Through to the semi-final!

Last night we (Satchel Blue) qualified as one of the bands to go through to the next round of Surface Unsigned 2008.

Thanks to everyone who turned up on the night and to everyone who voted for us by text.

We do have an audio copy of our performance taken from the sound desk so watch this space for mp3's coming soon.

In the meantime, here's the official review:

"Next up were Birmingham based five-piece Satchel Blue. Delivering another fine performance of their melodic Nu-Folk soundings, they went down very well with the Wednesday evening crowd. On the surface it’s a refreshingly simple, infectious noise that’s instantly likeable and wholly accessible, however don’t be fooled, there’s some real depth (and a nice touch of heartfelt whimsy) in their lyrical content and in the careful arrangement that goes into each track. Excellent material, an engaging and endearing manner, and tight technical ability onstage made for a convincing and impressive set from a band who do things their own way and sound all the better for it."

Read the full review of the night and check out the scoring.

Surface Unsigned - Round 2

Tomorrow night we (Satchel Blue) are playing in Round 2 of the Surface Unsigned competition for 2008 - although noticing that my favourite band in our Round 1 heat, Olly Dabblers, haven't made it past Round 2 then I'm not holding out much hope.

If you fancy supporting us, or just coming along to see what's going on, then pop down to The Factory Bar, Custard Factory in Digbeth.

First band on at 7.30pm and we're hitting the stage at 9pm.

(check out our MySpace or Facebook page for more band details and music.)

where2.0 links

After taking some holiday last week and walking the Great Glen Way in Scotland I'm now back in civilization and enjoying the comfort of sitting down once more.

I'll post an overall review of thoughts from the where2.0 conference in the next day or so but, in the meantime, check out the following information on the O'Reilly website:

• News & coverage
• Photos by Duncan Davidson
• Speaker presentation files
• Video from the conference

where2.0 2008, The End

where2.0 - Wed 14th May (3.30pm - 5pm)

The last session of the 2008 where2.0 conference, introduced by Tim O'Reilly.

InSTEDD: Humanitarian Collaboration Tales
Robert Kirkpatrick (InSTEDD), Eduardo Jezierski (InSTEDD)

"InSTEDD functions as an 'innovation lab' for developing novel approaches to challenges in the field."

Their approach is to partner with as many other services and technologies as appropriate.

"We learn by failing fast and failing often."

A virtual instance of Sahana (a disaster management system) has been put into action as part of the response to Cyclone Nargis.

Interesting use of existing apps such as Twitter, incorporating lat/long positioning data, to communicate with people in the field on mobile phones.

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Lifemapper 2.0: Using and Creating Geospatial Data and Open Source Tools for the Biological Community
Aimee Stewart (University of Kansas Biodiversity Institute)

Lifemapper: Two main purposes of the project
- to create an archive of ecological niche models
- a bunch of web services to expose the data in the archive and allow analysis on the data

Yet another projection of data being shown on Google Earth - Google must be happy.

Lots of data being collected from around 200 institutions, totaling about 6,000 collections of data. Some techie stuff about how the data is gathered, stored etc ("using as many existing standards as possible"), and then accessible via the Lifemapper website.

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Google Maps for Mobile with My Location - Behind the Scenes
Adel Youssef (Google Inc.)

"My Location opens the road atlas on the right page".

Launched in beta in Nov 2007 and launched on iPhone in Jan 2008.

My Location is based around using Cellid as complementary to GPS as a means of determining your current location.

No personal/user information is collected - just information about the location of the cell tower.

Some of the challenges:
- 100's of different platforms
- Areas of interest vs actual location (for example, the cell tower is not necessarily where you are... nor is it necessarily the location you are interested in)
- Noisy data

"A balance between respecting user privacy and providing good useful functionality to the user... the user has full control over the service".

What next?
- improving accuracy and coverage
- continue to improve security
- enabling location for 3rd parties (android, gears)

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A Data Source to Make Mashups Correct, Complete, Relevant and Revisited
Jonathan Lowe (Giswebsite LLP)

Freebase - an open, shared database of the world's knowledge - holds spatial data but is not exclusively spatial.

Freebase has semantically structured data. Semantics is about meaning, providing structured relationships between different objects.

So... semantics is good, structured data is good, Freebase does both of these and is also open... which is good, yay!

----

Enemies Around Every Corner: Mapping in an Activist World
Erik Hersman (Ushahidi)

First up, Erik is excited about some of the stuff he's seen at the conference.
These include Geotate, AfricaMap, Buglabs, DIY Drones.

Then onto his coverage of the unrest in Kenya around the recent elections.
One influential local blog was Kenyan Pundit.

