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.

Posted by Adena Schutzberg in Yahoo at 09:21 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0) |

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

Posted by Adena Schutzberg in Open Source, Yahoo at 06:00 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0) |

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

Posted by Adena Schutzberg in Google, Yahoo, LBS, Apple at 06:00 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0) |

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.

Posted by Adena Schutzberg in Yahoo at 06:23 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0) |

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

Posted by Adena Schutzberg in Yahoo at 06:17 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0) |

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...

Posted by Adena Schutzberg in Google, Yahoo at 12:43 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0) |