I've been playing with Google Maps a bit for a talk I'm giving on Monday. It's addictive stuff. But I'd like to be able to use alternate kinds of maps. E.g. plotting Samuel Pepys's diaries on a historical map of London, or points on a sonar map of the sea, or views of MMPORG maps. … Continue reading Open Mapping System? →

So you're sitting in a coffee shopping talking over an idea with a friend: how to get people to contribute quality metadata on all manner of topics. Kind of a semantic wikipedia but where the goal is data entry rather than essay writing. The basic concept is straight-forward: start from a basic fact such as … Continue reading It’s Like the Ultimate Lazy Web →

Some notes on a brief discussion I had with Geoff yesterday about tagging behaviour, in particular: what's the etiquette involved in shared bookmarking? Geoff has previously written about social bookmarking as telltale and the advantages of brain subscriptions. He'd also recently pointed me at a New Scientist article discussing research which shows that email forwarding … Continue reading Bookmarking Etiquette →

The only real hypertext system I've worked with is the web. I've obviously used hypertext help and documentation browsers, but I've never really done any development within a proper hypertext environment. I'm therefore always keen to see how richer hypertext linking capabilities can be built using web technologies. Bob DuCharme's linking blog is always a … Continue reading Abulafia Demo →

Came across DinnerBuzz after reading about it on You're It: Yummier and Yummier. OK, cool, this is somewhere I can collect my restaurant recommendations/reviews, perhaps more usefully than just tagged as Restaurant on del.icio.us. So I go to add a review of the Orient Cafe in Oxford, and what do I get: You've submitted a … Continue reading Dinnerbuzz →

Just came across this via Flickr ("Shiny New Toy"): Yahoo Search My Web 2.0 Beta. See also the obligatory product blog and developer APIs. Combines social networking and search to limit your search results based on trust metrics. I've not been able to get very far into the site yet to try it out. At … Continue reading My Web 2.0 →

In an attempt to put my various projects into the Public Domain, it seems that I've caused some confusion. All I want to do is the following: label my code as being in the Public Domain, but require that people at least acknowledge the fact that they're using something I wrote. I'd prefer it if … Continue reading IANAL →

Continuing yesterday's hack here's another stylesheet that converts RSS 1.0 annotated with geourl:latitude and geourl:longitude (e.g. geourl feeds) to the Google Maps format. I added a form you can use to generate links similar to this one which shows bloggers in my area. Looks like I can shout out the window to contact some of … Continue reading GeoURL to GoogleMaps →

I've been itching to have a play with hacking about with GoogleMaps for a while now, especially so once their coverage reached the UK. So as an exercise I thought I'd try gluing together Norm Walsh's Where In The World service and the myGmaps.com proxy. The former problems simple location based data such as where … Continue reading WITW Using GoogleMaps →