Google has just made some changes to the organization of the Layers in Google Earth, as seen below:

The biggest change involves the "Places of Interest". Not only did it move from the bottom of the list to nearly the top, but it's undergone some major changes. In the previous version, it had a huge list of subitems you could select. Those are gone, in favor of a single checkbox.

Google has also redone the icons in Google Earth, as well as the way they appear. When you're high in the air viewing an area, you'll only see icons for major attractions (stadiums, museums, airports, etc). As you zoom in closer, you'll see smaller items, such as restaurants and and hotels. There are still a lot of items that show up in the middle of the street, but hopefully people will continue to reposition the markers to make things more precise.

Other changes in the list include:

• Panoramio getting top-level treatment instead of being buried in "Geographic web".
• Traffic moved from the top-level into the "More" category.
• Quite a bit of reordering (see the screenshot above).

This is the first major change to the Layers list in quite a while, and it seems like it was very well-planned. What do you think of the changes?

Read more of this story at Slashgeo.

Earlier this year, we showed you the iPhone app that we had created. We're pleased to announce that our Android app is now available too!

The app is very similar to the iPhone app -- it shows you our recent entries, videos and Tweets. Once again, we thank MotherApp for making it possible.

If you have an Android-powered phone (Droid, Nexus One, etc), you can find the app from the Android Market on your phone. Give it a shot and let us know what you think!

Google has just created a few files to help show off the venues for this year's NCAA Basketball Tournament. All of the venues in this tournament are in 3D in Google Earth and are quite impressive to view.

You can view them all by downloading this KMZ file, or you can view them all in a special MyMap that they've created. In addition, you can view the 14 venues by downloading this KML tour or browsing them all in EarthSwoop.

Read more of this story at Slashgeo.

Read more of this story at Slashgeo.

"These easily recognisable logos more closely depict online what the offline world looks like, so next time you're trying to find your way on the map you can navigate more easily using these icons as landmarks."

Read more of this story at Slashgeo.

When we launched the Google Maps JavaScript API v3 last year our goal was to develop a framework in which we could deliver compelling and innovative features to our developers that cater to the new breed of location-aware mobile internet devices.

As we look ahead it is clear that HTML 5 offers us the platform we need to deliver on this vision. However as we develop features that exploit the potential of HTML5 it will not be possible to maintain our current level of support for older web browsers. For this reason we will be updating the list of supported browsers for the Maps API v3 on a regular basis. We are applying our first update today by removing Firefox 2, Internet Explorer 6, and Safari 3, while adding support for the Android browser and for Chrome on Mac and Linux.

We understand that many users work in environments in which they are not in control of the browser they must use. We will therefore do our best to ensure that users of browsers that we no longer support continue to have a good experience with Maps API v3 applications. If we develop a new feature that can be easily implemented in a manner compatible with these browsers we will do so, and we will continue to accept bug reports relating to them. We will also attempt to ensure that any features we launch in future that are not compatible with these browsers degrade gracefully for affected users.

The browsers that we no longer support for the Maps API v3 will continue to be supported for the Google Maps JavaScript API v2. We have no plans to change the list of supported browsers for the Maps API v2, and consequently if support for these browsers is important to you we recommend that you continue to develop your applications using the Maps API v2.

If however you are planning a new Maps API application or need to update an existing Maps API v2 application to offer improved support for mobile devices, we encourage you to consider using the Maps API v3. We are excited by the opportunities that HTML5 offers us and hope that you will enjoy using the Maps API v3 to develop the next generation of powerful and immersive Maps API applications.

Posted by Thor Mitchell, Maps API Product Manager

Does foursquare know where you are? Can GoWalla identify what shop you are near? Can Yelp really position you inside or near your favorite bar? With so many different ways to check-in and share your location with colleagues and friends (think Loopt, Gowalla, foursquare, pegshot,…

Read more of this story at Slashgeo.

A great video on the Ignite presentation format and how to tell a story… great advice not only on how to present but how to write a blog post or other online story - great stuff!

New This Spring … GEOINT Community Week May 17-21
What was once Tech Days has grown over the past several years to include myriad events for the geospatial intelligence community. Previously the week when Tech Days occured offered a classified and unclassified day of exhibits and…

A message from ESRI about this month’s Dev Summit… David invites Java developers to attend the technical sessions and demo theaters on ArcGIS Java platform at the upcoming ESRI Devloper Summit in Palm Springs, CA

Here's a quick video tour of some new 3D models in San Sebastian-Donostia, Spain, created by SketchUp user Gipuzkoa3d. He built the movie, which shows off models that he and others have created.

Update: The video was removed from YouTube (I have no idea why), but you can still view the awesome models using the KML file below.

To get there you can search for "San Sebastian-Donostia, Spain" in Google Earth, or just use this KML file.

(via SketchUp Island)

GORequest for iPhone the Government outreach mobile app enables citizens to communicate with local governments and report items of concern… Nice!  About the app… See a pothole that needs filling? Barking dog driving you crazy? Graffiti making a mess of your neighborhood? Tap right into…

If you ever like to pan for gold, a new tool might be able to help you out. Using a U.S. Department of Interior database, Gold Maps Online has created a variety of KML files to help highlight areas where gold is currently being found.

From their site:

This map can be viewed as a near real-time look at America's active gold deposits. It's near real-time because gold mining claim holders are required to pay annual fees to maintain ownership. They wouldn't do that if they weren't finding gold on the property. This is a map of where prospectors are finding gold in 2010.

The maps aren't free, but you have a few good options. You can try a free sample map to see what it looks like. If you'd like another state, simply contact them and mention GEB and they'll give it to you for free!

These maps are quite well done and could be rather valuable if you happen to be planning a search for gold.

If you play this video at an appropriate volume you will either get yelled at by your coworkers to turn it down or to turn it up…ignore the former and share a pint with the latter. And hey, with is more geographic than a band from Newfoundland being used to highlight a holiday we all connect with beer Ireland.

The Chronicle of Higher Education recently highlighted an interactive map of state spending on higher education institutions and how federal stimulus monies are being used in each state. The focus is on three themes: Percent of higher ed budget from stimulus monies (FY 2009-10), change in general fund spending (FY 2008-2010), and budget gaps as a percent of the general fund budget (FY 2010). It is interesting to see which states are in the best position to support state schools and which ones will have significant issues when federal stimulus monies begin to disappear in 2011. The image below is the % budget from stimulus map, click through to play around with the interactive map.

Manage Your Content – Integrate Your Content

I talked a little bit on the WeoGeo blog last week about how we were very focused on content management. Yea, very sexy stuff… But what I think it highlights is the way that we can share our data with each other. Getting your data “into the Cloud”, whatever that means these days, and then using it as much as possible gives you the best return on your investment. One thing that did come up at the FedUC in February was the huge adoption of ESRI’s ArcGIS Online Map Services among users. Using these great free services as backdrops to your mapping content gives you a great starting point. But how you can integrate your geo-content into them is critical. Making it as easy and simple to do is how you’ll be able to leverage your data.

