Brady points out on O’Reilly Radar some of the new layers in GoogleEarth. Most interesting though is his recap of feedback from Flickr’s Dan Catt on why Google isn’t currently displaying Flickr photos (despite perhaps the obvious that (Flickr! < Yahoo!) != Google).

His claim is that they take their bounding box parameters in different order: bbox=x1,y1,x2,y2. vs. box=x1,y1,x2,y2. However, based on my research of the API's, they look comparable. For example, Google Earth's view based refresh will do a bounding box request:

longitude_west, latitude_south, longitude_east, latitude_north

and the Flickr photo search expects the following BBox:

minimum_longitude, minimum_latitude, maximum_longitude, maximum_latitude

You can see that minimum_longitude is the same parameter as longitude_west, and so on. So I’m not sure why Dan Catt uses that as his explanation that the parameters don’t line up.

However, as Brady points out, what would really help everyone is if the services all spoke common languages, like Flickr outputting KML, or GoogleEarth consuming GeoRSS (since Flickr can output GeoRSS). My money would be on the latter, since there seems less impetus for a company like Flickr/Yahoo to export their data in a proprietary format.

Of course, the translation between the two formats, especially for basic geometry such as points, is trivial, so implementing both on both sides, or simple conversion utilities in the middle, would be straight-forward.

Extra Credit

For extra credit, implement said conversion utility to convert KML <=> GeoRSS using XSLT, or other language of your choice.

There are also various other Flickr/GoogleEarth utilities out there like displaying grids of the # of Flickr images in GoogleEarth.

Pleasant Surprise

While researching parts of this post, I found a new Flickr API method that I didn’t know existed before:

flickr.photos.getWithGeoData - “Returns a list of your geo-tagged photos.” However, you can’t do a search within this set other than by date. But at least now you can pull up a trail of your travels based on your photos.

“Where were you on the night of the 13th?!”

In the past, when using my Feed URL to get geotagged photos, I just made sure that photos had a tag “geotagged” and then grabbed all the photos with that tag.

Check out my post on GeoRSS Metadata over at the GeoRSS blog. Looking for some feedback and ideas on how to use the featuretypetag and relationshiptag elements of a GeoRSS entry. We’d like to put something into GeoPress to support them, but need to know what users would expect and want to use to refer to locations and tag them.

Dan Catt (of Geobloggers fame - now at Yahoo) talks about 3 hidden (less known) features of Flickr Maps.

Specifically, he outlines how to get photos at a location by a simple url:
http://www.flickr.com/map/Detroit

Flickr outputs proper Microformats geo for latitude & longitude.

And you can get a GeoRSS feed (more on this soon).

With the rise of geographic-interest via map mashups, mobile location, and geotags, there is now a slew of sites rising up to start aggregating and collecting all the of the localized information and news.

PlaceBlogger is apparently just about to start. It’s an aggregation of localized blogs. Blogs with posts about specific locations, like the neighborhood or suburb rather than just a larger metro area - dubbed hyperlocal. You can see a mockup here. It’s like a Yahoo frontpage, but centered around neighborhoods or areas of interest. (via Susan Mernit

Another site is outside.in (read the announcement and some thoughts here) which is already released and has data. At first it wasn’t quite apparent how to start contributing to the site or marking up locations. They refer to the GMAP format, but I’m not sure what that really means.

All of these sites and tools are really exciting. This is the purpose behind tools I’ve been working on like GeoPress and Mapufacture. I hope these other local-news aggregators also use and support broader, open formats that we can all share and play along together.

Also check out LocoBlog, which is a mobile-phone blogging application and site as well.

National Geographic’s Digital Places has a new story about using GeoRSS: Disaster Prediction, Social Networking Boosted by Geo-Data Feeds.

In particular, it covers how GeoRSS can enable environment monitoring and notifications and is useful for more than (though in addition to) tracking your friends and travel photographs.

You should also see the NG article on Global Positioning Tech Inspires Do-It-Yourself Mapping Project, about OpenStreetMap.