"Our Goals:
- create a way for everyday Kenyans to report incidents of violence they saw
- create an archive of news and reports around the same event
- show where majority of violence is happening"

ushahidi.com was created in a couple of days.

Lessons Learned:
- the importance of mapping accuracy
- data poisoning - what happens when an antagonist starts using it?
- verification is difficult
- clarify why it was created and make that obvious
- include a feedback route from the end user, not just pushing data out

Whether you are an activist or an antagonist depends on which side of the issue you are on.

Some examples of activists websites, including I Love Mountains.

Mapping for human rights is different to mapping for activism.


... and that's a wrap.

where2.0 - Wed 14th May (1.15pm - 3pm)

The internet is alive again and it's afternoon on Day 2.

Google Maps = Google on Maps
Lior Ron (Google, Inc.)

Apparently we are about to hear about 9 new launches in the next 9 minutes.

As the title suggests, the basic idea here is that Google Maps are all about everything you can do with Google on a map.

Announcement1 - A layer facility on Google Maps, initially allowing you to display photos /wikipedia entries on the map.

Announcement2 - An 'Explore this area' link on the left hand side to show popular searches in the area, as well as user photos and videos from the area.

OK, I'm getting lost in the numbers here... not sure if these are part of one announcement or 9 separate ones but the demo involves showing how photos, videos, wikipedia entries, web pages, popular searches, ... can all be displayed as layers on a Google Map.

Announcement X... ooh, "starting next week there will be a news layer on Google Earth allowing users to view news plotted on Google Earth map."
This includes news down to the "hyper-local, neighbourhood level".

Interesting stuff.

Something else coming along for next week is the aggregation of all data available around specific places - this includes all of the content mentioned above PLUS anything that can be found via web search such as upcoming events, flickr photos, UGC, ....

All of this will be available via the local search API to allow implementation - check Trail Registry for an example.

Apparently we've had 8 so far... this is announcement 9... "starting 1 hour ago, the API is available to implement maps in Flash."

-----

History's Best Geo-hacks (Part Deux)
Chris Spurgeon (The Walt Disney Company)

A brief history of Gerardus Mercator - a clever mathematician and cartographer who invented a map projection to allow sailors to navigate the globe by sailing in a fixed compass direction. Very clever.

John Harrison and The Great Longitude Prize. A clockmaker who solved the problem of defining longitude position while sailing on the ocean - but took a long time to get paid his prize money by the government.

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Venture Capital: What's Hot and What's Not on the Geoweb
Dev Khare (Venrock)

Slides of this presentation are available here.

We're talking money now, and how the geo/location world is impacting many traditional industries.

GeoMobile - GPS chip prices are dropping significantly which enables a whole new set of businesses to develop in this space.

GeoCar - "People spend 60 hours per month in their cars in the US, more than the time spent watching TV."

"In developing countries (india, south america, asia, ...) people are going straight to the mobile device and skipping the web/PC."

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Openlocation.org: Location Services for Web Developers
David Troy (Roundhouse Technologies, LLC)

The creator of Twittervision, Flickrvision, etc.

Most recently there have been local variations, e.g. Twittervision Local

"We need some way to rank search results based on the social graph - me, my friends, and everyone else."

Announcing openlocation.org - "A lot of web developers don't get Geo, there are lots of walled gardens and odd appraoches."

"What we don't want are attempts to lock up location data in an effort to become the Facebook of location based services."

"Sometimes maps are not the best way to deal with this type of information...". Hey, the second person to say that yes, "sometimes maps suck" and maybe, just maybe, they aren't always the answer to location based services.

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Earth-Browsing: Satellite Images, Global Events and Visual Literacy
Lisa Parks (University of California-Santa Barbara)

Some interesting questions about the use of satellite imagery and their impact on the real world.

For example, the Rwandan refugees (1996) and how satellite imagery was able to visualise the atrocity taking place on the other side of the world and catch people's attention.

There's something interesting in here about the role of Google Earth and how a satellite image used to be about scrutiny, investigation and would allow quite unique public deliberation, but, with the familiarity of Google Earth we are now becoming more accustomed to these views and the role of this imagery is changing.

I think that's the point anyway.

-----

Veriplace: Acquiring and Sharing Consumer Location
Scott Hotes (WaveMarket, Inc.)

Family Locator (allowing parents to track the location of their children) has given WaveMarket the experience to deal with sensitive and private location data.

-----

Digital Cities
Doug Eberhard (Autodesk)

Lots of 3D models of buildings and the benefits these provide architects and construction firms - and then how these relate to the benefits of being able to model cities.