The “Map Sandwich”

ESRI’s cartography blog of all places has the key to showing where data vendors (and just all around geo-Joes) can leverage their datasets in this new ecosystem of free web services. Now the blog post focuses on the cartography aspects of this mashup, but the huge takeaway here is that you can easily integrate your data into these free services in ways that your users/customers can leverage easily. What users want is to quickly integrate your data into their ecosystem. This means they want to consume them on their terms, not yours. Companies that successfully integrate with the Google, the Microsoft and large GIS vendors such as the ESRI, will see great consumption of their data. Those that create their own private data sharing sites or web services will see their fortunes decline, like Paul says.

A Window into the Future

I’ll tell you right now who I see fitting perfectly into this “Map Sandwich” world, Brian Flood’s Arc2Earth. Take a look at his demo app, “Tax Parcel Search – Westfield, NJ“. What is really cool about this demo app is that Brian has a link to the API that makes it happen. He based this API on some draft standards so it should be really easy to integrate into just about any application out there, but the chocolate syrup and cherry on top is his ArcGIS Server REST API Compatibility. Now, he still hasn’t released this publicly (at least that I can see), but it means that any data you create using his Arc2Earth API will be easily consumable in the ESRI ecosystem natively. No wacky WMS or WFS for ESRI users, this stuff will be copy and paste stupid easy.

Customers want this integration and it just isn’t ESRI users. We can sit on our high horse all we want and talk about open standards, but in the trenches people with money don’t have time for the OGC and others to get their act together (and even then they could care less).

“Give me a web service that integrates into my ArcCatalog natively and I’ll buy”

That simple.

“I’m using the ESRI Flex API and want to use your dataset.”

Here is the ESRI REST URL, have at it.

Give Me Some of that Good Data-as-a-Feature

We should be looking at these Data-as-a-Feature services as opportunities to get our data into the hands of those creating applications. A quick look at the ESRI Mashup Challenge shows that there are tons of very useful apps screaming to integrate your data layers into them. You just need to make sure you provide the meat and let ESRI handle the bread and lettuce (maybe a little bacon too).

Bottom Line

So the above example is “ESRI Centric”, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t valid for EVERYONE. If your online geo-content isn’t in formats or services that can easily be integrated into popular mapping APIs and libraries, your data is not going be easily used. For the consultant, if you can’t deliver you data to your clients quickly and easily, they’ll look elsewhere for services (integrating with Drupal, SharePoint, whatever). For data providers, if I can’t grab your data and throw it into my OpenLayers mapping application or Silverlight API app by cutting and pasting lines of code, I’ll probably not use your data at all. You’d better start thinking this way because the landscape has changed, work with web services or be out of work. The writing is clearly on the wall, pay attention.

We will have some representation at the ESRI DevSummit next week and while the focus will be on covering some of the presentations and getting an idea of what will be changing in the dev area in ArcGIS 10, there will be some time to catch up with anyone interested in highlighting their work. If you are interested in sharing your thoughts and work of the podcast contact us to touch base and make a plan to meet.

As well as adding postcode search support recently, CycleStreets.net this week upgraded the general street/place finding system geocoder. Default map is Open Street Map (Cycle Map) but Google Streets and Google Satellite are available via the map controls. Image source: http://www.cyclestreets.net/blog/2010/03/14/geocoder-upgraded/

Some tips for quicker searches are:

• If the map is zoomed out, ideally include a city name as well, so that it knows what area to look in
• If you do specify a city, add a comma before it, e.g. “York Street, Cambridge” rather than just “York Street Cambridge”
• Note that lower-case text works the same as Capitalised Text.

1. Fastest route
2. Balanced route
3. Quietest route

Gradient, Wiggliness and number of Traffic lights are also factored in for your journey on your bike.

Mapperz News Blog

A VerySpatial Podcast

Shownotes – Episode 243
March 14, 2010

Main Topic: Our conversation with Brian Wienke of Accela

Click for the detailed shownotes

Music

News

• Google Geocoder Web Service and Google Maps new Bike Route feature
• MAPPS pushing for “Imagery for the Nation”
• “The City Is A Platform” at SXSW 2010
• Software
• –ArcGIS Explorer Build 1200
• –Unity 3.0 and XNA 4.0
• –Autodesk moves from disks to downloads

Sponsored by ITT Visual Information Solutions and their product ENVI EX

Web Corner

• 8-bit NYC

Main topic

• This week we feature our conversation with Brian Wienke, Product Manager at Accela, Inc, as he tells us about Accela and its products, including Accela GIS and the newly-released Automation 7.0

Tip of the Week

• 2010 GeoDesign Summit Videos

Events

• AAG Annual Meeting 2010: 14-18 April, Washington, DC
• Conference of Latin American Geographers: 26-28 May, Bogota, Colombia
• NCGE 2010 Conference: 29 Sept-3 Oct, Savannah, GA – Proposal deadline June 1
• AI and Interactive Digital Entertainment: 11-13 Oct, Palo Alto, CA

This week A Very Spatial Podcast is sponsored by ESRI.

With Job Tracking for ArcGIS, you can better manage project information and centralize both GIS and non-GIS workflows. This ArcGIS extension helps save time and increases efficiency. Visit www.esri.com/jtx to request a free 60-day trial.

For all you students out there whose maps are greeted with a “That’s bizarre…”, I’ve got the perfect map challenge for you! Our reader Keith M. sent us a heads up about the Bizarre Map Challenge, a map design competition open to high school, college, and university students (only here in the US). The maps submitted by students are supposed to be “bizarre” in the sense of being out of the ordinary but still using real-world data, so thinking outside the box will pay off!

The deadline to submit your map is March 22nd, and you can find complete contest rules here

First Prize is $5000 and the top ten will all get cash prizes, so start designing those maps!

.

It looks like the powers that be at the ESRI Developer Summit have decided a .NET ESRI/Microsoft SIG is a good idea after all. Fears (possibly all mine) that the DevSummit was changing and wouldn’t be able community anymore are tempered somewhat by this announcement. So if you work the ESRI/Microsoft angle to develop GIS applications, you can now share this fact with your brothers and sisters in code. Viva Palm Springs!

• Google Maps of Omeonga crater suspect in DR Congo
  Here is the location of the DR Congo crater suspect identified by the Italian scientists. Interestingly, the Google Earth Community has had this location in its sights since Aug 2006, and it has been in the database of Suspected Earth Impact Sites (SEIS) since at least then. I assume the latest news regards the increased probability of this site actually being a crater.
• BBC News - DR Congo ring may be giant 'impact crater'
  Deforestation has revealed what may be a giant impact crater in the DR Congo. Apparently, the feature has only become visible on satellite imagery over the past 10 years.

