this is aaronland

Help! I'm being chased by a bubblegum machine!!

That was me, talking (part three)

Nothing says luxury like airport hummus.

I'm sitting here in the Vancouver airport with hours to kill after triggering every single warning signal known to US customs and immigrations officials: Arriving with way too much time to kill, being efficient in line and generally dismissive of Air Canada staff, carrying a ten-year old passport unrecognizable by any machine produced post September 11th, wearing a t-shirt and probably smelling bad.

Which is sort of what I imagined speaking at GeoWeb 2009 would be like. Looking through the conference schedule this spring I wasn't entirely sure why they accepted my proposal. Or what sort of reception it would get.

One of these days, it really wouldn't kill me to do the same talk twice. The idea behind the talk is still very much a work in progress and still sort of hard to articulate properly. I wanted to talk not about the kinds of things we're building around place and geography these days — they're both awesome and understandable in an historic context — but rather the stories we tell ourselves about what we're building.

I finished my presentation at State of the Map by talking about the, admittedly hand-wavey, idea of what it would mean to use all the precision we've accumulated as a blunt instrument. We've collected all this data and create all these tools in the service of a faithful representation of the world and what would it mean to treat it all not a finely-honed tool but a sledgehammer in the service of story-telling and understand the world?

You would be forgiven for thinking that was just the over-priced airport beer talking but this is what I was thinking about when I got here and that's where the talk dove in arms-a-flailing...

That was me, talking (part two)

On Thursday I spoke at the Visual Web Meetup, in San Francisco. Peter Samis and Susan Chun were also presenting current research material from the Steve.museum project. We were talking about tags.

It wasn't my best talk ever partly because I was speaking from the back of the room (note to self: when someone offers to be your slide changer say yes) and partly because it was the end of the day and I was still working through jet-lag and partly because I did not have any funny picture-slides.

The last part isn't really true because it's a bit like blaming a camera lens for a bad photo and because there is one funny cat picture in the presentation. Anyway, I decided to try a minimalist presentation style using only big words and, essentially, two colours. When this works it can really lovely like Dave McKean's black and white and blue graphic novel Cages. This was not that lovely but people seemed to enjoy the talk.

I'm not sure how I would do the same talk differently. I certainly didn't read from the notes which have since been edited to reflect what I meant to say and what I wish I'd said. I wouldn't use yellow text again unless I was confident that the room I was speaking in was pitch dark.

That was me, talking (part one)

I am back from State of the Map. It was fantastic.

I spoke on Friday morning about how the Flickr uses Open Street Map and people seemed to enjoy it. One part of the talk that was interesting for me was threading the needle between acknowledging the obvious existence of an unhappy version of the story while not dwelling on it or saying things that, uh... did I say that?

The only thing I've changed slightly in the slides to reflect a world where I would do it differently next time is the inclusion of Stewart's vision statement for Flickr: to be the Eyes of the World. I think that the Open Street Map community does the same thing and I think it's one of the reasons that we like it so much!

At the very end, I tried to belabour two important thank yous:

The goal of the Open Street Map project, when it began, was of such hair-brained proportions as to be laughable. Which is rarely a reason not to do something and (however many years it's been) on they've not only pretty much done it they have also, despite all the inward facing questions about participation and conflict resolution and general sausage making, they have done it in a way that probably ensures it will keep going and only get better.

There is no going back to a world before Open Street Map and that is, in many ways, just as impressive as the actual thing they've created. One reason the Internets have always excited me is that they afford the possibility of building the world we want to live in so I am doubly happy when someone does.

There's no time to do a proper recap of the rest of the conference, right now, so I will end by parroting Mike when he says: Amsterdam is magic!

This is me, talking

As it happens, I will be speaking quite a lot this month. I will be making the words about:

With any luck The Thing, With The Stuff will be ready to talk about publicly by the time Geoweb rolls around but since July has already shaped up to be sixteen different ways to crazy that might be ambitious.

200907041834

In the interim, the Talk Is Cheap Department offers instead a small thing I made with the I Am Here Map to test the new and shiny flickr.places.getTopPlacesList API method. Here are:

Also, extra:extra=extra !

I Am Here Map (with apologies to Simon)

I finally got fed up of hunting around for simple latitude/longitude tools when messing around with mapping APIs, so I built my own with a memorable URL.

— Simon Willison

Simon will be remembered for many things and I hope one of them is getlatlon.com. It's a remarkably simple site — you drag a map around and it displays the latitude and longitude of the center point — but it insanely useful for all kinds of things and no one, before Simon, had managed to put two and two together. It was definitely a Duh! moment for me.

I use it all the time, now, and I needed something like it for a side project I'm working on. My first thought was to clone Simon's work but when Tom, from Stamen, told me that they had been working on an (still) experimental Javascript branch of the ModestMaps code I decided to try that instead.

Most days I still haven't gotten over the initial shock and awe of seeing Google Maps for the first time but at a certain point All-Things-Google-All-The-Time starts to feel like walking on thin ice. They're doing just fine competing on features (a good thing!) but I think it's important we also continue build and support an infrastructure of tools that people can run and host themselves.

With that in mind, I set out to write my own getlatlon map tool last week. It's called I Am Here Map and on Sunday I finally pushed it out the door.

Like this:

I Am Here Map (work in progress)

(Map data CCBYSA 2009 OpenStreetMap.org contributors, because that's an early screenshot before I added proper attribution.)

This is what the code to generate that map looks like:


                        // as in <script src="iamheremap.js"></script>
                        // and   <div id="map"></div>

                        var args = {
                        	'modestmaps_provider' : 'CloudMade',
                        	'flickr_apikey' : 'YER_FLICKR_APIKEY',
                        	'cloudmade_apikey' : 'YER_CLOUDMADE_APIKEY',
                        	'map_style' : 999,
                                'map_height' : 480,
                                'map_width' : 640,
                        };

                        window.map = new info.aaronland.iamhere.Map('map', args);

You can see a live demo over here, using a different style, specifically Matt Jones' Image of the City tiles:

http://www.aaronland.info/iamhere#style=2241

The style= stuff isn't part of the default install but it's a simple example of the sort of thing you can do. At the moment there are no standard controls to toggle between n number of map views/tiles but that's obviously a good next step. It's also one of the things that ModestMaps makes really easy!

I am pleased and excited by all of this. One of the things I talked about at PaperCamp was the desire to get back to building some of the online tools for Papernet projects. That includes a generic list-map-store style interface for things like geotagging Twitter posts, a new and Moar Bettar version of deliciousmaps and the Other Thing (with the Stuff).

The I Am Here Map is not that toolkit but it's a building block, at least.

list map store

As usual, the code and a list of known-knowns (this has only been tested in Firefox and Safari, for example) is available over on Github:

http://github.com/straup/js-iamheremap/

Enjoy!