"Autodesk is hard at work to define a new technology vision for digital cities."

A problem exists today in that business is still done on paper and "3D models are (currently) not 'legal' enough".

Some very pretty pictures and animations - the point of difference seems to be that the movement of cars, people etc within the model is based on "accurate and trustworthy" realistic modeling.

It's easy to see how these provide a more useful method of city planning and land use than the current paper-based plans.

Not exactly sure on the specifics though - how easy/cheap can it be to build one of these models? And what makes the modeling so trustworthy?



... and it's the afternoon break... I need several cans of cold diet pepsi, a plateful of cookies, a visit to the bathroom, and a new pair of eyes to replace the ones that have been ruined by sitting too close to the big screen... some fresh air wouldn't go amiss either.

where2.0 - Wed 14th May (11am - 12mid)

Going Places on Flickr: The Significance of Geographical Information in Photos
Dan Catt (Yahoo!, Inc. )

Dan outlines the challenge for Flickr around selecting location. How does Flickr take a lat/long coordinate pair and decide exactly where a photo has been taken?

This is about reverse geo-coding.

"Places have meaning... we (Flickr) should be able to give them (a user) back a sense of meaning about the place where they have taken their photograph."

A 'ladder of locality':
- 'neighborhood'
- locality
- county
- region
- country
- continent

Flickr starts at the bottom ('neighborhood') and works up the ladder until it finds a suitable match.

"What does this mean? It means there is a bias of interpretation... and... we are all working with imperfect data."

Lots of stuff about "bounding boxes" which are used to provide a contextual means of location around an area - it's about associating point data with these bounding boxes.

"Flickr is a photo sharing website... it's not about maps." - But, maps do help users get the geocoding correct.

Once again crowd sourcing is mentioned at the conference... this time it's about using the power of crowd sourcing to improve the set of location data to help correctly define where a photograph has been taken... and ultimately to improve our geographical knowledge of the world.

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LocationAware: Standardizing a Geolocation API in the Browser
Ryan Sarver (Skyhook Wireless)

Development thinking is focussed around "what does it mean when a device is location aware?".

"locationaware's goal is to help drive the standardisation of how a user's geolocation is exposed to the website through the browser."

GPS, Wi-Fi and IP are different technologies which require some interesting challenges.

Announced today: Skyhook are working with mozilla labs on a prototype extension to explore geolocation in the browser (available June).

Yelp will be the first 'user client' at the point of launch to help explore some of the particular challenges around making a useful service.

-----

Lessons Learned in Location-based Gaming
Jeremy Irish (Groundspeak)

Geochaching is a global community using GPS devices to hide and seek hidden "treasure". There are over 500,000 containers in the world."

Whereigo is the next generation of geocaching - "it's a toolset for creating media rich experiences in the real world using GPS and handheld devices - taking adventure games outdoors".

A recommendation for using User-Generated Content in this context. Take advantage of local experts to improve the context.

"Players are manic-depressive - educate, motivate and reward often."

More advice on creating successful games:
- keep games short... under 30 minutes is best
- serialize your game into chapters
- simplify, simplify, simplify
- encourage players to look up from screen

"Remember, you can't control the players, a player can and will go to any length to finish a game."

Finally, "Be aware of legally grey areas", whatever that means!

-----

Crawling the web for GeoData
Juan Gonzalez (PlanetEye Inc.)

Going behind the markers on a map to uncover the lat/long coordinates... but also gathering other types of location information contained in content on the web.

There is a problem however, current geocoding techniques struggle with the large variety of different types of location data used in the real world.

The solution is, apparently, 'low-resolution geocoding'.
OK, I get it, it basically means that sometimes we can only tag content with a wider area, rather than being able to tie everything down to a specific point.

"Sometimes you need to look beyond the location information" - Useful to spot commonalities in data (for example, different address styles but the same phone number) in gaining a better understanding of location information.

"Why are we doing all of this? - Planet Eye is trying to aggregate all travel information on the web"


...and we're off to early lunch thanks to the fact that the internet is dead (not all of the internet, just our little bit).

where2.0 - Wed 14th May (9am - 10.15am)

Day 2 begins at 9am with...

Disaster Tech: What is Working and What is Coming
Jesse Robbins (O'Reilly Radar), Mikel Maron (Mapufacture)

How innovative tools can make the bridge between consumer tools and saving lives.

"It's difficult to innovate, but there is a way...".