Comments (0)

• Avoid highways and tolls. If you prefer to take the road less traveled you can now generate routes that avoid highways. Similarly, if you find yourself a little short of loose change, you can avoid tolls.
  
  
• Route optimization. Have many places to go but no preference as to the order you visit them in? We can now reorder the waypoints of your route to minimize the distance and time you must travel. Very useful for traveling salesman I hear.
  
  
• Bicycling directions. Prefer your vehicles of the two wheeled human powered variety? In conjunction with the launch of Bicycling directions in Google Maps you can now also request directions in Maps API v3 that are tailored to your Penny-farthing.

• Bike lanes: For more than 150 cities in the US, we know which streets have dedicated bicycle lanes. These are also prioritized when coming up with a routing suggestion. On the bicycling layer, you’ll see these roads indicated in bright green.

• Recommended routes: For many cities we also provide information on streets that have been designated as good for cyclists, so we them into account in our algorithm. These roads are indicated with dashed green lines on our bicycling layer.

• Uphill slopes: l don't know anyone who enjoys biking up a hill, especially when you're trying to get somewhere you need to be. Going uphill is worse than simply being much slower; it's also exhausting and can take a toll on the rest of your ride. Our biking directions are based on a physical model of the amount of power your body has to exert given the slope of the road you’re biking on. Assuming typical values for mass and for wind resistance, we compute the effort you’ll require and the speed you’ll achieve while going uphill. We take this speed into account when determining the time estimate for your journey, and we also try hard to avoid routes that will require an unreasonable degree of exertion. Sometimes the model will determine that it's far more efficient to make you ride several extra blocks than to have to deal with a massive hill. My teammates in San Francisco were relieved to see that this does indeed work!

• Downhill slopes: Many cyclists will tell you that going downhill is annoying for a different reason: you may have to ride your brakes all the way down. All else equal, we try to avoid routes that require a lot of braking. Of course, in some cities, including my hometown of Seattle, this isn’t always possible! And if you feel like you need a big workout and want to climb some hills, or if you just love that wind-in-your-hair feeling of a long downhill (you better be wearing a helmet and staying safe!), you can always turn on the terrain layer to check out the hilliness of an area for yourself.

• Busy roads: Cyclists often tend to prefer to stay off of fast roads, and not even cross them unless it's necessary. This is roughly the inverse of driving directions, where you want to stay on arterials and freeways, so we had to rework a lot of those fundamental calculations when coming up with our biking directions algorithm.

• Busy intersections: We try to avoid making you cross busy streets with a lot of car traffic and long wait times.

Mapperz News Blog

Is there such a thing as collective guilt? Or if not that, then at least some kind of national responsibility for past state crimes? Was the Nazi period a freak of history, or an inevitable culmination of the revanchist, reactionary forces of German nationalism? And what did grandad do during the War?Those are just some of the issues that are the burden of every German born after 1945 – a peculiar variant on the concept of original sin.

Over six decades now separate us from the end of World War Two, but the conflict will not – will not be allowed to – fade away from German national consciousness. Post-war Germany’s actions on the European and world stage for the most part have been motivated by the responsibility of atonement for the war (1), and the apprehensive avoidance of any international grandstanding. Whether or not it was Helmut Kohl who said that “Europe should not become German, but Germany should become European,” the quote correctly identifies Germany’s exemplary pro-Europeanness as an essential part of its post-1945 identity.

The flipside of Germany’s new, post-war identity is a complete rejection and reversal of its pre-war and wartime Nazi ideology. This might seem like the obvious and only possible course, given the extent of the Nazi regime’s reprehensible belligerence, heinous perfidy and horrid crimes against humanity. However, the quasi-absoluteness of denazification in Germany contrasts markedly with Japan’s reluctant retro- and introspection vis-a-vis its wartime guilt (2).

And yet, despite the official attitude that fascism is not an opinion, but a crime (Faschismus ist keine Meinung, sondern ein Verbrechen), expressly criminalising the outward signs of Nazism (e.g. the swastika, the Nazi salute, denial of the Holocaust, publication of Mein Kampf), mementos of the other, older, evil Germany keep resurfacing. In recent years, several German cities have publicly retracted the honorary citizenship bestowed on Adolf Hitler in tempore suspecto (3): Düsseldorf (2000), Aschersleben (2006), Bad Doberan and Biedenkopf (2007), Kleve (2008), and Forst/Lausitz (2009), among others.

This map shows another clattering of skeletons in Germany’s closet (4). Under the ironic title ‘Germany’s most beautiful school names’, it catalogues German schools bearing the names of Germans with a less than salubrious track record during the Nazi years. The offending names are:

• Ferdinand Sauerbruch: surgeon and personal physician to Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi’s chief propagandist. As a high-ranking medical official, he approved funding for medical experiments on concentration camp inmates.
• Klaus Riedel: Rocket scientist, co-developer of the Vergeltungswaffe (‘Retaliation Weapon’) V2, which caused the deaths of 100,000 civilians in Allied countries and of 12,000 forced labourers in Nazi-occupied Europe.
• Wernher von Braun: In charge of the Heeresversuchsanstalt (‘army test organisation’), member of the Nazi party and Sturmbannfuehrer in the SS, developer of the V2 rocket, personally selected forced labourers in the Buchenwald concentration camp (5).
• Rainer Fetscher: Physician, “racial hygienist”, member of the SA. Compiled a database to identify “biologically inferior individuals”, was responsible for at least 65 forced sterilisations. In this light, it is particularly unfortunate, to say the least, that his name is attached to a school for physcially handicapped children.
• Peter Petersen: A teacher, he wrote about “racial superiority” and about “the Jew, [...] who, in everything he touches, has a destructive, flattening, and even poisoning [effect].” As late as 1949, he complained that the German people was “racially polluted”. The large number of schools named after him can be explained by his development in 1927 of the ‘Jena Plan’, an educational concept still followed by quite a few schools in Germany (among which, one imagines, those named after Petersen himself).
• Rudolf Dietz: nostalgic poet, member of the racist Deutschbund (‘German Association’) and of the Nazi party. Wrote about 30 anti-semitic poems, in his poem Reichslied (’song of the Empire’), he wrote approvingly of the “unity under the swastika”.
• Hermann, Herbert and Werner Andert: Hermann was a member of the Nazi party, his sons of the SA and the Nazi teachers’ union. Werner was a contributor to Nazi newspapers.
• Agnes Wiegel: Nazi poet, member of the Nazi party, ardent Hitler-worshipper. Wrote the Ode an den Fuehrer (‘Ode to the Leader’), signatory to the Gelobnis treuester Gefolgschaft (‘Promise of most loyal obedience’) to Hitler.

