Google investigating strange trees

Stinky Journalism goes into the detail of how this poor attempt at cloning in Photoshop could be very damaging to the reputation of Google Maps - issues of accuracy and trust etc.

The prospect of well done, difficult-to-detect photoshopped photos taking over Google Maps – as opposed to the amateurish tree cloning exhibited in the golf course – is a real potential threat.

A Google spokesperson has reportedly commented that “We’re aware that there seems to be an anomaly in our imagery and are working to determine what happened.”

Google, quite rightly, need to respond in such a way to assure everyone that they have sufficient levels of trust in their data providers and are able to identify and deal with a third party supplying them with inaccurate or poor quality imagery.

The rest of us just need to remember our common sense and intelligence. If you are relying on third party information for something important then, whether that third party is Google or a bloke in the local pub, remember to check the facts.

Found via GIS Lounge.

Where 2.0 2009 - details announced

Details of the 5th annual Where 2.0 Conference have been announced.

This annual gathering of the geospatial industry leaders, developers and interested parties is taking place during 19th - 21st May, 2009 at The Fairmont San Jose, San Jose, California, USA.

Check out the O'Reilly conferences site for more details as they are announced.

Links (18th August 2008)

• Another UK crime map - this time it's London
  The Metropolitan Police have launched their own crime map site based on an implementation of Google Maps.
  

• Mapping the West Bank
  Mikel Maron has some fascinating posts on his blog about his current project to map the West Bank area, OpenStreetMap style.
  
  
• Local 2.0 reference site now updated
  Michael Bauer has updated his reference site for Local 2.0 websites around the world, including the addition of an RSS feed.
  
  
• Google mobile phone due in October
  Google are set to launch their first mobile phone through T-Mobile in the US in October. It will be powered by Android, Google's mobile software, and the handset will be produced by Korean firm HTC.
  
  
• The Huffington Post goes local
  Arianna Huffington has launched the first local version of The Huffington Post in the city of Chicago. "HuffPost Chicago is part local news source, part resource guide, and part virtual soap box -- featuring a collection of bloggers who know and love Chicago."

Links (13th August 2008)

• Yahoo's "Fire Eagle" Comes Out of Beta
  Fire Eagle, the tool designed to manage your location information, is now fully released.
  
  
• Mapping the 2008 Olympics
  A map-related round-up of coverage of the Olympic Games in Beijing.
  
  
• How the regional papers use video
  Andy is taking a look at how the top seven (by circulation) regional newspaper websites in the UK are starting to incorporate video.
  
  
• Flickr introduces a new way to geotag photos
  Dan Catt explains some new methods of adding location metadata to your photos in Flickr.
  
  
• Flickr uses OpenStreetMap for improved coverage of Beijing
  OpenStreetMap tiles of Beijing now in use on Flickr to help you plot your Olympic photos onto a map.

Job title includes 'Hyper-local'!!

Noooooo!!!! I've already mentioned my aversion to the use of 'hyper' and 'ultra' as supposedly valid prefixes to the word local when it comes to defining interactive services or content propositions.

Now for the first time I've just seen the phrase included in a job ad, for a Hyper-local Video Journalist in Las Vegas.

Apparently, suitable candidates must have "an interest in community journalism and a passion for the hyper-local".

If the successful candidate should ever happen to read this post then please, please do let me know how you managed to demonstrate your passion for the hyper-local, as opposed to the rest of us who merely have a passion for local.

I really should make more of my Nokia N95...

So I'm sat at departure gate 15 of Glasgow airport, the dark clouds are so low they are literally sitting on the runway, rain is pouring from the sky, I'm drinking lucozade and my insides are full of painkillers that are having almost no effect on the onset of flu, oh, and the plane that we are supposed to be boarding in ten minutes hasn't actually arrived on it's inbound journey yet.

My Nokia N95 only has two bars of battery left but I'm in desperate need of anything it can offer in the way of passing the next few minutes... or maybe hours.

A quick browse of my available phone applications doesn't really offer much in the way of promise.

In no particular order, the apps I have, and generally use are:

Qik Capture - great for shooting short video clips and uploading to the web but a quick scan of the immediate vicinity doesn't provide anything of particular interest in the filming category.

Camera - The Nokia is blessed with a slow but effective 5MP camera which does get a fair bit of use, but again, any photos taken from my current sitting place could only be titled 'Grey'.

Ladbrokes Mobile - Essential tool for wasting money on the outcome of all sporting events without the need to boot up the PC and visit the Ladbrokes website. I doubt very much that they will be offering odds on my departure time from Glasgow though.

Sports Tracker - A GPS/Stopwatch/Information service for tracking your speed and distance whilst taking part in any sporting event that involves moving over a distance. I'm currently stationary, very stationary.

Zonetag - Useful when used in conjunction with the camera, allowing me to attach location metadata to my images, but of little use otherwise.

Sky Anytime - I could, if I wanted, set my Sky Plus box to record something on TV tonight, or simply view the channel listings. Not particularly entertaining though, and I am hoping to make it home at some point - and when I do it is very unlikely there will be anything on TV I actually want to watch anyway. (This app is priceless however if you are out on a Saturday night and have forgotten to record Match of the Day.)

