If you haven’t already heard, there are only a couple more days (Monday, March 24, 2008) to vote for the The NetSquared Mashup projects. NetSquared sponsors ‘mashups’ that promote and enable social change. This can apply to a very wide variety of projects, from awareness to funding aid. It’s incredibly easy to vote, and the top 20 voted projects of the 120+ submissions will go to the NetSquared conference in May to pitch their project for additional resources and also engage closer to the rest of the community.

When you register, you have to vote for at least 5 projects (to make sure people don’t just vote for their one personal favorite, but actually investigate other projects), and you can vote for up to 10 different projects.

I’ve personally been working with Alan Gutierrez of Think New Orleans on his incredible work in bringing awareness, and a stop to, the improper demolition of houses after Katrina. He is digitizing City Buiding permits, demolition plans, notifications, and incentive options to help citizens protect and rebuild their homes. He runs GIS coworking at Trinity church to educate local citizens on the use of GIS software for doing a lot of the heavy lifting - and we’ve been working with him to help bring all this together into the web to share and utilize by a broader community.

You can check out that project here: City of New Orleans: A Mashup for Citizen Monitoring of the Recovery

Another great project is Ushahidi: Mapping Reports of Post-Election Violence in Kenya - where they’ve built a preliminary site to accept user-contributed information on violence outbreaks.

The projects are addressing real world issues with real solutions - so far they have had success on their own and are making a difference. Independently the projects will still be successful and important and their success will only be improved upon by support of the NetSquared community.

It can be daunting to hunt through the rest of the projects. It reminds me of going through conference submissions - I would recommend going through topical areas such as “Health”, “Community Improvement”, “Arts”, etc. to make it easier to compare all the great ideas and potentials.

Remember, voting is only open until this Monday, March 24, 2008 - so please register and vote!

Chris Haller has recently released a very cool new localized news video site, iCommunity.tv. The site allows users to upload and geotag videos of their own news media around the world.

iCommunity.tv is a fore-runner in providing video media primarily centered around geography in addition to focusing on citizen journalism , and not just videos of crazy stunts and movies served up by other media sites. Users can create custom channels and collections based on their interests and locations.

They offer a GeoRSS feed and a KML feed of the postings - which means it works very well in your Mapufacture Maps. See the feed map. Now you can add the feed to any of your Mapufacture maps to get update when a new video shows up in your community (or area of interest, for example where your family lives or you’re going to take a vacation)

Lastly, under the hood, iCommunity.tv is built on top of the Drupal CMS platform and is an excellent example of the power behind building a GeoCMS. In the future, Chris possibly plans to offer the ability for users to aggregate their video blogs through the service to allow for easier posting.

iCommunity.TV is a service of eParticipation.com

I was intrigued by the concept of Location vs. Locality posed at EarthCode.com. Location is the latitude and longitude that mark a spot, or the address of a building. Locality is the ‘area’ that is local to you, and is much less defined: downtown Detroit, Northern Virginia, East Coast.

Locality also varies scope depending on what you’re talking about. Are you physically going to a restaurant? You probably are looking fairly close. Do you want an update on news? Then the larger metro area is more interesting. Weather? You’re looking at national regions (or local too, if you live near interesting geographical features).

But what do you call it?

To add to the concept, or confusion, is what people refer to these localities as. Is it: NoVA (’no-vah’), Northern Virginia, or just DC? And what would a tourist guide from Madagascar refer to it as?

Of course, English speakers are often have it a little easier because many locations have an English name - even if the location itself isn’t an English speaking location. Of course, this happens all of the time in other languages as well for English locations. But you probably recognize Roma is Rome, and España, is Spain. However, do you know where Vereinigte Staaten is? Or what about 中國 (Zhōngguó)?

We’re constantly referring to locations by names we’ve given them and not as they’re known by the people that live there. The term for giving a name for a location that isn’t used by the locals at that location is an exonym. This is what Wikipedia has to say on the subject:

An exonym is a name for a place that is not used within that place by the local inhabitants, or a name for a people or language, that is not used by the people or language to which it refers.

The name that a location is referred to by the locals is an endonym.

What is interesting looking at exonyms is that they are a marker of levels of foreign involvement in the region. As cities and areas became colonized or visited by outside people, they would typically be bequethed a name in the new language. Some of these names would just be used by the visitors, but in many cases, for long periods of time this exonym would be the official name of the city. For example, look at former Soviet states or India (Bhārata Gaṇarājya).

There was a lot of this in New Zealand as well, where the Pakeha (Europeans) would bestow English names to the large ports and coastal cities. But as you venture out of the cities and leave Auckland or Christchurch, you start passing Whangarei, Tonagariro, or Oamarau.

For a demonstration of some variations of the names in Europe, check out the Interactive Map of EUROPE and database of exonyms.

We can all just get along

Internationalization of applications has long been a difficult task and subject. It is made even more relevant as the internet, and websites, becomes widely available in many more countries. Users speaking their native languages will want to view maps of their localities, using the endonyms, localized names.

This will be especially important for projects like OpenStreetMap that seeks to create a global map, for the people. There are projects in many other, non-English speaking, countries that are doing similar projects for their own regions, and presumably in their own languages.

And excellent example is the Mumbai FreeMap that seeks to “develop an open-access spatial data infrastructure, and a set of simple tools and applications in localised in Indian languages, for knowledge transfer and participatory urban planning by communities and citizens in the Mumbai Metropolitan Region.”

How do you find all the names for a location? Flickr geocoding leverages people’s own terminology for location and maps it to a location. So a photo taken by an English speaker in Germany may be labelled: Germany, Munich. Whereas taken by a native German speaker may be labelled: Deutschland, München. Together, these tags describe the same location, but with the exonym and endonym.

So when developing web applications, in particular geographic services, keep in mind who your users will be and how they will use your tools. They may be locals and want to use their own names, or they may be visitors or virtual tourists and interested in learning more about the world outside their window.

Andri Snaer talks about how last night, all the lights were turned off in INSERT_ADDRESS. Then a famous astronomer talked about the night sky over the radio for people to enjoy the natural beauty of the cosmos.

I think this is a simply marvelous idea. I’ve been in several European cities when they’ve had “Car Free days”, most recently in Brussels during EuroOSCON. The idea is one day of the week that everyone will go car free, and enjoy the relative quiet and easy biking/strolling about town.

Overall, I am an idealistic technocrat. I really enjoy technology, gadgets, programming, etc. However, I also enjoy natural beauty and the environment as it is. I hope that towns here in the US start promoting these sorts of activities. I mean, what’s the worse that can happen, people actually think its a good idea and turn off their lights at night?

There is a CNet article: Congress targets social-networking sites, that lays out a current discussion on Congress wanting to push the requirement of websites retaining user data for 1-2 years. This is similar to what is required now for ISPs.

The article mentions that this could be as little as retaining the IP address for each user - which seems absurd, since users will likely be coming from many IP addresses (dynamic IPs, laptops, cafes, etc.), and go so far as storing identity, messages, websites visited, and any info available.

What constitutes a “social networking site”? Would a blog be required to track comments, visits to the blog and link that to the IP address? What happens to blogs that are up and gone in 6 months?

And these suggestions come under the guise of national security, but also protecting minors, and copyrighted material.

These are some very frightening prospects.