Many thanks to John D. Boy for sending in this map, found here on Extra 3, a blog associated with the northern German tv station NDR Fernsehen. Germans have, it seems, a bit of a tradition of humourous maps of their country. See also the Deutschlandkarte showing clusters of hair salon names, discussed earlier on this blog (#385).

—– 

(1) whether the First One needs to be included in this exercise in atonement is a whole different can of worms.

(2) for a revealing comparison of the post-war attitudes on responsibility and rememberance, read Ian Buruma’s excellent book on the subject: ‘Wages of Guilt: Memories of War in Germany and Japan’).

(3) The retractions were largely symbolic, as honorary citizenship (Ehrenbuergerschaft) is considered voided by the death of the person thus honoured.

(4) If you’ll pardon the expression. Also: what is the correct collective noun for a group of skeletons?

(5) Wernher von Braun of course became a respected member of the American scientific community, contributing to the American space programme. A multipurpose indoor arena in Huntsville, AL was named after him (the Von Braun Civic Center – VBCC).

ROSE: Yah it’s a lot of braunschweiger.

[Brenda starts to ring up the braunschweiger]

ROSE: It’s for my dad….. for his….. trip. My dad……. He… is going to……. Wisconsin.

BRENDA: Oh Wisconsin! A real party state.

[...]

BRENDA: Oh yah. He’s goin’ to visit his brother in Wisconsin.

DOROTHY: On a lawnmower?!?!

BRENDA: Yah…

DOROTHY: Great party place, Wisconsin.

[...]

ALVIN: In Wisconsin. Just over the state line.

CRYSTAL: (nodding) Oh….Cheddar Heads.

[Alvin laughs at this and Crystal smiles, too]

ALVIN: Aren’t those just about the dumbest things you ever saw a person put on their head?

[She nods and laughs]

CRYSTAL: I hear that’s a real party place, Wisconsin. Guess I’ll never get to find out.

The repeated insistence in The Straight Story – the slowest road movie ever – that the great, plain state of Wisconsin is a mecca of mirth seemed like a mere running gag, underlining the orneriness of Iowans. Turns out that director David Lynch might not have been joking after all. It seems those Cheddar Heads really do know a thing or two about partying – especially if it involves hanging out in bars.

This map represents localised references in the Google Maps directory to either grocery stores or bars. Yellow shading indicates that there are more references to grocery stores than bars at that particular location. Red indicates more references to bars.

Yellow is generally prevalent in most of the US; one can assume that there are more grocery stores than drinking establishments in those areas. But red dots, where bars outnumber grocery stores, are dominant in a few very particular regions:

• The aforementioned party state, Wisconsin. The dotting corresponds quite closely with the Wisconsin state line, turning yellow again where northwestern Wisconsin transforms into Michigan’s northern peninsula.
• North Dakota is also heavily bar-oriented, as are significant parts of Montana, Wyoming, South Dakota, Nebraska, Minnesota, Kansas and – ironically – Iowa.
• Illinois is also a mainly ‘red’ state, with the notable exception of Chicagoland, on the southern shore of Lake Michigan.
• Curiously, heavily red areas are almost all found in the Midwest. One exception is a red cluster in Upstate New York and Pennsylvania, overflowing to the coast into a semi-separate Boston cluster.

This strange map was produced by Floating Sheep, a website dedicated to “mapping and analyzing user generated Google Map placemarks”. In this instance, the ovine analysts of cybergeography were so startled by this remarkably differentiated result that they wanted to check it against information a bit more official than the data provided by Google Maps (1) .

According to the 2007 Census, there are on average 1.52 bars (2) for every 10,000 people in the US. Those numbers are a lot higher in the ‘red’ states: Wyoming (3.40), Nebraska (3.68), Iowa (3.73), South Dakota (4.73), Wisconsin (5.88), Montana (6.34) and North Dakota, which, with an average of 6.54 bars per 10,000 inhabitants apparently is the top “party state” in the Union. Next time you want to take your lawnmower to a party, you know in which direction to head.

.

Many thanks to all who sent in this map: James Smith, Dan Boucher, Ted B. Gerstein, Mark Hamlin, J.P. Coughlin, Pepijn Hendriks and Matthew Zook (of Floating Sheep; this map on this page of their site. Do check out the rest of the site for more interesting statistical maps).

(1) No offence to Mountain View’s finest – and mightiest!

(2) In Census Speak, not bars but rather ”NACIS code 722410: Drinking places (alcoholic beverages)”.

• Unlimited Usage*
• Status Codes (in Plain English!)
• Java Support (Parsing XML with XPath)

• "OK" indicates that no errors occurred; the address was successfully parsed and at least one geocode was returned. example
  
• "ZERO_RESULTS" indicates that the geocode was successful but returned no results. This may occur if the geocode was passed a non-existent address or a latlng in a remote location. example
  
• "OVER_QUERY_LIMIT" indicates that you are over your quota. (your geocoding too fast!)
  
• "REQUEST_DENIED" indicates that your request was denied, generally because of lack of a sensor parameter. example
  
• "INVALID_REQUEST" generally indicates that the query (address or latlng) is missing. example
  

Mapperz News Blog

Geocoding - finding the geographical location of a given address - is one of the most popular features of the Google Maps API. Both the JavaScript Maps APIs and the Maps API for Flash include classes that enable applications to perform geocoding, and there is also a RESTful web service that offers the option of making geocoding requests from server side applications with output in both XML and JSON.

The Google Maps JavaScript API v3 introduced a new format for geocoding responses that offers a number of improvements over the format used in the v2 API:

• A flatter response format for address components that is easier to parse
• The ability to tag an address component with multiple types
• Both full names and abbreviations for countries and states
• Differentiation between rooftop and interpolated geocoder results
• Both the bounding box and recommended viewport for each result

The Geocoding Web Service is intended to enable precaching of geocoder results that you know your application will need in the future. For example, if your application displays property listings, you can geocode the address of each property, cache the results on your server, and serve these locations to your API application. This ensures that your application does not need to geocode the address of a property every time it is viewed by a user. However we do ask that you regularly refresh your cache of geocoder results.

Note however that it is a requirement of the Maps API Terms of Service that you use the Geocoding Web Service in conjunction with a Google map. This means that when it comes time to use cached geocoder results in an application, the application must display the results or any data derived from them on a map generated using one of the Google Maps APIs or Google Earth API.

If your application needs to geocode arbitrary addresses that are entered by your users while they wait we recommend that you use the classes in the appropriate client API. This ensures that the requests your application generates reach Google directly from your users, which will improve the performance of your application and ensure it is resilient to unexpected spikes in use. For more details, I highly recommend this excellent blog post by our very own Mano Marks.

In addition to an improved response format you will notice some other changes in the new Geocoding Web Service. Requests no longer require a Maps API key, and Maps API Premier customers must sign their requests. In addition CSV output is not supported because we found that the minimal amount of data in a CSV response makes it is difficult to identify false positive results.