The key seems to be a step-by-step iterative pattern. Within this space:
1. Disaster happens
2. Three is ad-hoc adaptation of some tech tools
3. After the event the better ideas are championed
4. Thereby providing ideas for iterative improvement

An interesting example from New Orleans. Red Cross were looking at Google Maps and assuming the aerial view was a 'live' image whereas a the I-90 bridge (for example) was actually destroyed and no good for supplying aid.

Open mapping, such as OpenStreetMap, could provide better solutions to this problem by allowing users to provide more frequent updates.

Importantly "people who are trying to save lives have very little time" so the role of the champion is crucial to illustrate the positive role of new technology in helping with emergencies.

"Be champions".

-----

Your Memories: Here, There, Everywhere
Jef Holove (Eye-Fi, Inc.)

A clever gadget - basically a memory card in a digital camera - that uploads from the camera to a number of web services, or the PC, via wi-fi... i think there's something about geo-tagging in there as well.

A unique set of considerations/limitations that helped drive the product development:
- the camera is unaware that this is happening
- no user interface
- network authenticates card automatically
- connectvitiy, upload status

Geotagging - (Geotagging is an onerous chore with todays technology - Stephen Shankland, CNET). "What is the issue? - It is time consuming, cumbersome, expensive, slow, limited".

The solution needs to work with no user interaction, be quick, work indoors, and have minimum impact on battery life.

So...
- The card is inside the camera using wi-fi to detect surrounding networks
- Card uploads photos and geo-data at home or wi-fi hotspot
- Eye-fi service processes network IDs

I like this... I want one.

A good quote to finish:- "Advanced (technology) is simple. Really advanced is effortless."

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Merian Scout Case Study
Jennifer Kilian (frog design inc.)

"Marion wanted to create their own GPS device with premium content and experience for European travellers."

I think this explains the final product.. and this.

It's a physical, electronic device, slightly smaller than a blackberry, which works as a kind of digital Lonely Planet, but using the possibilities available due to the electronic format - GPS, audio content, etc

Think of it as a hand-held Tom-Tom device full of tourist information.

-----

GeoDjango: Web Applications for Geographers with Deadlines
Justin Bronn (CartoAnalytics, LLC)

From the website - "Our goal is to make it as easy as possible to build GIS web applications and harness the power of spatially enabled data."

"Why? 80% of enterprise data has a spatial component."

GeoDjango is made up from MTV - that's Models, Templates, Views - not Music Television.

Lots of mentions of MySQL, Python, KML, GML ... oh, and we're off into lines of code on the powerpoint slides., ouch!

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Your Car Gets an API
Chris Butler (Dash Navigation)

Dash is the first two-way navigation device available in the car and announced today is a dynamic search API for the product.

Some examples are shown to demonstrate the potential... a weather bug application, a way of accessing radio playlists (mediaguide), and something called Trapster, which shows you were the nearest police presence is and allows you to add your own police sightings to help other users.

People sitting around me seem to like this last idea.

-----

The Future = Location
George Filley (NAVTEQ)

Talking about the "Mobile Information Revolution".

"The future is here... in Quarter 1 this year, 43% of downloaded services were Location Based Services."

The end user expectations can be summarised as:
- I want to be able to access it anywhere, anytime
- I want to be able to share the information
- I don't want to pay

Connectivity cost is dropping and device capabilities are increasing... and there is "strong advertiser demand for new and innovations advertising forms."

The focus here is on how to monetize and create revenue in this space.

A slightly scary quote about developing local services to the point where a stranger can walk into a neighborhood and know more about the place than someone who lives there.

Or is it just me that finds that slightly scary... and slightly pointless. As a user, would I actually want, or be able to consume, that amount of information?


... and it's morning break and more coffee.

Where2.0 Blog Links

The Map Room has pointed out a couple of other blogs from where2.0.

where2.0 - Tue 13th May (4.15pm - 6pm)

Heading towards the end of Day 1...

Mirror World: Using MMOs for Real World Mapping - Wagner James Au
(MMO = Massively Multiplayer Online Game)

Examples of Google Earth and Second Live mash-ups which merge the virtual world and the real world, including real-time weather data on the globe, real-time LA airport arrivals/departures, and a project Digital Urban, 3d-izing London.

"But, why immersive maps of real worlds?... maybe the metaverse will just become pocket-sized."

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Indexing Reality: Creating a Mine of Geospatial Information
Anthony Fassero (earthmine inc )

Images (photographs) contain a vast array of geo-spatial information... how do we get this out?

Earthmine is trying to find the missing link between information and places.

Lots more info on the website, including a demo.

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A NeoGeographical Approach to Aerial Image Acquisition and Processing
Jeffrey Johnson (Pict'Earth), David Riallant (Pict'Earth)

"Neogeography is about using external technologies to gain the big picture. this is not a new thing.

