Tuesday, September 8. 2009

TechCrunch Explores Online Maps Response to Bay Bridge Closure

TechCrunch give Google the win - it rerouted and said why. Yahoo rerouted by didn't say why. Bing didn't by default know of the closure.

I live in Boston and the closure - and its extension - has been the on the national news all weekend. It also got lots of play on San Fran based Buzz Out Loud on Friday.

Tuesday, August 25. 2009

Microsoft's Popfly Shuts Down

Like much of the rest of the world I didn't realize the shutdown occurred yesterday. But I noticed today. I was reviewing next week's lesson for my students where I reference the customization power of both Yahoo Pipes and Microsoft's Popfly. That's where I found the notice that it was no longer available. A more complete explanation was made on July 16 on the Popfly blog.

Pipes and Popfly are visual development tools aimed, for the most part, at non-programmers.

I'm pleased Yahoo Pipes is still with us. But, the fact that Popfly never made it out of beta gives me pause. Why did Popfly not make it? More broadly, why are these very powerful visual modeling tools not more popular? I know that Safe's Workbench, the first one of these I ever saw, IS well used within its user base. (I even used it fairly effectively as a complete newbie at the FME User Conference.) I wonder about ESRI's ModelBuilder. I like to think it's used, but don't hear much about it or about people sharing models.

Are these types of metaphors just not that useful? Is there really no audience for programming between casual or heavy duty that would use such interfaces? Are they too complex to use?

Tuesday, August 4. 2009

Podcast: In the News - State Stimulus Sites and User Generated Corrections

This week two news items peaked our interest: Good Jobs First, a Washington research center, released a report giving mediocre grades to state websites that aim to be transparent about the distribution of federal stimulus dollars. One of the criteria considered? Maps. Second, is there a trend in local news related to sat nav? Is there a move away from "two techs capturing data" stories to how users can get involved with collection and update?

Monday, August 3. 2009

Impact of Yahoo/Microsoft Deal on Local Search?

This is not an area I follow, but Matt McGee at Search Engine Land dug into the possibilities. Among the questions: will/should Yahoo drop its own maps for Bing Maps?

Tuesday, July 7. 2009

A Yahoo Maps Sighting

Yahoo Maps doesn't get much press of late (and a recent Search Engine Land article suggests it won't get much more...unless it takes action). Still, it does pop up in odd places like a notification for parents to determine if their children (in Newburyport, MA) are eligible to take the bus to school for free.

Students entering sixth grade and younger and living outside a 2-mile distance as measured by Yahoo maps, are eligible for mandated free transportation.

Monday, July 6. 2009

Yahoo Placemaker Update: GeoMaker

Placemaker is a developer tool to take locations from unstructured text and pop them onto a map. With some time on his hands, London-based Yahoo developer Chris Heilmann, made it more accessible to non-programmers in GeoMaker, which debuted July 1 (when many in the U.S. were getting ready for a big holiday weekend). The resulting autogenerated comes in two forms - an embeddable map (you need a Map Developer key) or the data in the geo microformat.

Heilmann is looking for feedback and plans to release the code as open source in the future.

- Yahoo Developer Blog Post (includes video demo)

via TechCrunch