Wednesday, February 11. 2009

Location Sharing from Google: Now in GMail

The Gmail Labs project was announced in Tuesday in a Google Blog. It's what you'd expect: if you turn it on it does its best to add your location to any e-mail you send. It uses IP by default, so it many not be accurate. A Google engineer suggests installing and using the location tools in Gears (Wi-Fi) which should yield a more accurate location. Steven Musil uses the term "placedropping" for those who like others to know from what "cool location" they are writing.

- via Webware

The Broadband Mapping Issue - and its Teachable Moment

If the stimulus bill's $35 million to map existing U.S. broadband sounds like a lot, read Saul Hansell's blog post at the New York Times. And the money will go to some other related efforts, too. (Frank at Very Spatial alluded to the situation this week in the podcast, so this will help clarify for those who were left scratching their heads.) The article also does a nice job highlighting some things I know I forget to mention when speaking about mapping the U.S.:

- It's not usually as simple as you'd think.
- Not everyone wants to help.
- It can be expensive.
- The resulting data may or may not fully public.
- Everyone has an angle.
- Maps and accountability go together and make some people nervous.

Update: Lessons from Mapping the Australian Fires

Update 2/11/09: ZDnet Australia explains the challenges faced in putting the map (and some others) together due to Crown Copyright of government data.

The search giant's search for data to plot fires on public lands — which are managed by the Victorian Department of Sustainability and Environment (DSE) — produced an entirely different result. With no public feed of the fires' location and an explicit denial of permission to access its own internal data, the engineers were ultimately unable to plot that data on the map as well.

The culprit, according to [Google Australia engineering director Alan] Noble: legally established Crown copyright provisions, which assign copyright over all government-produced information to the government and prevent its use without explicit consent. Crown copyright is well established in Commonwealth law, but runs contrary to data protection provisions in countries like the US, where data produced by government agencies is held to be in the public domain.

- ZDnet

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TomTom Takes the Next Step in Crowdsourcing for Data Updates

In a press release issued today Tele Atlas (part of TomTom) explained that its first dataset updated in part by data from user generated GPS tracks shared via its Map Share program has been released. Back in October the company announced the first dataset that took advantage of the options to mark errors in the data via Map Share such as incorrect street names or the wrong direction of traffic.

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