dougmccune.com » Blog Archive » Not Your Mamma’s Maps - a very slick app for browsing geospatial data. Their screencast shows input through a geoRSS feed, but I am guessing that will not be freely available. Via Mikel.
DeWitt Clinton » Blog Archive » Yelp search API - yesterday I decided I didn’t have the time to read through the whole Yelp spec and make my suggestions on how they be using OpenSearch. So naturally, DeWitt (independently) did exactly that.
High Earth Orbit » Blog Archive » OpenSearch Geo and Time extensions - I was working on something like this back when I was working on OpenSearch, but the industry and formats weren’t at the right stage. It’s great that the community is working on this now, there is so much potential. I like Andrew’s point “that is almost too easy.”
As always, DeWitt is involved. Here’s the latest draft.
I’m watching the State of the Union now. After rambling on about how America is great for a minute or so, his very first words were “on september 11…”. omg is about all I can say to that. one of his first sentences: “dictatorships harbour terrorists” - is that generally true?
I also likes how he points fingers at countries. “these guys are bad”, basically. argh, why do I even watch these anymore…
work seems to be keeping me rather busy
Yesterday I got around to fixing a several-month-old bug with my University of Waterloo search engine. Turns out the problem was Yahoo having changed their query parser. The query I was sending used to be
search terms (site:example.com OR site:example2.com OR ... site:exampleN.com)
however example.com wasn’t showing up on the results… the fix was adding a space before the ending parentheses.
search terms (site:example.com OR site:example2.com OR ... site:exampleN.com )
I wish Yahoo would publicly document all of their advanced search syntax, including the maximum query length.
I’ve been meaning to do another OpenSearch Update post. I’ve recently started adding some of these to del.icio.us. Noticing lots of non-English blog posts on OpenSearch lately, which is very cool. Today someone asked about including thumbnails. I’ve replied suggesting Media RSS but asking for consensus (although my email still needs to be moderated).
Lots of neat stuff in the mapping space lately. Thanks to Mikel Maron, Virtual Earth now has georss feeds.
So for years I’ve been largely ignoring the social networking websites. Or to be more accurate, reading up on them a lot, but not actually using them. Among other things, I don’t want to waste my time, nor provide a lot of my personal data to some walled garden. Regarding the latter, PeopleAggregator has been out for a while, and I hadn’t gotten around to congradulating Marc and Phillip. Anyhow, Facebook came to my school (this year I believe) and I’ve found that I’m actually using it. Not much, but more than I’ve ever used another similar site. Unlike the first generation of these websites, it actually has a point to it. I’m still resisting uploading photos to it (if I annotate those photos, am I ever going to be able to export that? highly unlikely) and I don’t like using it for messaging, because it won’t be searchable and integrated with my email or instant messaging services. Amusingly enough, I do think Facebook will actually succeed in making money. Hmn.. I guess I don’t have any major point to make here..
MapCruncher turns static images into tiles suitable for use with Microsoft Virtual Earth (Windows Live Local), and presumably other tile-based mapping applications too. Very neat and useful, the existing hacks I’d seen to handle this on Google’s map API were relatively poor. Via VE blog.
worldKit 3.0 released - congrats to Mikel. worldkit is one fantastic open source mapping api
Google Maps API - finally, and thank goodness. I haven’t looked at the API yet, hopefully it still leaves a place for Mikel’s fantastic worldKit. Via Google Blog.
Update later June 29: also today, the Yahoo! Maps Web Service. All because it’s the beginning of the Where 2.0 conference. I’m still not sure how I feel about the industry practice of launching things to coincide with conferences…
World Processor - incredible gallery of around 200 ‘globes’, each with a different geopolitical theme. Via The Map Room.
Ever singe people started hacking on Google maps (and since I’ve intended to when I get the time) I’ve been waiting for an official statement from Google. Well this isn’t exactly that, but it’s pretty close. Google Blog: Bird view.
this is exactly what I’m talking about. Well, thinking, anyway.