2,500 requests may be sent to the Geocoding Web Service per day from a single IP address. This is independent of any geocoding activity generated by applications using one of the client Maps APIs for geocoding. Maps API Premier quotas remain unchanged.

A forward geocoding request to the new Geocoding Web Service with XML output looks like:

http://maps.google.com/maps/api/geocode/xml?address=sydney&sensor=false

A reverse geocoding request with JSON output looks like:

http://maps.google.com/maps/api/geocode/json?latlng=-33.873038,151.20563&sensor=false

Check out the Geocoding Web Service documentation for more details on the options available for language and biasing of results.

In conjunction with the launch of the new Geocoding Web Service we are also announcing the deprecation of the current service, now retroactively named the "Geocoding V2 Web Service". Existing applications using the V2 Web Service need not worry though. Deprecation indicates that we no longer intend to pursue any further feature development, but we will continue to maintain and support the service in accordance with the deprecation policy set out in the Maps API Terms of Service.

We hope that you find the new Geocoding Web Service easier to use and useful. As always we encourage you to check out the Google Maps API Google Group if you have any questions or comments relating to the APIs. We look forward to adding more great features to the Geocoding Web Service in future.

Posted by Thor Mitchell, Maps API Product Manager

A late edition to the ESRI Developer Summit is the GeoDesign Idea Lab. This is going to be a set of lightning talks by developers showcasing how they’ve been using the concept of GeoDesign in their applications. I’ll be moderating the session with Eric Wittner of ESRI. If you’ve been telling everyone you’ve “been doing GeoDesign for years”, now is you chance to get up and show everyone how your stuff is teh sexay.

Most of what we’ve seen out of this GeoDesign has been with researchers and university types talking about concepts. Now is the time to show how developers have been in the trenches integrating disparate disciplines and bringing the results to the decision makers and the public.

Email your Lightning Talk (10 minutes maximum) abstract to geodesign_devsum@esri.com to be considered. I’ll be blogging the session in detail so this could be a great opportunity to get your GeoDesign chops out in the open. Plus since it is going on at the same time as the Business Partner Conference expect some of the marketing geeks to drop by and see what is up.

GeoDesign Idea Lab Part 1
GeoDesign Idea Lab Part 2

T.S. Elliott was doing GeoDesign before anyone else!

Google’s Public Data Explorer continues their push to integrate their simply awesome visualization APIs with searchable datasets. Think big though:

If you’re a data provider interested in becoming a part of the Public Data Explorer, contact us.

Social networks came into existence thanks to our instinctive need for sharing. Facebook grew out of college campuses by allowing students to share photos or "faces", while Twitter grew by enabling users to share short and quick "tweets" or status updates. As smartphones like iPhone and Android led to the rise of the mobile web, location signature of GPS-enabled devices added a new twist. Users could share locations and activities, opening up a wide range of possible applications, and creating brand new specialty social networks.

As I recently moved from OpenSocial to the Geo APIs, I'm very excited to see that Google Maps is the default platform to power this fast growing segment of what I call the Geo Mobile web. In this post I'm going to highlight this emerging trend by sharing a few of my favorite examples.

Let's start with FourSquare, which is all about sharing the location and activities of users. When a user signs in from a mobile device, FourSquare detects the current location of the user, performs a reverse geocode to fetch a list of places nearby and sends them back to the user, who can opt to check in at one of the places and share it with others. In this snapshot the Google San Francisco office is shown on Google Maps using the Google Maps JavaScript V2 API. Users can check-in to a place, see check-ins by others, explore places nearby, and build up social contacts by adding friends, all the while having fun by earning badges.

Gowalla by Alamofire is another application building on this same concept of user check-in and sharing location and activity. When a user chooses a place of interest, activities by others at that location are shown and the user can choose to add people as friends, discover new places, pick up, drop off, and trade items with others.

Gowalla's web app version uses the Google Static Maps API to show a map view of a place while the iPhone native app uses the MapKit framework to render a map.

It is interesting to note that users of these apps initially start out without a built-in social graph but can gradually build them up by sharing their own whereabouts and discovering the location and activities of others.

This kind of viral sharing has boosted the growth for Facebook and Twitter in the past and it is once again driving the creation of these specialty social networks on the new frontier of the Geo Mobile web.

Established social networks like Twitter have taken notice. They recently enhanced their APIs by offering geotagging for tweets and local trends, which have spawned innovative mash-ups like Trendsmap.

The rise of these specialty social networks on the Geo Mobile web is predicated on the introduction and wide adoption of smart mobile devices, the viral spread in user sharing check-ins, as well as the availability of geo data sources and services. Google Maps is the developer solution of choice for many of these applications in regards to data source of tiles and places and services like geocoding, and I'm looking forward to seeing more innovations in this exciting arena.

Oh S#*t!

Why is it companies want to be so disruptive when all you want to do is make maps? Says John Herlihy of Google

“In three years time, desktops will be irrelevant.”

Bam, game over. We’ll be working our GIS magic on Androids and iPhones. I know, I know… We’ve heard this all before from Messrs. McNealy, Ellison, but now that Google is saying it (again?) we’d be get our act together or we’ll be irrelevant. Heck old Larry bought himself a trophy on the backs of those making desktop irrelevant.

Devil is in the Details

OK, so what does this talk really mean. We all know damn well we’ll be using our desktops to perform GIS analysis for years to come. Consuming data is what Google is talking about. Unlike Sun or Oracle, isn’t focused on content creation, but enabling people to discover and use it. The operative word is mining for data. Google is talking about the world (who most of the time is searching for information on their mobile devices) performing a search and then visualizing that information. Yep, you are thinking what I’m thinking, that is GIS in a nutshell, visualizing information. Content creation will still be performed on desktops around the world, but it will remain a niche marketplace. The “magic” we’ve been taking about will happen on mobile clients.

Cloud/Servers/SaaS

So right, ESRI is “cloud ready”. Everyone is either developing a cloud plan of action or executing it. We want to host our data with providers who scale as the need arises. We want to pay monthly (or hourly) for these services and not have those annoying maintenance agreements. But wait, where are we down Google’s path of mobile nirvana?

We’ve got some efforts into web visualization from Geocommons (who is probably at the forefront of web browser vizualization), but alas their client is flash based so it isn’t really designed for mobile apps. You can bet your last Amazon gift certificate that they’ve been working damn hard on one. ESRI has also moved into this space with two feed. Their Map a Map service is right up that Geocommons alley. I keep waiting for the the announcement that they’ll link Make a Map to their ArcGIS Online service and bam, ESRI users have a way to visualize their data online. But like Geocommons, their client is Flash (see a trend here) and isn’t usable on most mobile clients. Change is coming though. We’ll see their effort at the ESRI Developer Summit realized with their ArcGIS for iPhone API. Right to the front of the line goes ESRI with consuming geo-content on mobile devices.

