Are you ready for it?

Where2.0 starts in one week, with the free and avant-garde WhereCamp the weekend after. I think the team pulled together a great program that captures many of the new companies and concepts of the morphing Geographic space.

Unfortunately not everyone that deserves the opportunity to speak got a slot. There are also very few returning speakers - we want to hear from new innovators. The conference is single track - which means we’re all part of the same conversation, and talks are already limited to 5-15 minutes so it’s a whirlwind of energy and ideas. That’s why WhereCamp is the perfect venue to really engage and still share your ideas with a broader community.

Mikel, Steve, and I are giving a workshop essentially talking about Neogeography and integrating geo-data and services into your web applications.

Monday night I’m giving a 20-by-20 (20 slides, 20-seconds per slide) lightning talk at Ignite titled “Building Customized Slices of the GeoWeb”. I’ll be sure to share the slides (once I’ve actually made them)

And I also have a couple of other things in the works that will be released as well that I’ll be able to talk about soon. Overall it’s going to be a really exciting, and crazy week. I’m thrilled looking forward to the inspirations and conversations that will happen at the conferences.

Ryan Sarver shares the info on Twitter’s new location API. Looks really simple, and really nice.

curl -u USERNAME:PASSWORD -d location="Arlington, VA" http://twitter.com/account/update_location.json

You can even use GET, which means bookmarkable location settings (similar to FireEagle)

http://username:password@twitter.com/account/update_location.xml?location=Paris,+France

There has been a number of GeoTwitter clients and applications show up. And a lot of discussion on alternate picoformats for location markup.

By extracting this away to Twitter proper, it means any application can set this information how they want, and have it updated in the user’s profile. One thing that is lost is the ‘home’ location of that user as their profile potentially becomes very temporal.

FireEagle as the central store is a good option, however it is just one location store and Twitter’s location will no doubt serve as the centralized location store for a number of new applications. As more social or personal applications gain location storing and sharing support, there is a question of how synchronization between these services will easily happen.

I don’t want to have to set my location in multiple services. This is the same problem that troubles social bookmarking sites such as del.icio.us and magnolia. This may become especially problematic if there were automatic updating services that detected a change in FireEagle and then updated your Twitter location, and vice versa - which then updates FireEagle from Twitter. Perhaps causing an implosion of the GeoWeb.

A fan of “unconferences”, I made it to PodCampDC this weekend. The Pod in PodCamp is not specifically about podcasting, but in general was focused around “New”, or “Social” media (e.g. media casting, blogging, interactive media).

For a full recap of PodCampDC, being a media conference, there is a plethora of blog posts, photos, videos, and of course twitters.

The Un- of *Camps

Contrary to other *camps I’ve been too, PodCamp is more “face-forward” and less round-table discussion. The sessions and speakers were pre-arranged, and so had slide decks and specific messages they were conveying. The conference was still open in that there were open questions, and available rooms for new talks, but in general it had more of a traditional conference feel. I spoke with some at the conference about this, and they agreed and speculated on why PodCamp doesn’t exhibit the full un-conference style. Many of the speakers and attendees don’t have experience with unconferences, so may feel uncomfortable or unsure of how to act in that kind of setting - however, I think you can just have it happen and they can learn and the experienced ones can help mediate. I also have suspicions that not being Tech Central on the East Coast there is a general lack of prevalence of expecting everyone to be up on folksonomy, geotagging, twitter, and the like.

Expanded Insights

It’s great going to non-technical conferences. And not only that, but going to sessions that are outside my normal expertise or “things I do”. The reason I enjoy building things is addressing a variety of issues and users - and it is beneficial to understand broader concepts and use cases in order to build the right tools. In particular, I really enjoyed Whitney Hoffman’s “Education 2.0″ talk on using technology and interactive, new media for learning and cooperation between students, teachers, parents, and community. The talk was well attended by educators of all sorts, and I think very few “techies”, who were probably off learning details of lighting and sound capture. So when I spoke up to ask the question, “As a tool developer, what do you see is missing from the Education2.0 ecology” there was a flash of bright ideas and excited people.

