BlogTalk
I’ll be at BlogTalk 2.0, in Vienna, Monday and Tuesday. My presentation is on things location and weblog, and will go in depth on the things I’ve worked on. One of which (with Johannes Gruber) is Mapping Blogtalk, a collaborative map of Vienna, built using worldKit and Moveabletype. So far, the map is going really well, over 100 annotations!
Tour de France RSS
Are there any RSS feeds that are covering the Tour de France? Seems ideal for keeping up with a month long sport event ,.. Ah excellent, just found a Tour de France weblog.
Yahoo Groups -> RSS -> My Yahoo
Yahoo Groups has add “Add to My Yahoo” links. We worked on spreading these links throughout the Yahoo network, since it was much easier to personalize in the context of browsing, then going through edit screens. (I suppose this is still true of RSS Aggregation. Directories haven’t been very useful…).
The cool thing is that My Yahoo hasn’t resurrected the Groups Module, rather Groups is simply providing a link to subscribe to messages in the My Yahoo RSS aggregator (This was a suggestion in my original review of the myy aggregator). My Yahoo itself may have had nothing to do with this; it could just be the initiative of the Groups group.
The RSS aggregation infrastructure has enabled seamless personalization across the network, with next to zero additional engineering. A lot of my job used to be building specialized systems to move data from one part of Yahoo to another.
These RSS feeds from LabourStart “Where trade unionists start their day on the net.” reminded me of an idea from my first days at Yahoo. My Yahoo was heavily based in stock and financial information, so I saw my goal as improving the breadth of personalized information. In the stock portfolios module itself, I wanted to include a little fist icon next to companies that were experiences labor conflicts, strikes, protests. Guess what? Didn’t happen, Yahoo had its own labor problems. Well, with RSS, etc., perhaps it won’t be long to someone builds a conscientious stock market monitor.
This workshop took place last week, at University College London. My proposal to demonstrate worldKit was accepted, so it was exciting to attend the one day I could make it. This was a fairly professional meeting, with several show and tell demonstrations of Earth Observation and GIS-ish technologies and implementations, as well as some fairly heavy discussion on standards like GML, SensorML, Web Service coordination, and GRID computing. On a different level from geowanking, with all the pluses and minuses that implies. They have access to some amazing data sets, satellites, supercomputers, and unmanned aerial vehicles. That’s traded against less openness and the compromises of working within large government organizations.
Still, the intention, and purpose of EOGEO specifically, is to open up this information for the general good beyond agencies, in the form of Civil Society. Yes, it moves slower than loose knit web hackers, but they have huge masses to move. They want to pick up on the margins, from their perspective the, and this was the source of the invitation for submissions to geowanking that I responded to. worldKit demos were received very well I think, a lot of folks grokking that this level of technology suffices and is more suitable for a lot of purposes out there — particularly in Civil Society where technical resources are limited.
A couple stand outs for me. “A Web Map Server for satellite imagery in the ESA Multi-Mission Catalogue” from Swedish researchers impressively constructed composite images from numerous satellites and sensors, on the fly (reminded me of the app at David Rumsey Historical Map Collection. Clive Best talked on European Media Monitor, from the European Commision Joint Research Centre; they will be building news maps to monitor opinion and events from media across all the member states. That’s quite exciting, the EU taking such a forward approach to keeping informed. On the other side of the spectrum, the Ordnance Survey gave a very commercial focused talk, detail on their new web based shopping system; the subtext for me was don’t expect free UK geo data any time soon.