Of course there are hundreds of others competing in this space. Cloudmade (I think this month they are mobile), SimpleGeo, Twitter (with their GeoAPI), and countless others.

Back to the Future

Yea so go about your business. Desktop Geo isn’t going anywhere. But clearly if you don’t provide mobile versions of your web apps you are going to be as irrelevant as every stupid MapGuide 6.5 Active X junk mapping site out there. All yawls standardizing on ESRI’s Flex API better be planning because Google is spot on, we’ll be visiting your website working with your data on our mobile devices. Good data not accessible on mobile is going to be devalued completely.

It’s dead Jim!

• Using Google Earth and GPS to Track Afghanistan Cash | Danger Room | Wired.com
  To avoid fraud, Afghanistan cash-for-work projects are documented locally using GPS-enabled cameras. (This will work as long as nobody decides to hack the EXIF data:-)
• Google warned by EU over Street View map photos - Yahoo! Finance
  EU privacy regulators tell Google it must first warn people when and where it will be taking Street View photos. Also, they want Google to keep the original unblurred images for just 6 months, vs. the current 1 year.

Comments (0)

Even old New York / Was once New Amsterdam / Why they changed it I can’t say / People just liked it better that way

- They Might Be Giants: “Istanbul (Not Constantinople)”

This map is doubly strange. It simultaneously depicts the wrong city, and under a previous name – the former error committed on purpose, the latter possibly unwittingly.

Dated 1672, this map by Frenchman Gérard Jollain purports to represent Nowel Amsterdam en Lamerique (New Amsterdam in America) – the inset top left even shows its position relative to other Dutch possessions such as Le Fort d’Orange (present-day Albany, NY) and Fort Nassau (now Gloucester City, NJ), surrounding Indian tribes like the Maquimanes, Capitanasses, Senecas and the Lacs des Iroquois peuples tres cruels (lakes of the Iroquois, very cruel people); and the neighbouring English colony of Massachusets (sic).

But the main map – one of the first bird’s eye views of a North American city – is not of New Amsterdam. This depiction of a hilly metropolis, densely packed with churches and palaces, bears no resemblance to the fledgling city then clinging to Manhattan’s southern tip. It is an almost identical copy of a popular map (1) of Lisbon, the Portuguese capital.

Was it the windmills (2) on the horizon of the original (shown at the bottom of this post) that gave Jollain the idea to transmogrify Old Lisbon into New Amsterdam? The street grid, buildings and topography are copied fairly exactly and in great detail; but however blatant the forgery is, Jollain took pains to infuse it with a Dutch atmosphere.

The ships bobbing on the Mer du Nort (Atlantic Ocean) in the foreground of the forged map are clearly of a different (and doubtlessly more appropriate) type than those on the Tagus, in front of Lisbon. Most city blocks are rendered in similar layouts, but the meticulously drawn individual houses are different.

The larger buildings are visually identical to the originals, but obviously serve a different purpose. Lisbon’s grand cathedral is New Amsterdam’s impressive Maison de Ville (City Hall). Lisbon’s Central Square becomes New Amsterdam’s Amirauté (Admiralty), the castle of São Jorge on one of Lisbon’s hilltops the Chateau de Nassau (Nassau Castle) (3).

Jollain embellishes the original with a few fantastic additions of his own. An unnamed castle on a distant Portuguese hilltop becomes the even more distant French fortress of Quebec. An empty hilltop left of the castle of São Jorge in Lisbon is occupied by a gallows in New Amsterdam, chillingly named La Iustice (Justice). A building at the foot of that hill is the location of het Tuchthuys cesta dire Maison de Dicipline, aussi en icele (?) sont renfermer des Faineans que lon fait trauailler (The prison, where lazy people are also imprisoned and made to work).

Other Dutch-sounding names sprinkeled throughout the city are Wageschot (to the left), ouestkir (Western Church [?]) and the Eglise ou Temple de Bikerque (Church or Temple of Bikerque). Further places named are Magazins des cuirs (leather warehouses), Le bureau des entrées (Customs House), Grand quay, Pelletrie (furriery), Place de la Bourse (Stock Exchange Plaza). The area to the right that is called Campus S. Clarae (St Claire’s Field) on the Lisbon map is unnamed on the New Amsterdam one, but bordered by a Hopital and a Magasin de Castors (warehouse of beaver [pelts]).

Why would a cartographer commit such a gross, and presumably easily traceable forgery? And who was this Gérard Jollain anyway? Not easily traceable himself, the rather obscure Monsieur Jollain (1641-1704) was a map seller and engraver, at some point in his career in the service of the French court, at another working in Cologne (where, one imagines, he picked up the Lisbon map). The reason for his forgery is unknown, but it is not unthinkable that he callously abused the relative ignorance of the times to present a French audience with a map of a city they had very little knowledge of. Dutch city views of New Amsterdam were in existence when Jollain produced his, but were possibly quite rare in France.

I do not know whether this forgery was a one-off, or if Jollain was in the habit of abusing his audience’s lack of access to the latest knowledge. The nomenclature of the map might illustrate how Jollain was beaten at his own game, though. He still calls the city New Amsterdam, and in the legend at the bottom of the map describes it as a Dutch colony. In fact, the city was taken over by the English in 1664 and renamed New York - eight years before he produced his remarkable forgery.

Many thanks to Francisco Feijó Delgado, who brought these maps to my attention. Quite aptly, Mr Delgado is Portuguese, and noticed that Jollain’s map of what he calls Nova Amesterdão “seemed strangely similar to our own city of Lisbon, pre-1755 [the year of the devastating earthquake].” His original entry on these maps here on his blog. Both taken from (and eminently zoomable at) the Norman B. Leventhal Map Center at the Boston Public Library (here for Old Lisbon, here for New Amsterdam).

——–

1 From the Civitates Orbis Terrarum, published by Braun & Hogenberg in Cologne in 1617.

2 Windmills, deemed iconic attributes of Dutchness (together with clogs and tulips) are quite common and typical elsewhere, also on the Iberian peninsula (Don Quixote famously fought them).

3 Please report any other concordances you might spot.

• Iran threatens airline ban over Arabian Gulf tag | Reuters
  "Iran has threatened to ban airlines from using its airspace if they refer to the waterway between Iran and Arab states as the "Arabian" instead of "Persian" Gulf." Admittedly a very creative way to censor. Let's hope India and China don't catch on. Most likely, the upshot would be no more in-flight mapping for affected flights.

Comments (0)

• Google LatLong: Google Earth now available for Android
  Google Earth for Android: Faster than iPhone, with bigger screen, voice commands and a road layer.

Comments (0)

All French towns of above a certain size, in any of the six corners of the country, have a Place de la République at their centre, and an Avenue Charles de Gaulle in its vicinity. Each of France’s départements is numbered alphabetically – that there are exactly 100 at present may be a coincidence, but there once was a plan to make them all perfectly rectangular (#159).

