I read a few news article about this new platform, the Yahoo Internet Location Platform, including Dan Katt's blog post but I didn't get it. Those articles, I think, are written for programmers, the folks who'll use the platform. Still, this is it's very cool and I think the rest of us should know what it does! And, frankly, I think too many people are too wrapped up in other platforms to see what's going on at Yahoo. I think Fire Eagle is killer, but I keep talking to people who don't know what it is. I don't want that to happen with YILP, so here's what this new platform is, as I (a non-programmer) understand it.

Yahoo has and uses a big database of location information. It's got points (places of interest), towns and cities, states, and countries in it. Each has an ID, called a WOEID (Where on Earth ID, Yahoo acquired WhereOnEarth a London company in 2005). Yahoo has opened up that database to the world complete with an API (application programming interface). That means programs can ask questions of and receives answers from this big database via a Web service.

Like what? Like:

Give me the WOEID of Boston, MA. (Why? Because maybe you to find pictures of Boston from Flickr. You'd use that value to ask Flickr for the pics.)
Give me the location of 2507854 (Where would you get that? you could get it from Fire Eagle!)
Give me the "next level up" (parent) geography for my point of interest, or in other words, in what city is the Eiffel Tower?
Give me the neighboring ZIP Codes to 12795711 (the WOEID of a ZIP Code).
Another cool one - the ability to ask for the name of a place in a specific language!

Many have already asked for a comparison to Geonames (a free online database with services built on it used by many location-based services to do some of these things). My sense is that Yahoo will tap into the wisdom of the masses to grow this database, just as Geonames does. And, since Yahoo's already aligned with OpenStreetMap, perhaps it can play well with Geonames? Could this database end up as the worlds single place coding database?

"You could say that the city is showing common sense in not trying to take a useless step."

Professor Ralph Stein, who tracks Homeland Security issues at Pace University, on New York City's decision not to blur images of the area in Google Maps. He made the comment in yet another Google Maps censorship story this time at WCBS-TV. In addition to this statement, the TV station provided another valuable statement:

"Google uses images from a state database, which is why Westchester was able to censor them. Yahoo! Images come from a private sector company."

Danny Sullivan at Search Engine Land details a paper from Cornell and Yahoo titled Spatial Variation in Search Engine Queries. The idea is to map the "centroid" of search queries. What's the center of the search for the Red Sox? Other teams? Pretty much what you'd expect. Other queries, such as about hurricanes change at the storm moves. Interesting, but how's it useful? I guess it could be used as another "context" valuable to determine the type of query of its not clear.

In what the Channel Times says is a unique move, the company will now offer the service in Hindi, Tamil, Kannada, Marathi, Gujarati, Telugu, Malayalam, Bengali and Punjabi. The article goes on to wonder if its worth the effort as the Indian population has limited Internet access and most people live in the cities. The offering includes many features including "key landmarks along the route (ATMs, hospitals, etc.), the walking direction."

No, I didn't get an invite, but Brady at O'Reilly did and he explains how it works and why you should care.