first. According to Facebook, at the time of writing they have 500M users. But how many of them will actually use the service, regardless of whether they've updated their privacy settings?

Deja vu the second. So you decide you want to use Facebook Places? Only on an iPhone I'm afraid or from Facebook's HTML5 mobile web site. Want an Android or Nokia app? You're out of luck, for now. Want to use it outside the US? You're even more out of luck, for now.

Deja vu the third. So you decide you don't want to use Facebook Places? It's a location app so there's bound to be privacy implications. Granted, Facebook have chosen to go down the opt-out route for location privacy, though you still have to physically use the service, but even the most cursory of web searches for "disable facebook places" yields loads of different takes on the same basic set of actions. Cult of Mac and ReadWriteWeb have great write ups, in non threatening, non technical language for how to ensure Facebook Places never sullies your Facebook stream.

Now take a step back, re-read the three points above and substitute, in order, Google's Latitude, Foursquare's, err, Foursquare and Yahoo's Fire Eagle for Facebook Places. Granted the opt-out vs. opt-in approach to location sharing differs substantially (for Latitude, Foursquare and Fire Eagle it's implicitly opt-in) but we've been here before. Many times. A new location sharing service is launched, people get worried due to media coverage and eventually the status quo is restored and everyone gets on with their lives as before, maybe with an additional bit of location richness added, maybe not. It's worth bearing this in mind before you buy into the latest media coverage which over-uses the phrase "sparks privacy concerns".

Update 1/9/10 - turns out I'm not the only one thinking along these lines. After I originally posted this, my daily trawl through my RSS feeds uncovered a post from Jonathan Crowe over at The Map Room blog that draws pretty much the same conclusions over Facebook Places as I do.

Crystal Ball Gazing Part 2 - Eddy's Sofa and The Nightmare of a Single Global Places Register

2010-05-27 13:21

OpenGeoData, the blog and podcast on open maps, data and OpenStreetMap, a snippet of which is below.

"Eddies," said Ford, "in the space-time continuum." "Ah," nodded Arthur, "is he? Is he?" "What?" said Ford. "Er, who," said Arthur, "is Eddy, then, exactly, then?" ... Why," he said, "is there a sofa in that field?" "I told you!" shouted Ford, leaping to his feet. "Eddies in the space-time continuum!" "And this is his sofa, is it?" asked Arthur, struggling to his feet and, he hoped, though not very optimistically, to his senses.

Jump onto Eddy's sofa for a moment and fast forward to a possible 2015.

After the location wars of 2010, the problems of mutually incompatible geographic identifiers have been solved with the formation of the Global Places Register. Founded by a fledgling startup on the outskirts of Bangalore, the GPR offered an open and free way for individuals and corporations to add their town, their business, their POI. All places added became part of the Global Places Translator, allowing Yahoo's WOEIDs to be transformed into OpenStreetMap Ways, into long/lat centroids, into GeoNames ids or even, for the nostalgic, Eastings and Northings.

... the rest of the article is on the OpenGeoData blog. Photo Credits: Hell-G on Flickr.

I recently contributed an article to the OpenGeoData, the blog and podcast on open maps, data and OpenStreetMap, a snippet of which is below.

"Eddies," said Ford, "in the space-time continuum." "Ah," nodded Arthur, "is he? Is he?" "What?" said Ford. "Er, who," said Arthur, "is Eddy, then, exactly, then?" ... Why," he said, "is there a sofa in that field?" "I told you!" shouted Ford, leaping to his feet. "Eddies in the space-time continuum!" "And this is his sofa, is it?" asked Arthur, struggling to his feet and, he hoped, though not very optimistically, to his senses.

Jump onto Eddy's sofa for a moment and fast forward to a possible 2015.

After the location wars of 2010, the problems of mutually incompatible geographic identifiers have been solved with the formation of the Global Places Register. Founded by a fledgling startup on the outskirts of Bangalore, the GPR offered an open and free way for individuals and corporations to add their town, their business, their POI. All places added became part of the Global Places Translator, allowing Yahoo's WOEIDs to be transformed into OpenStreetMap Ways, into long/lat centroids, into GeoNames ids or even, for the nostalgic, Eastings and Northings.

... the rest of the article is on the OpenGeoData blog. Photo Credits: Hell-G on Flickr.

Placebook ... Facebook "Places" In The Wild

2010-04-26 20:16

a hamlet in Spain ...

... through to New York City.

It's clever though not particularly sophisticated at this stage; a simple exposure of Wikia's underlying geo metadata and it probably took very little effort to implement. Facebook appear to treat places as people, hence the exhortation to connect with the place.

After much teasing and tantalising, one of the long rumoured Facebook location features is out in the wild in the form of place community pages. They vary in scale from a hamlet in Spain ...

... through to New York City.

For now there's very little additional geo element present though what is there is probably enough to get people to connect with and like local community places or places they already feel a connection with, their home town, neighbourhood, honeymoon spot and so on. That alone should yield valuable demographic and (geo)targetable information.

This is pretty much a classic case of picking low hanging fruit for Facebook and a far better exemplar of a place than the somewhat clumsy rebranding of Google's small business listings as places, though the browse places page seems to suggest otherwise as it's very POI heavy.

It will be facinating to track how this feature of Facebook develops and matures.