I'm a firm believer that Nokia make great mobile phones. I think the N95 is fantastic - and it's a disservice to even label it as something as trivial as a mobile phone given it's range of capabilities.

I also believe that Apple make good looking hardware that is appealing to the eye and, eventually after a few upgraded models are released, generally quite good to use.

But the iPhone is not massively innovative, groundbreaking or revolutionary in what it is able to do.

So, why have I spent the last few days being fairly impressed with the interesting, entertaining, and extremely useful applications that have demonstrated to me by friends trying to convince me that the above statement is false?

Surely the N95 is capable of, dare I say it probably even has, many applications that provide the same degree of entertainment and usefulness as the iPhone?

I need to go searching in the Internet jungle to find these exciting beasts, these strange unknown creatures.

I need to hunt them down, capture them and add them to my marvellous N95 so that next time I am stuck at Glasgow airport waiting for a delayed plane, suffering from flu, with nothing but grey rain out of the window I have something better to do than write a long, waffling blog post that offers questions but no solutions.

...the plane has still not arrived.

New web application to add contextual mapping to your website

MapMyPage is a new web application that allows you to add contextual map information for any locations mentioned on your web page.

An explanation of how it works is on the site:

MapMyPage uses its own proprietary technology in combination with MetaCarta's GeoTagger and the Google Maps API to identify locations in web pages and display corresponding maps. MapMyPage also provides hyperlinks to relevant content with every map including directions from Google Maps, bird's-eye views from Google Earth, photos from Panaramio, weather from Weather Underground, articles from Wikipedia, news from Google News, events from Zvents, concerts from Gruvr, activities from Viator, trips from Kayak, travel books from Amazon, travel information from WikiTravel, real estate listings from PropSmart, jobs from Indeed, classifieds from Oodle, web search results from Google, blogs from Google Blog Search, videos from YouTube, radio stations from Radio-Locator, TV listings from Yahoo TV, gifts from CafePress, and auctions from eBay.

A comment on AllPointsBlog points out that this feature is available in Internet Explorer 8 which is all well and good, but I use Firefox and I'm sure many other people use different browsers to IE8. A simple web app, that can be customised and coded into pages, has to be the way to go for allowing people to incorporate the functionality into their own content.

So does it actually work?

Well, let's try a few examples and see what comes up:

In my life I have visited Exeter, London, Nottingham and Devon but I have never been to Bangor in Wales or Bangor in Northern Ireland.

In this simple test it has worked fairly well with straightforward towns/cities of a reasonable size.

A number of usability issues around the small size of the pop-up window and having all of those text links squashed into the pop-up bubble. It also took me a while to figure out how to get rid of the map window as well (you simply click outside the window!).

For Nottingham, the initial view is much too zoomed in and I had to zoom out to check that I was actually looking at Nottingham.

Exeter worked much better in this respect and London was generally ok although a few times the zoom level was different and a small number of times I clicked on London the image on the right popped up.

Not really what I would expect of a map depicting the location of London!

Countries suffer from a similar problem with Wales and Northern Ireland represented by a point somewhere near the middle of the country - but the map so zoomed in that it's hard to make out where you are.

Devon, a county in the South West of England, didn't even trigger a response from the application.

Using Bangor was a bit like asking a trick question - although it does highlight one of the common problems with simple geo-tagging solutions like this... many places have the same name. This is how wikipedia copes with the problem. Using MapMyPage the Northern Ireland instance appears and the Welsh option, and others, are ignored.

I also experienced a number of broken links or links to un-related content when clicking on the items in the pop-up for the country items. Exeter however, a decent sized and uniquely named (in the UK at least) city, proved much more successful in providing relevant content.


So, in my brief look so far (and it has been a brief look) I think the idea behind this is really quite cool and I'd love to see it developed and improved further, but definitely some work to do around the design/usability of the map widget and in finding solutions to some of the more complex issues of geotagging and referencing location data.

Links (5th August 2008)

• News gathering and reporting with Twitter
  An informative guide to why Twitter is an essential tool for local newsgathering and reporting.
  
  
• Google expands Street View imagery to Japan and Australia
  Yet more detailed street images available via Google Earth and Google Maps.
  
  
• Mapufacture joins with FortiusOne
  Exciting times ahead in the world of freely available mapping and geodata applications.
  
  
• Nokia N82 phones used as newsgathering tools
  Nokia has partnered with Bizcommunity.com to offer journalists at the title Nokia N82 phones to produce multimedia reports for the site using the five megapixel camera and ‘DVD-like quality video capture’.
  
  
• New Beijing Olympics Satellite Imagery now in Google Earth
  Google has quietly slipped in brand new satellite imagery taken by Geoeye on July 19th, 2008 showing the Beijing Olympics venues.
  
  
• Yahoo drives 100 million users to local newspaper websites (in the US)
  Yahoo's partnership with local newspapers in the US has caused a surge in traffic to the titles' websites.