Two main trends have resulted from the rationalist vein coursing through France’s administrative politics since its revolution in 1789: towards homogeneity and centralization. The latter tendency, also called parisianism, obviously emanates from the republican capital so succulently portrayed in the previous post.

And yet, in some ways, France remains a very unhomogenised country. “These maps illustrate the perdurating cultural diversity of contemporary France, in spite of a long-time process of cultural unification,” writes Olivier, who sent in these maps from Tours (capital of département number 37, Indre-et-Loire).

Even though standard French has by now replaced most of France’s regional languages, that vanished linguistic diversity remains a good marker for cultural variation within France. The southern third of the republic was once the domain of a rival romance language, the so-called Langue d’Oc (or Occitan), so called after its word for ‘yes’ (oc). This area was (and is) more ‘mediterranean’ in outlook than the northern rest of France, where the Langue d’Oïl (i.e. French, or its dialects) was spoken.

To this binary view should be added the other, non-romance language areas of France, in the north (Flemish), east (German), south (Basque) and west (Breton). Another linguistically distinct region is the small area around Perpignan, where another romance language – Catalan – is spoken.

Each of these five maps, taken from the 1997 edition of Géographie Première, a schoolbook by Rémy Knafou, slices up metropolitan France in surprising ways, but also every time reflecting, in some way, the divisions described above.

Map [1] compares the household money spent on butter and oil; with most money spent on butter in the north and west (blue) and most spent on oil in the south (light orange).

Map [2] shows between 90 and 100 litres of beer per inhabitant imbibed in the north and east, with less than half of that in most of the country, but especially in the south. See the entry on Europe’s alcohol belts (#442) for a similar take on regional differences in alcohol consumption.

Map [3] reveals how many members pétanque clubs have per thousand inhabitants. The game was conceived in Provence, and its name derives from the Occitan pès tancats, meaning ‘anchored feet’. In keeping with its southern origin, it is 10 times more popular in the Occitan swathe across the south of France than in the north, northeast and northwest.

Map [5] charts the dominant roof type throughout much of the south (and, surprisingly, in the northeast): flat roofs with curved tiles.

Map [7] details the popularity of bicycle clubs. The sport of the Tour de France is most popular in Brittany, but also adjacent areas inland (darkest red), and quite popular throughout most of central and northern France (orangey red). The areas least likely to cycle are scattered throughout the north, northeast, east, southeast, and south.

Many thanks to Oliver for sending in these maps.

Over the last couple of years, my office has been working on using the Google Maps API to display the Missouri State University campus map. The map is used by campus faculty, staff, students, and visitors and includes buildings, parking and transit system information. Beginning this summer, we started work on incorporating live GPS tracking of our campus buses into the map. Both the idea and GPS application on the buses came from one of our computer science students who wanted more information on the campus transit system.

Using the Google Maps API v3, I was able to create a mobile version of our map for use on smartphones. After showing it to my users, one of the first responses I got was, "Are you going to make this available as an application?". After spending many hours developing a feature-rich mobile web version, the thought of investing a large amount of time to code the same experience on multiple platforms was overwhelming. Then I began thinking of the maintenance headaches; even simple changes, such as adding a new sets of icons for custom markers, would be time consuming. All of a sudden the idea sounded much less appealing. I'd spent all this time on the mobile web version of my map, why couldn't I just use that?

All Wrapped Up

So instead of writing the maps application using the SDK of each phone platform, I wrapped my v3 Maps API site into a WebView inside a stub application. Now all the work spent on the web version automatically applies to the "native" application and my users never even know the difference. The Google Maps API team have even provided some great reference articles for Android and iPhone which help get the process started.

Optimization

Response time in this type of application was a big concern both within an app and within the browser. I saw significant performance gains by using Closure-Compiler on my JavaScript, using the CSS sprite support in v3 for markers and following most of the suggestions in the Web Performance Best Practices document. To improve the user's initial loading experience I also pre-load the WebView with static HTML that contains a "Loading..." message and use JavaScript to redirect them to the actual map page.

Popularity

I was initially skeptical of the usefulness of such a project. The mobile version of the map offers users the same functionality that they can get by simply bookmarking the map in their browser. So I was very pleasantly surprised at the both the usage and publicity the application has garnered. Within the first two weeks, the iPhone application was downloaded 1,200 times and the Android application almost 200 times. Both applications are receiving very positive reviews.

We consider this project a huge success. Going forward it will now be a priority to make sure new features work well both on the desktop as well as on mobile devices wherever possible.

Posted by Chad Killingsworth, Assistant Director of Web & New Media, Missouri State University

“I have been seeing this image almost every day for years, but only a few days ago did I realize that it was actually a map,” writes Julien Nègre. It’s an ad for Boucherie Chevy, a butcher shop in the 14th arrondissement of Paris. The ad shows a slice of red meat which turns out also to be a map of Paris.

“The Eiffel Tower is of course the main point de repère to get your bearings, but if you look closely you’ll notice that the white piece of fat that runs across the red meat also follows the curve of the Seine River that runs across the city. The two small patches of red meat in the middle correspond to the Île de la Cité and the Île Saint-Louis. And even the parsley leaves on the right and left are vegetal representations of the Bois de Boulogne to the West and the Bois de Vincennes to the East.”

Image sent in by Mr Nègre.

• Bing To Use Flickr Photos, Live Video, But Google’s Got Goods, Too | Gizmodo Australia
  Remarkable what a difference a week makes: Before, uploading photos to my favorite photo site Flickr meant foregoing their publication on Google Maps and Bing Maps. Now, suddenly, they are popping up on both. Upload once, and see them published on multiple platforms, That's how it should be, of course.

Comments (0)

Hot on the heels of Google, Microsoft have released their tech preview of using Flickr photos with maps. Only using just Creative Commons photos, so feels a little more Opt-In.

More info here: Spatial Search: The Next Frontier

I think John Allspaw sums it up pretty well with …

“Fuck. Easily the coolest shit I have seen in a very long time.”

As did Aaron with “(this made my day)” …

This, is what geotagging photos is all about, it’s about having enough of them, millions and millions, so that they can be thrown through complex analysis, allowing them to be matched up, combined, calculated and computed into a geo-spatal context. It’s also about people sharing the world about them.

Start of mini rant

You’ll see that all these advances are made by Google and Microsoft, and in each case they’ve had to use the API (and thank fuck we have one!) to grab the photos, download them and process them.

Yahoo, who has direct access to all the photos and metadata, including extra EXIF data that you can’t get via the API, it’s just sitting there on the disks … isn’t … you may notice, producing any tech demos, or videos of its latest research.

I can’t even begin to say how frustrating this is, or at least was, I’m a little bit more over it now that I’m no longer working at Yahoo.

