Geotagging Bookmarks in Del.icio.us
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Matt Gillooly
Apr 11, 2008, 8:38:10 PM4/11/08
to Mashable City
Allan and I had a productive brainstorming session today, and came up
with a system for organizing Mashable City's source data. Your
feedback would be appreciated!
Ultimately, we want to bring all kinds of local data into structured,
query-able data stores, but to start, we'd like to build an index of
the URLs where this info already lives. For instance, we'd eventually
like to have the full menu, hours of operation, and reviews for 729
Hope Cafe directly accessible, but for now it would help just to have
a record that http://729hopecafe.com/ has info about something near
the latitude and longitude (41.846383, -71.396283).
Fortunately, we discovered that http://del.icio.us/ has support for
machine tags (seen also in Flickr), which can be used to store
latitude and longitude info, among other things. More info on this is
available at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geotagging#Geotagging_in_tag_based_systems
You can get the lat+lon coordinates for a street address at http://geocoder.us
Here's a screenshot of how I bookmarked 729hopecafe.com
http://img.skitch.com/20080412-kb2siijyt6by66qeywfxatr2ia.png
In addition to the latitude and longitude, I've tagged it
"mashablecity" to indictate that it's part of our project, "geotagged"
to indicate that it has geotags, and added some descriptive tags that
we can use later, for instance to include this info in a map mashup of
just the cafes in the area. Additionally, I've put the literal street
address into the bookmark's description field, which could also come
in very handy later.
If we follow this convention, then we'll be able to retrieve an
aggregate list of all our geotagged Mashable City URLs at
http://del.icio.us/tag/mashablecity+geotagged/. There's already a
tool that can render this URL as a map at http://worldkit.org/delicious/;
our map would be http://worldkit.org/delicious/tag/mashablecity+geotagged/.
(It's not very granular, but it's a free head start. We'll be hacking
up a better map soon.)
I'm planning to hack together a quick mashup to assist with the
geocoding and tagging workflows, but in the meanwhile, I don't think
the manual process is so bad.
So, that's where we are right now. I'm really excited that we're
starting to actually build a useful corpus of info, and it's only
going to get more exciting when we can start the phase of extracting
the meaning from each of these URLs. In the meantime: Any feedback?
Anything we forgot?
with a system for organizing Mashable City's source data. Your
feedback would be appreciated!
Ultimately, we want to bring all kinds of local data into structured,
query-able data stores, but to start, we'd like to build an index of
the URLs where this info already lives. For instance, we'd eventually
like to have the full menu, hours of operation, and reviews for 729
Hope Cafe directly accessible, but for now it would help just to have
a record that http://729hopecafe.com/ has info about something near
the latitude and longitude (41.846383, -71.396283).
Fortunately, we discovered that http://del.icio.us/ has support for
machine tags (seen also in Flickr), which can be used to store
latitude and longitude info, among other things. More info on this is
available at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geotagging#Geotagging_in_tag_based_systems
You can get the lat+lon coordinates for a street address at http://geocoder.us
Here's a screenshot of how I bookmarked 729hopecafe.com
http://img.skitch.com/20080412-kb2siijyt6by66qeywfxatr2ia.png
In addition to the latitude and longitude, I've tagged it
"mashablecity" to indictate that it's part of our project, "geotagged"
to indicate that it has geotags, and added some descriptive tags that
we can use later, for instance to include this info in a map mashup of
just the cafes in the area. Additionally, I've put the literal street
address into the bookmark's description field, which could also come
in very handy later.
If we follow this convention, then we'll be able to retrieve an
aggregate list of all our geotagged Mashable City URLs at
http://del.icio.us/tag/mashablecity+geotagged/. There's already a
tool that can render this URL as a map at http://worldkit.org/delicious/;
our map would be http://worldkit.org/delicious/tag/mashablecity+geotagged/.
(It's not very granular, but it's a free head start. We'll be hacking
up a better map soon.)
I'm planning to hack together a quick mashup to assist with the
geocoding and tagging workflows, but in the meanwhile, I don't think
the manual process is so bad.
So, that's where we are right now. I'm really excited that we're
starting to actually build a useful corpus of info, and it's only
going to get more exciting when we can start the phase of extracting
the meaning from each of these URLs. In the meantime: Any feedback?
Anything we forgot?
Matt Gillooly
Apr 12, 2008, 2:20:34 AM4/12/08
to Mashable City
I made a quick first pass on a couple tools tonight...
http://mashablecity.org/bookmarks.html is a viewer for all geocoded
bookmarks tagged with "mashablecity". There's a slight lag, but
anyone should be able to tag their bookmarks as outlined above and
have them show up on this map. It's very bare bones for the time
being.. suggestions for extensions welcome.
http://mashablecity.org/geotag.html is an interface for easily
geocoding your bookmarks. I haven't completely smoothed out the
del.icio.us integration, but I think it's already more usable than the
manual version outlined above. Just enter the street address you want
to geocode and your del.icio.us username, and submit the form. Any
location matches will appear on the map (usually just 1 shows up), and
you can click the tear drop to get a second button that confirms the
location and sends you to del.icio.us to finish entering the
bookmark's details. I intend to create a bookmarklet version of this
shortly, so that you can quickly bookmark whatever page you are
currently looking at, and even use any highlighted text as the address
to geocode. Again, any further suggestions are welcome.