The Geoweb has two main sources of information. Large scale base maps and site specific annotations from user generated content/information... there is something missing in the middle - site specific base maps"

From the website:

Pict'Earth is a combination of advanced image aquisition products and services giving you the ability to produce high definition images over your areas of interest,

Using light aircraft and simple kit the aim is to provide high quality ariel imagery to your requirements... I think the simple kit being mentioned is the Nokia N95 (due to the fact it contains both 5MP camera and GPS built in) but I'm not 100% sure.

In summary, "Pict'Earth empowers users to create their own site specific base maps."

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What About the Inside?
Mok Oh (EveryScape, Inc.)

"Inside is important and valuable. How much time do you spend indoors?" - the correct answer here is "a lot".

"We are providing the means to paint the world... and it has to be both inside and outside"

Mok talks through the Boston demo which essentially allows a user to walk the streets of Boston, but also enter inside the Cheers bar and look around.

In conclusion "the 2.0 community need to start thinking about the inside".

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Navigating the Future: Mapping in The Long Tail
Patrick McDevitt (Tele Atlas)

We're back onto the subject of The Long Tail and we haven't even got to Chris Anderson yet.

The point here is based around the observation that maps, mapping and location have been around for a long time, yet map content and services have largely been the domain of just a few big players.

Using The Long Tail metaphor, companies like Tele Atlas and Navteq are at the 'hit-based' end, but other players are now exploring the niche end of the market.

"We're most excited about the green box... we think user-communities can do it better, faster, cheaper than we (Tele Atlas) can... "

Therefore pushing mapping services down the long tail.

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Bringing Spatial Analysis to your Mashups
Jeremy Bartley (ESRI)

Jeremy presents a longer demo of the new ArcGIS 9.3... i think... hmm, not really sure... what's next?

-----

Global Weather Visualization: Utilizing Sensor Networks to Monetize Realtime Data
Michael Ferrari (Weather Trends International)

OK, weather...I know a bit about weather...

The opening section explains how current weather models and forecasts are produced, and the problems with un-predictability.

"Our forecasts are based entirely on pattern recognition... ability to forecast 11 months out"

Lots and lots (and lots) of slides of weather data.

"What this is all leading to is a paradigm shift in Earth system biogeophysics."

"We're not at a point where we are going to prevent weather-related disasters from happening... but we can probably plan for it and react to it a bit better."

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DIY Drones: An Open Source Hardware and Software Approach to Making “Minimum UAVs”
Chris Anderson (Wired Magazine)

"The Minimum UAV Project - How cheap and simple can a UAV (unmanned aerial vehicle) be?"

Essentially some grown-ups playing at kids games using lego and cheap kit to produce a UAV - sounds fun!

"Turning the military industrial complex into a toy"

Made cheaper with use of mobile phones... strapped digital cameras to the bottom for image gathering... tested by flowing over the Google campus and taking images of people having breakfast.

Ardupilot - $130 open source autopilot
- GPS
- IR stabilisation
- can control camera

"This is low cost access to the sky... it's never been so easy."

However, interestingly, there are no clear guidelines or regulations over the use of these 'toys'. Only use of UAVs to date has been military or commercial - no history of open source, non-commerical development in this area.

"What's this good for?... We don't yet know... Our job is to make the technology cheap, easy and ubiquitous.. Then users will show us what it's for."


... and that's the end (and credit to Chris Anderson, it was a very enjoyable end) of the speaker sessions for day 1 of Where2.0 2008.

where2.0 - Tue 13th May (1.30pm - 3.30pm)

Ride the Fire Eagle: Open Location for All
Tom Coates (Yahoo! Brickhouse)

Fire Eagle is there to allow users to:
- share their location online
- control their data and privacy
- easily build location services

"Fire Eagle helps sites and services to respond to a users location"

Yahoo Internet Location Platform - if fire eagle is the lens, YILP is the language we use.

Lots and lots of examples, but basically Fire Eagle is a 'middle-man app' that can take input from all kinds of services/sites and distribute this location information to any number of other websites/services.

Lots and lots of existing examples and ideas for future services, including Wikinear - "Over 1 million geo-tagged articles in wikipedia", Wikinear shows you the five nearest geo-tagged entries near you.

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The Business Case for Simulation, Gaming & Virtual Worlds
Denis Browne (SAP Labs, LLC)

There's a doll's house on stage... and a guy on a laptop... and a simulation of the house on the projector screen. The point being that there is 2-way communication between the latop/model and the real-world device - the doll's house in this case.

