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!

GeoPress, the WordPress plugin that makes it very easy to add location, maps, Microformats, GeoRSS, and KML to your blog, was has been neglected for awhile. Some very nice users have sent in bug reports and I’ve been working through these and update the v2.4beta to 2.4.1 today. You should be getting it from the WordPress Plugin repository. This way you get notified when new versions are available. If only WordPress had a simple mechanism for upgrading plugins without requiring downloading zip files and shell/FTP access.

Please let me know if you run into any issues. There had been numerous bugs in the beta - and I think most of these have been ironed out. I also updated the KML to use KML 2.2 and some simple atom links to your blog and post authors.

Also, the geopress_map function has some nice functionality for being embeddeable in Archive, Category, and Search pages. Right now the function signature is a little long, but if you want to have all your markers for a category or search show up in the map, you use the following in your template (assuming you want your map to be (200px high, 400px wide)

This will embed the map with unlimited (-1) locations from the category (unless you have lots of geo-posts in a single view). Check out my conference blog post archive.

There have been numerous requests for per-item and categorical styling. This shouldn’t be too hard to add. And also per-post zoom and map types. Also I will be updated GeoPress/MovableType to converge on the same feature-set.

Also - if you have any updates/patches/suggestions for GeoPress - chime in (and contribute code

Need to add hyperlocalization to your mashup/site/app? Users searching for “Pizza in Dogpatch” and your geocoder just falls over? Well, Urban Mapping pulled a some what surprising, and incredibly great move today and announced they are opening up the API to their neighborhood database.

If you haven’t heard before, Urban Mapping provides the data to most of the major mapping users on defining areas like “Little Italy”, or “Soho”. This includes Google, MapQuest, and others. By opening their API, third-party developers can now build this type of capability into their own applications. It’s something we’ll definitely be adding to Mapufacture very soon.

There are numerous other geocoders out there, not least of which is the excellent and open GeoNames. However, an API for looking up ambiguous, and changing local definitions of a neighborhood has been missing. UMI fills that by providing multiple mechanisms for finding and defining ‘hoods. For example, you can look up the neighborhoods at a location, by name, or even get the exonyms of a neighborhood, depending on the language. There are a number of other methods and demos available. Check out the very good
documentation that links to each of the demos and even includes code snippets in Ruby and PHP for how to call the API.

As Brady points out on O’Reilly Radar, the API is using SOAP, and not REST. The API was developed just as REST was “becoming all the rage”, but had various reasons for being SOAP based. Still, the code examples show how easy it is to use a SOAP library to create a simple wrapper around the API. [via Brian Suda]

Of course, I’m perhaps a little biased on the Urban Mapping demos and documentation - considering I helped developed them. Urban Mapping is a great company to work with and I’m really looking forward to their continued expansion of their data products and APIs.

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.

activeCollab is an easy to use, web based, open source collaboration and project management tool. It’s BaseCamp, but free of charge and open-source. And I actually possess all of my own data.

Setup took a whopping 10 minutes (including waiting for the DNS of the MySQL database to propagate, and adding some accounts). You can setup projects, add users, limit users to specific projects, and add clients. It even looks really great, which is entirely not-normal for an Open-Source project, which is usually very innovative/solid, but looks like old white toast.

I don’t think it supports the nice API’s and such that BaseCamp does, but it’s an actively developed project, so hopefully it shows up soon.