Who knows what happened on Thursday
On Monday, Yahoo! released a public API for its
Where On Earth database. This is the same dataset that
Flickr, Upcoming and FireEagle use for doing geo
stuff. Rather than repeating everything that Dan said, you should just go read what Dan said but the important parts are : public; unique identifiers; methods for resolving the lineage (the parents, children and even neighbours) of a place
.
On let's-pretend-it-really-happened-on-Tuesday, Andrew let it be known that Mapufacture will start allowing its users to create and print little pocketmod-papernet maps.
On Wednesday, Dan was kind enough to ask me to join him on stage
at Where 2.0 to explain what, exactly, reverse geocoding is and
why it's harder than you'd think. We also announced, what internally we've been referring to as, the Corrections
project whereby you can tell us that no this is not Noe Valley but actually the Mission. Short-term this will help us to stop making your blood boil every time you geotag a photo and longer term we hope to teach the computers to be less dumb about it all on the first pass.
We had a shared 15-minutes to plow through all of this which was a daunting proposition for two people naturally prone to tangents and run-on sentences. Somehow we managed to squeeze it all in without strip-mining the subject of its flavour, I think. Dan has the full set of slides which he'll get around to posting soon, but in the meantime this is what I gave him to work with.
In 2008 I did not prepare notes for talks which was always a bit risky. I wish I had written notes for this one since I still refer back to it. This talk was recorded so you can watch Dan and I race-car-chase-bomb our way through the details if you're in to that kind of thing.
On let's-pretend-it-really-happened-on-Thursday, the people from Instedd proved that they are pure awesome (and that working code always wins).
Finally, on Friday the syndication
feeds at Flickr were updated to include a woeid element for
every geotagged
photo. This is not anything that you should necessarily feel the need to
get overly excited about. It's just a tiny piece of plumbing
—
a nubby-bit — that will hopefully let someone build
some magic on top of.
Actually, I think that did happen on Thursday
but on Friday there were also some tweaks to something I'm not going
to talk about before Corrections
is launched except
to say that
it too is also now better.
[this is good]
This blog post is full of links.
#thursday