It is … there was … brickhouse … smart people, it … ah I can’t even find the words to fully explain it. Yahoo has let so many opportunities and good people slip through its fingers, that it makes me a little bit sick thinking about it.

So I’ll stop

End of mini rant

Anyway, great work Blaise and the rest of the team over at Microsoft. Thank you so much for doing what you’re doing.

Google have just updated their Street View to include Flickr Photos …

… you can see this in action here.

Flickr joins Panaramio and Picasa as a source of photos. Flickr has always had plenty of good quality geotagged photos, so this looks like a handy addition to the whole Street View thing. No word on how many Flickr photos they’ve used, or if it’s just for certain locations, but I’m sure there’ll be some official word at some point.

But wait, there’s more:

Flickr photos have also been crunched into google’s image brain …

… not only allowing for seamless picture-zooming between Flickr, Picasa & Panaramio photos, but it also means Google has a bit more understand of where a photo is and it’s context to the surrounding area than Flickr itself has. I guess this means they’ll make it onto the iPad version of GoogleMaps too.

Which is kinda neat.

Not quite sure how the copyright works out though. Traditionally image search results have shown thumbnails, which are fine as search results. Here fullsized images are being shown, and considering they must have been downloaded to be processed for the image-zoomy thing, they’re probably being served from Googles servers.

Haven’t sniffed the traffic while Flash loads them, so not sure yet.

Photos shown: seattle space needle #3 by lomokev & IMG_5811: Space Needle by ac4lt

(via Kellan)

From Working at Flickr to the new job at The Guardian … a not unsurprising transition.

I count myself as very lucky, to have been able to work on Flickr, something that has effected so many peoples lives, bend its code in unexpected and unusual ways and mainly work with <3 amazing people … and this is basically how it went …

“In addition to building, scaling, evolving, and generally being as loud and fast as we could possibly be with the original Ludicorp team, I had the absolute privilege to hire and work in the trenches with some of the greatest people on the web.” – John Allspaw

“It is difficult and sad to leave Flickr but I have no regrets. If you asked me whether I’d do it again and what I’d do differently I’d tell you that I’d do it again in a heartbeat and the only thing I’d change would be to try to do it harder and louder and faster than we already did.” – Aaron Straup Cope

It’s that, right there, the people, harder, louder, faster, and to quote another ex-flickr, if I may, George Oates, “I’ve been thinking about the design for my spaceship” oh wait, that’s not it … “Just Fucking Do It”, yeah that’s more like it.

So that was Flickr, and now I’m at The Guardian.

I would have written this “Hey I’ve got a new job at The Guardian” sooner, but then it involves the question of what I’m doing at The Guardian and it took a few weeks to figure that out, and you know, having a spare moment :) …

Take a look at Frequent Releases Reduce Risk, you can get through 154 slides surprisingly quickly fwiw. For those without the time to read it, it’s all about deploy many times, often and keep moving forwards. With that in mind …

• I work on the Internet == fast!
• I work at The Guardian == wtf, old lumbering media, so slow!

But wait …

The Guardian prints (at around 33.4mph) newspapers every single day (well except Sunday, kinda). Not only that but it updates with various editions, or patches if you will. I’ve listened to conversations about last minute changes taking place because a new picture comes in, or a source of a quote needs to be checked. Layouts get swapped in at the last moment and so on.

To me that seems pretty fast, it certainly feels fast. It’s somewhat not unlike Continuous Deployment; you make it, update it, push it out there and fix bugs/corrections as you need to. If anything the paper version is in some ways just a snapshot of the current state of news. Also I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone roll back a newspaper. Sometimes The Graudian makes mistakes, bugs get in there but there are community feedback mechanisms in place for that too.

There are other similarities between Flickr and The G, but I’ll save those for another post. For the moment I now know what the answer is to the “what are you doing at The Guardian?” …

… It’s to do it again, in a heartbeat, and the only thing I’d change would be to try to do it harder and louder and faster than we already did.

The every-so lovely NewspaperClub have just announced their prices for printing your very own paper. And this shouldn’t have to be said, but I will …

Printing your own Newspaper is very exciting.

People are already used to printing books and to an extent magazines, (Blurb, lulu and MagCloud as examples) but newspaper up to this point have been far trickier. Unless you wanted a run of a thousand or so; Newspaper presses are huge and fast (and print lots), digital ones still expensive and not that common.

And that’s what makes it a thrill when your newspapers arrive on the doorstep, like this …

Stuff I learnt

I was very lucky to be able to have a go at printing a Newspaper (again), so I took the opportunity to use various photos to try different things out. High contrast, stripes, gradients, solid blacks an so on, here’s an example double spread …

1. Blacks will have that Newspaper look to them, not solid black, there’ll be specks of white and grey in there, but not as bad as you may think if you were tempted to ask the question “How’s the black appear?” I didn’t notice any weak stripes though the printing, or other stuff you maybe worried about.
2. I used a couple of photos with subtle gradients in and didn’t expect them to come out as well as they did, basically if you have mid grays don’t worry about it too much, the print handles it well.
3. When you convert colour images to black and white punch the contrast up a bit.
4. Best advice came from Tom at NewspaperClub, blow the highlights out a bit (in a way you wouldn’t normally do). Because the paper isn’t white, your whites won’t be, well white. Everything from a very light grey to white will essentially look the same. So adjust your levels so there’s more white at the top-end i.e. drag your right hand marker down about 5-8%, if that makes sense (if it doesn’t don’t worry about it)

The only other thing I discovered was with the center spread …

When I designed the pages, each page had a margin around the edge. My settings …

Page size; 11.378 by 14.9606 inches, no bleed.
Margins; Top: 0.8661, Bottom: 0.9449, Inside: 0.5118, Outside: 0.6299, Gutter: 0.1667 (inches).

… which aren’t definitive or “The Correct” ones, just what I happened to used.

But because of the margins and the preview when I’d uploaded the PDF I assumed the center spread would have a margin down the middle. For that reason I cut out a strip of the center image, so they curves would appear correct, rather like looking out a window with two panes of glass in.

However, in this case the two sides were put flush together, and I didn’t need to cut a strip out of the middle … if you look closely at the picture you can see where the structure doesn’t match up under the dome, that’s totally down to me and not a printing error.

In short

If you’re printing photos, boost the contrast, tweak your levels a bit to give your top end more white, but don’t sweat it too much.

Have fun.

Ebb and Flow of Melbourne Trains by Flink Labs Originally uploaded by flinklabs

Because I was going to post about my new job, but got tired and found this instead.

“Inspired by several visualisations showing GPS tracks of planes, taxis, and people, we have produced a visualisation showing the ebb and flow of the trains in Melbourne over a weekday.

We geocoded all the train lines and converted the published train timetables from pdf for rendering using processing.

You can see an increase in trains during peak hours and a general steady state of trains during the day.

This visualisation was created and produced by Flink Labs www.flinklabs.com