The system isn't restricted to a doll's house though - it can control large metropolitan areas. The aim being to control our natural resources better and make the world a better place - hooray.

-----

Next up is a panel discussing on monetizing maps & mashups...

First off is an argument about whether hyper-local is worth anything or not... smaller market... but more focussed... but less of an audience... but more relevant... and so on.

Steve Coast (OpenStreetMap) asks the question "when will Google turn on adsense for their maps".

...and then lots of discussion which seems to indicate that nobody really knows how, or when, new advertising models can be built on these developing location-based services.

iPhone does appear to be a breakthrough technology in terms of a mobile device encouraging greater take-up of location services. How advertising may work on these services appears to be anyone's guess at this stage.

-----

Now 3 different talks on new hardware gadgets.

Peter Semmelhack (Bug Labs) begins with 10 minutes on 'Building a Programmable GPS Device with BUG'.

Peter asks the question "Can hardware match the progress we see in software, web services and APIs?". Hardware mash-ups anyone?

Cue some complicated diagrams on-screen.

To conclude - "Software + Hardware mas-ups will release a new wave of innovation"


Johan Peeters (Geotate) - 'Enabling the GeoWeb by Mass Market Geotagging' - is on stage to talk about new ways of geo-tagging image content.

"What is a Geotag / Geotagging = Adding an (instant) notation of place and time to a 'real world' user generated or observed event/content".

GPS is too slow as a method for geo-tagging content - I couldn't agree more on this point.

Geotate provides a solution to this problem and is aiming to be included in digital cameras to allow automated geo-tagging of photographs.

It seems to avoid the start-up delay limitations of the existing GPS devices, thereby making it quicker and more practical to use.

Much more information on the Geotate products website.


Tom Churchill (Earthscape) - 'Augmented Reality Lets the DPD Know Where You Are'

Are there any reported fatalities due to Powerpoint overload? Nothing against Tom Churchill who is now talking about video monitors in police helicopters following criminals on the ground, but my eyes are starting to grow corners and become four-sided... and it hurts.

Lots of clever stuff based on the fact that you know where the helicopter is, and you know where the camera in the helicopter is pointing, so you can build a computer model of the area on the ground.

Then, factual information (road names etc) can be overlaid from the computer model over the video display from the live camera, making it easier to track the aforementioned criminals.

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Where is the "Where?" - Vincent Tao (Microsoft Corporation)

"What is where 1.0?" - Dr Tao tells us something but I blinked and missed it... we're running at a pace again. Now we're off onto Where 2.0.

"Location matters - One third of search queries are of local intent".

Apparently we are moving from W3 to W4. No, we're not biking around London districts, W4 means "what, when, where, who".

An interesting slide on how people look for local information. The categories mentioned are community, commerce, entertainment, communication, local search/mapping, search, portals.

71% of people are looking for local info on their PC, 21% are looking in print media... phones only come in at 7% (based on the number of queries).

Lots of Virtual Earth plug-ins mentioned for other MS products such as Outlook, Messenger, ...

Microsoft are aiming to make 500 world wide 3D city models available in Virtual Earth this year, alongside work to make Virtual Earth "more real and more precise".

They are also looking to use crowd sourcing to add further data to the mapping service - examples shown include stadium seating plans and tram line maps.

For the first time in public, a demonstration of how users can add their own photographic experience onto the Virtual Earth platform - looks nice but no real detail on how this would work in practise.

-----

... afternoon break. I wonder if caffeine has any useful properties for making my eyes return to their previous, more rounded state?

where2.0 - Tue 13th May (11am - 12mid)

11:00am: Best Practices for Location-based Services: Privacy, User Control, Carrier Relations, Advertising, and More
by Sam Altman (Loopt - a social mapping tool to connect, share and explore in the real world)

"GPS is the number one requested feature on a phone in the US, more than a camera."

Location challenges today (what we want) can be summarised as:
- inexpensive
- low friction access
- relevant accuracy
- strong privacy
- availability and reliability

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Modeling Crowd Behavior - Paul Torrens (Arizona State University)

Why would you model crowds? Lots of reasons it seems, not least in understanding how to deal with emergencies and public health and safety concerns.

How does this happen. Lots of models and diagrams but essentially it comes down to having access to lots of raw data, either from existing systems or by running tests to gather the data specifically.

Geospatioal exoskeletons - now that's a phrase you don't hear every day!

"The real job here is to apply this to real world issues".

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Greg Sadetsky (Poly9 Group Inc.)

FreeEarth - a cross-browser, cross-platform 3D globe which does not require any download.