Nii Simmonds also gave a great talk on Venture Capitalism and emerging markets in Africa. He specifically pointed to the Business Week article, Can Greed Save Africa, highlighting that businesses investing in, rather than giving to regions like Africa lead to better outcomes. I’m traveling this fall to South Africa for FOSS4G 2008 and hoping to also connect more into the African developer and entrepreneurial community.

Thanks to all the hard work that went into PodCampDC. It was terrific to become connected with members of the DC community.

Well, it’s official. And as reported here: “The whole process is anticipated to take less than a year.” 363 days later, that statement holds true.

There has been a meme floating around about the new “Geotag Icon” that was originally proposed here and now has an officious site: Geotag Icon Project

There has been a lot of dialog. Sean discusses a lot of his thoughts about semantic interoperability and formats. There has also been a number of discussions on the design itself - everything from the color, to the pushpin being indicative of points only - maybe reinforcing the “red dot fever” that plagues many maps.

These are really minor quibbles. Overall I think it’s a decent design that gives some simple meaning to what the icon conveys. However, the problem I do have is the Usage guidelines & examples. Essentially, they are saying it should be used for all geospatial formats.

Example from the site:

Bruce defends this:

Whereas the Geotag Icon describes a general concept (”This item is geotagged”) the KML icon and GeoRSS favicon each proclaim a file format. This is analogous to the Feed Icon: can you imagine having a different orange icon for each web feed format? There’s no reason why the Geotag Icon can’t sit side-by-side with file format icons if that’s what folk wish to do. But a well-recognized Geotag Icon (in time!) adjacent to the text description “Download KML file (opens in Google Earth)” could well be more informative to the majority users than what is otherwise sure to be a growing set of vaguely-related file format icons with which to become familiar. The power of de facto standard icons is in instant recognition—and the fewer the merrier!

I disagree, he’s proposing this one icon should be used for a multitude of different formats that each have different capabilities and uses. It’s not like the difference between RSS and Atom, it’s the difference between HTML and RSS or CSS. Or a Video and a Photo. Sure, they’re both images, but they’re also very different in what they do.

He’s creating additional confusion by using the Geotag icon for GeoRSS. GeoRSS isn’t even a file format, it’s an extension to another file format: RSS / Atom, and they already have a recognizable icon that has meaning to users. I wouldn’t want to put yet another icon in front of them that meant something slightly different. And KML is a visualization format, similar to HTML + CSS. GPX is a very specific format that works for handheld GPS units and PND’s. I’m surprised the Geotag Icon wasn’t proposed to be used for Geo and Adr Microformats, since it matches this formula of all things geo.

This is the follie of the greater GIS community - assuming something is primarily geo first, and general information second. I’m surprised this is idea is also followed by people outside the GIS world.

So I only ask that the Usage guidelines of the Geotag icon be scaled back. It’s interesting that it’s been incorporated into Minimap Sidebar - good idea, but perhaps again confusing application with format? Using it in a photograph or video is nice because it’s clear to me that the format is a video (and I don’t care if it’s mov, fla, et al.) and useful to be alerted that it has geocoded content inside. I also think it could be useful as a link to a page of Geospatial formats. Why not even use it like the Share this on… on the Geotag project page itself?

GPX icon is from Garmin’s Communicator Plugin. You could optionally replace the format names (like KML) with suggestion applications, but I find this a little to vendor specific. Don’t you dislike it when people say things like “I opened the Internet Explorer page…”?

I think this set of links is how I would do it in GeoPress. But don’t suggest that Geotag Icon become the over-arching marker for other formats that happen to contain geo-data. Otherwise, I’ll be suggesting a family of icons like Timetag, and Titletag.