Monday, June 22. 2009

Flickr's Location-based Image Gallery

Yahoo announced a new feature of its mobile Flickr page. Those using Android-based phones or iPhones can click a button to "find images taken nearby." Once the user gives permission to the page to determine location, images are found and displayed.

- Flickr Blog
via MocoNews

Friday, May 22. 2009

A few new datasets available from Yahoo

First off, the shapefiles built off the geotagged Flickr photos is now available for download. Second, you can get the WEO IDs database. Details. The are under different Creative Commons licenses.

The "data" in these have been available via API, but if you want them local for some reason, now's the time to download.

Thursday, May 21. 2009

Yahoo Placemaker: Location Parsing from Raw Text

The new service from Yahoo!, Placemaker will search through raw text (feeds, web pages, news, status updates ), pull out and disambiguate location references, counts them and provide WEOID (a Yahoo location ID). Then, one can programmatically "do something" with that information. Here's the blog post introducing it.

So, I'm sure someone is thinking..."oh, like MetaCarta." Yes and no. Yes, MetaCarta's tools do parse geographic locations - but they do it with natural language processing - so "ten miles north of Paris" can be turned into a correct location based on the context in France or Texas. I don't expect that from Yahoo's offering.

via @timoreilly

Thursday, May 14. 2009

Off Topic: How I Managed During the Google Outage

I knew it without checking Twitter; something was up with Google News this am. After confirming it was not my ISP I used another service. Yep, Yahoo News did the job just fine. Oh and GMail was down, but if anything really important was going on via e-mail - my colleagues would IM or another e-mail account or Twitter to reach me. No biggy. The cloud works for me...

Wednesday, April 22. 2009

Yahoo Layoffs; Could Yahoo Maps be Outsourced?

Yahoo reported less than stellar earnings: first-quarter profit fell 78 percent to $118 million (8 cents per share), though last years earnings were high due to investments in China. It also announced plans to layoff 5% of the workforce, about 675 people mostly product managers and engineers. Yahoo cut 1,000 jobs in January 2008, and 1,500 more last October.

I've been looking for what that might mean for Yahoo Maps. One thought, from Trip Chowdhry of Global Equities Research: Maps might be outsourced to another company. I'm not sure of the logic for such a move.

- San Francisco Chronicle

Friday, March 27. 2009

Cartifact "Raises the Bar" on Online Map Interfaces

The last we wrote about Cartifact was when the company made headlines as the cartographers for Yahoo's in-house version of Yahoo Maps.

Now, Cartifact Labs (the R&D arm of the company) lead Bruce Daniel points out a map space (his term; I'd call it a beta demo built on Google Maps) that among other things raises the bar on Internet map's look and feel. He notes these highlights:

1) custom cartographic platform leveraging power of online APIs
2) new implementation of tools– database search and display, detail bubble, lens, information display tray
3) raising the bar for online mapping design standards
4) extremely flexible architecture for various online map/data presentations
5) addressing the need to present geodata in an appealing and interactive exploratory way rather than a "dump" of unadorned data onto a map

My thoughts after a quick tour:

- This seems far more intuitive than some of the Flex apps I've seen lately (this demo does not use it; further the demo is optimized for Safari on the Mac and Firefox on the PC)
- The implementation of the lens (what we at Cadcorp called the Roamer in the desktop package) is terrific. I think the folks from Telemorphic had such a tool, but it's rarely found on the Web
- The "drawer-like" tools seemed far less jumpy than other implementations I've used. I tend to have them pop up and hide unexpectedly.
- If you are feeling like all Web maps look the same, this implementation will put a smile on your face.

Video below, if you are lazy, but I suggest you just go play with it!

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