Additionally, I'm planning to open source both of these... I'm
thinking of using Google Code to host the project, but I'm open to
alternatives.
http://mashablecity.org/bookmarks.html is a viewer for all geocoded
bookmarks tagged with "mashablecity". There's a slight lag, but
anyone should be able to tag their bookmarks as outlined above and
have them show up on this map. It's very bare bones for the time
being.. suggestions for extensions welcome.
http://mashablecity.org/geotag.html is an interface for easily
geocoding your bookmarks. I haven't completely smoothed out the
del.icio.us integration, but I think it's already more usable than the
manual version outlined above. Just enter the street address you want
to geocode and your del.icio.us username, and submit the form. Any
location matches will appear on the map (usually just 1 shows up), and
you can click the tear drop to get a second button that confirms the
location and sends you to del.icio.us to finish entering the
bookmark's details. I intend to create a bookmarklet version of this
shortly, so that you can quickly bookmark whatever page you are
currently looking at, and even use any highlighted text as the address
to geocode. Again, any further suggestions are welcome.
Additionally, I'm planning to open source both of these... I'm
thinking of using Google Code to host the project, but I'm open to
alternatives.
Allan T.
Apr 12, 2008, 10:54:03 AM4/12/08
to Mashable City
Matt, awesome ! Nice job. I coded Restaurant Oak, works great. A
couple things I noticed.
1. If I put my own bookmark on one of the mashablecity locations (e.g.
729 Hope Cafe, I bookmarked and added "wifi bakery coffee" as tags),
this bookmark is not shown or aggregated in the popup information
bubble.
2. (Probably related to the first). I bookmarked the RI Monthly review
of Oak as well. This does not show up. Assumably if I'd bookmarked the
review first, it would be what would show up as the default link in
the info balloon.
Excited to see this getting off the ground !
On Apr 12, 2:20 am, Matt Gillooly <matt.gillo...@gmail.com> wrote:
> I made a quick first pass on a couple tools tonight...
>
> http://mashablecity.org/bookmarks.htmlis a viewer for all geocoded
couple things I noticed.
1. If I put my own bookmark on one of the mashablecity locations (e.g.
729 Hope Cafe, I bookmarked and added "wifi bakery coffee" as tags),
this bookmark is not shown or aggregated in the popup information
bubble.
2. (Probably related to the first). I bookmarked the RI Monthly review
of Oak as well. This does not show up. Assumably if I'd bookmarked the
review first, it would be what would show up as the default link in
the info balloon.
Excited to see this getting off the ground !
On Apr 12, 2:20 am, Matt Gillooly <matt.gillo...@gmail.com> wrote:
> I made a quick first pass on a couple tools tonight...
>
> bookmarks tagged with "mashablecity". There's a slight lag, but
> anyone should be able to tag their bookmarks as outlined above and
> have them show up on this map. It's very bare bones for the time
> being.. suggestions for extensions welcome.
>
> http://mashablecity.org/geotag.htmlis an interface for easily
> anyone should be able to tag their bookmarks as outlined above and
> have them show up on this map. It's very bare bones for the time
> being.. suggestions for extensions welcome.
>
Matt Gillooly
Apr 15, 2008, 5:20:19 AM4/15/08
to Mashable City
Good catch, Allan. Currently, I don't handle location collisions at
all, so when multiple bookmarks have the same latitude and longitude,
their markers appear on top of each other. Whichever's on top is the
only one of the set that you can interact with.
To address this, I'm planning to implements a sidebar list of all
bookmarks, and I'm also looking into implementing some marker
clustering like the RI Nexus map has.
all, so when multiple bookmarks have the same latitude and longitude,
their markers appear on top of each other. Whichever's on top is the
only one of the set that you can interact with.
To address this, I'm planning to implements a sidebar list of all
bookmarks, and I'm also looking into implementing some marker
clustering like the RI Nexus map has.
Allan T.
Apr 22, 2008, 10:52:09 AM4/22/08
to Mashable City
I noticed that EveryBlock is implementing clustering, both in the size
of the "place bubble" on the map, indicating how many items are
related to the place, and in a "1 of x" approach in the info popup. We
shouldn't struggle too hard to solve this, since it is p-o-c and our
goal isn't to build the map, but get the data to be available...
of the "place bubble" on the map, indicating how many items are
related to the place, and in a "1 of x" approach in the info popup. We
shouldn't struggle too hard to solve this, since it is p-o-c and our
goal isn't to build the map, but get the data to be available...
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