So, I’ll be making it to the Where 2.0 conference coming up in San Jose, CA, June 13-14. I’m super excited to meet a lot of people I’ve corresponded with, but haven’t had the chance to meet yet. The Where 2.0 program looks really good. Some developers are even offering various internal organs to go.

I agree with Matt Croydon’s take on the 5/15-minute presentation schedule. It seems very “lightning round”, but also a really good way to get lots of ideas out and then move the interesting discussion to the sideline and various nightly gatherings.

In particular, the Birds of a Feather (BoF) meetings should be great. There is a Microformats meeting to discuss the possible directions microformat. also hope to meet with some of the GeoRSS developers and bloggers.

I’ve even secured a place at the Google Geo Developers day on June 12 - so I should get a chance to show off my cool mashup projects. Not to mention discussing other possibilities of visualizing geo-specific driving simulations in GoogleEarth.

I think my biggest concern about attending is wanting to meet everyone and discuss all the current ideas and possibilities in location information & mapping.

Of course, to get to California, I’m heading out of Vienna early, by way of Detroit, then on to San Francisco. Yay lots of time on a plane. Here’s to hoping for flying on something nice like an Airbus 330.

So, I’ll be making it to the Where 2.0 conference coming up in San Jose, CA, June 13-14. I’m super excited to meet a lot of people I’ve corresponded with, but haven’t had the chance to meet yet. The Where 2.0 program looks really good. Some developers are even offering various internal organs to go.

I agree with Matt Croydon’s take on the 5/15-minute presentation schedule. It seems very “lightning round”, but also a really good way to get lots of ideas out and then move the interesting discussion to the sideline and various nightly gatherings.

In particular, the Birds of a Feather (BoF) meetings should be great. There is a Microformats meeting to discuss the possible directions microformat. also hope to meet with some of the GeoRSS developers and bloggers.

I’ve even secured a place at the Google Geo Developers day on June 12 - so I should get a chance to show off my cool mashup projects. Not to mention discussing other possibilities of visualizing geo-specific driving simulations in GoogleEarth.

I think my biggest concern about attending is wanting to meet everyone and discuss all the current ideas and possibilities in location information & mapping.

Of course, to get to California, I’m heading out of Vienna early, by way of Detroit, then on to San Francisco. Yay lots of time on a plane. Here’s to hoping for flying on something nice like an Airbus 330.

Technorati Tags: google, mapping, maps, where2.0

A couple of days ago I mentioned some Greasemonkey scripts I wrote. One of them, which I didn’t discuss, is particularly devious.

What happens when users have the ability to hijack sites and how they expect to be used? For example, there are scripts to provide mapping functionality within Flickr!, or to compare book prices on Amazon.com with other vendors.

MapThis! overrides the “Map This!” link that shows up in GMail when an address is detected. Instead of linking to just a plain-ol’ googlemap, the link is “hijacked” to provide routing directions from the user’s geolocated position (using HostIP) to the address in the email.

This is useful, for example, if a friend sends you the address of their house, or that cool roller-rink with disco ball that you’re meeting up at and you want to quickly get directions.

It also demonstrates how a user isn’t limited by the interface a site-designer supplied, allowing them to customize and use the site as they wan.

I’ve recently put together a web-application and am looking for beta testers. Instead of doing the super-private sign-up here and we’ll maybe let you in beta testing, I’m doing the “you came across/read this blog so may be interested in trying out a cool app” signup.

Think Calendar and Traveling.

If you’re interested, and actively use (or will start using) GoogleCalendar, or an iCal program like Appl iCal, Sunbird, AOL Calendar, et al. then drop me an email at: testing@highearthorbit.com and I’ll let you in on the info.

The idea is I want to test with a small number of “cutting edge” users before releasing it public. It’s easier to fix bugs and answer support requests that way.

I’ve been fairly quiet for the past couple of weeks. I’ve been focused on some projects, including entries to the MapQuest OpenAPI developers’ competition.

One of my entries, which may or may not actually be considered a “mashup”, is a Firefox GreaseMonkey script called GreaseRoute that creates map and route icons for an Microformat formatted adr or geo locations. These are often used in an hcard.

One of the cooler parts is that the extension automatically determines the location of the person viewing the page. Using the HostIP IP-to-Location database, the user’s location is automatically entered as the starting location. So when a user is viewing the webpage of, for example, a store or business, they can click the “route” link and get turn-by-turn directions to that location. No more copy & pasting street/city/state to a form or asking the person next to you “where are we?”

Microformats are a stepping stone on the way to the semantic web. They are a simple way to encode useful information for viewing and mining by users and other applications (ala mashups).

Example adr

The proper format of the adr is as follows:

<div class="adr">
 <div class="street-address">1517 N. Main St.</div>
 <div class="extended-address">Box 203</div>
 <span class="locality">Royal Oak</span>,
 <span class="region">MI</span>
 <span class="postal-code">48067</span>
 <div class="country-name">US</div>
</div>

which will then be displayed as:

Example geo

Instead of an address, one can instead just encode the latitude and longitude:

The Result

GreaseRoute has 2 version, the lite version and the embed version. The lite version displays a map and route icon next to the addresses found on the webpage:

The embed version displays a “route” link. When clicked, a pop-up map is displayed between the users location and the encoded address.

Give GreaseRoute a try and let me know what you think.

You can also go over to Userscripts.org, the GreaseMonkey script repository, and rate them and leave comments.

• UserScripts.org: GreaseRoute
• UserScripts.org: GreaseRouteEmbed
• UserScripts.org: MapThis!