It's "Part of the Web" - I've heard that phrase somewhere before!

A joint venture with Cell Bridge Communications Corp is announced called GeoAlert. "It's a system to save lives".

mapmkr is launching this summer - Your data. Your maps. No software.

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Convergence of Architectural and Engineering Design and Location Technology: Implications for eGovernment
Geoff Zeiss (Autodesk, Inc.)

Well, I've learnt something unexpected today. In the UK there is a 'right to light' in building regulations which concerns how much shade is created when a new construction is built.




... and that's lunch, phew! That's a lot of speakers for one morning, and most were competing with each other for the most-words-spoken-per-minute count.

maps.google.com

where2.0 - Tue 13th May (9am - 10.15am)

Day one proper kicks off with brief opening remarks from Brady Forrest (O'Reilly Media, Inc.) - 'Where2.0 has now hit the mainstream'.

-----

Then Adrian Holovaty the creator of EveryBlock: A News Feed for Your Block.

It's all about finding news relevant to you because you live there - stories that a journalist would never devote the time and effort to covering.

'There's tonnes of stuff on the internet that's interesting to lots of people but they just don't know about it... EveryBlock works because it doesn't ask you for your data, it justs shows you what's out there'.

Holovaty states that 'The more local you get, the more effort it takes' but this is where the success lies.

There's also a lesson here about not simply mashing-up a map interface with local data. 'One question i like to ask myself is, would my site succeed without maps?'. Make the web page the object so that people can link to it, share it, it's permanent, accessible, and so on...

Not every news story is about a point, sometimes it's about a region, a polygon on a map. Simply using the central point of this area is not good enough. Or news articles that can be represented by a line (e.g. upgrade work on a particular street).

Some solutions to these problems include
- Limit the zoom level of the map
- Roll your own maps: You have no control over many aspects of off-the-shelf mapping applications (colours/fonts/styles/design/...).

Everyblock uses opensource tools such as mapnik, tilecache, and openlayers to allow the site to be designed as its' own service and not be forced to use the style/design of a map provider such as Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, ...

To cope with privacy issues, geo-coding only happens down to a block level and no names are ever used in crime data.

On the question of funding and what next? Currently funded by grants for two years and no idea of where the money will come from after that.

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Five minutes from Michael Halbherr on the future of Nokia Location Based Services.

It's all about cross-platform. "There is no mobile internet or PC-internet... just the one internet available on different devices".

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Next a talk titled 'From Data Chaos to Actionable Intelligence: How the Convergence of the GeoWeb and Semantic Web is Revolutionizing the Way We Process Information' by Sean Gorman (FortiusOne)

Once again the benefits of crowd-sourcing to deal with the data sets on the web. However, most crowd sourcing is dealing with the long tail. Need a different solution to deal with the other end of data.

So... Finder... I think they're officially launching this today although the guy's talking pretty quickly so keeping up is a task in itself!

From All Points Blog:

FortiusOne will officially launch of Finder!, the first application of FortiusOne’s GeoCommons Suite. Finder! aims to turn unorganized, unsearchable, and unusable data, thus inhibiting their ability into something useable, so that users can produce actionable geo-intelligence. And, apparently you can visualize the found useful data in a variety of products from ESRI, Google and Microsoft.

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John Hanke from Google on The State of the Geoweb.

The Google Geo Search API is launching today to provide better access to the vast array of content on the 'Geoweb'.

Then ESRI and how geospatial applications are growing on the web and lots of acronyms and techy stuff about servers, metadata, scripting, and so on.

I think it basically all means that everyone will be able to access this location tagged content in new and interesting (and accessible) ways on the web.

Full detail here on the new possibilities availble using ArcGIS9.3.

... and it's morning break, where's the coffee?

Watch where2.0 via live web stream

From O'Reilly Radar...

If you can't make it to Where 2.0 you can watch it live-ish via two different video streams. For tonight's Ignite and Launchpad event you can watch via UStream.TV. This stream will get audio directly from the soundboard.

Seero, a geo-broadcasting portal that is focused on events is going to be live-streaming the entire event. You can watch it on their site or via the embed on the O'Reilly site.

Searching the Geoweb: Exposing Your Geo Data to Search Engines (Monday 1.30pm - 3pm)

Mano Marks and Lior Ron from Google Maps API team talking about geo search in this afternoon's session - Searching the Geoweb: Exposing Your Geo Data to Search Engines.

"43,566,346 geotagged photos on Flickr" - now that's precise! Although presumably it was also incorrect as soon as it had been typed. The point being that there is a huge amount of content on the web that has been geo-tagged in some form.

No information is forthcoming on how Google Maps ranks the search results to produce the most useful ordered list of results- for example, in the way Page Rank is used for the Google web search - but the suggestion is that site owners should "expose as much data as possible alongside geo-coded content".

Seems obvious - although maybe not desirable for a lot of people.

Lior made two new announcements:
1. Geo Server support - here's how
2. A new type of Google site map to allow webmasters to submit specific geo content

There is no moderation or checking procedure for geo-content collated and displayed via Google Maps. This is, of course, the same model used in web search. However, it is recognised that this could be more problematic for geo-content where users may be using the results to plan 'real world' activities such as driving to a particular location.

Mano starts to talk about some of the more technical aspects, including how you should decide between GeoRSS and KML formats.

The suggestion is that you should use GeoRSS if you:
- are already outputting RSS
- want to convey that 'updates' or 'most recent' items are contained within the data
- only ever represent point data

Use KML for everything else.

Oh, and Google "don't comment on future plans" in case you were wondering, which made for some fairly un-interesting answers to the questions from the audience.

Geo-ify Your Web Site (10.30am - 12)

Mikel Maron is up after the coffee break to talk about Illuminated Hacks.

However, my battery reckons it has 14 minutes of life left and I appear to be sitting far away from any potential power supply... damn and oops.

...We're back with power.

An interesting talk from Mikel on a number of different hacks involving maps, location data and content.

On of these was the BBC Bangladesh River Journey - something that was particularly close to home for me (the BBC that is, not Bangladesh).

There was also some interesting stuff with Flickr - utilising the power of crowd sourcing the 65 million photos on Flickr to define locations across the world.

A brief mention of the Headmap manifesto and searching for sadness in New York.

In a lucky coincidence, he talked about the usefulness of machine tags and how Flickr can automatically connect with Upcoming as on one of my photo uploads to indicate that the image was taken at the Where2.0 2008 event.

Geo-ify Your Web Site (8.30am - 10am)

Monday morning and I'm signed up for a session called Geo-ify your web site.

What does this mean? Good question. Some interesting stuff from Andrew Turner about microformats and embedding location tagging within the html of web content.

Then onto Mapstraction and its use in providing efficient and effective access to a variety of mapping providers, rather than being tied into the restrictions of one service.

Lots of very interesting library calls to provide functionality around image overlays, time sliders, data filtering and so on.

OpenSearch also gets a brief mention.

To highlight the increasing use of location information and web mapping we are told that " something like 60% of all mash-ups include the use of a mapping API".

Most of the questions revolve around Mapstraction, in particular on how the product is developing, in terms of speed and direction. This seems particularly relevant for a product that is supposed to allow you effective access 9 separate mapping providers - some of which are developing fairly quickly themselves, and not necessarily in the same direction.

Steve Coast (from Cloud Made) then stands up to talk about OpenStreetMap.

They are aiming to solve the problems caused by the fact that "Geodata isn't free, open, or current." and provide mapping/location data on a free license to anyone that wants to access and use this information.

There are currently 35,000 users of OpenStreetMap and this is growing by 2,500 per month.
3,000 users are currently editing maps every month which seems like a fairly decent percentage of the current user base, although I sense this will need to keep increasing at a decent rate to keep up with demands of the growing user base.

Lots of techie stuff about how OSM works - most of which can be found on here.

"It's the community, stupid!" - Steve points out that "OSM is not a technology project, tech standards don't matter (discuss?), and that simple (tools, API, workflow) is good".

"OSM is a community project... convincing people to do this for free on a Sunday is quite difficult".

Mailing lists in different languages, the project wiki, mapping parties (the first was in the Isle of Wight in 2006) and other methods are used to encourage the community to keep building.

Then a very interesting point about how some commercial map providers (none named) deliberately add erroneous streets on their products purely to try and trap people who might breach copyright.

Where 2.0 Conference, 2008

The 4th (i think!) annual where2.0 conference organised by O'Reilly kicks off tomorrow and I consider myself lucky enough to be attending.

(UPDATE - All my blog posts from the conference can be viewed here)

It's a break from my usual objective to avoid anything remotely work/business related on my blog but I'm hoping that this conference will be sufficiently interesting to merit plenty of comment.

There is an RSS feed from the official website and the organisers have asked any photos or blog posts on the web to be tagged with 'where20' and 'where20Conf08' so keep an eye on the usuals - Flickr, Technorati, del.icio.us, etc.

It will also be an interesting test of Keotag - a site that allows you to search across many other sites and services based on tags. The interface is very simple and quite effective - as long as you know which services/sites all of those little symbols represent!