I discussed our efforts more in depth on the FortiusOne blog – especially about our entire culture of open sharing and collaboration in GeoCommons as well as supporting communities like OpenStreetMap and CrisisCommons.

Next week I will be in London and Swindon in the UK at the Socioculture knowledge workshop discussing our work in a more academically rigorous venue.

It’s been very enlightening so far. The best comparison we have made based on our experiences is that it is the density and working density of China, with hints of Kenya. There is such a vibrant buzz about daily life and activities, with a fervor for interaction, color, and food that permeates the entire social landscape.

You can follow along with the map of the trip.

This spring my conferences take me through nearly the entire gamut of possibilities in next generation mapping. This week I will be at the North Carolina GIS Conference in Raleigh talking about “Lessons Learned from Neogeography Applied to GIS.” We are finally beginning some very poweful conversations between traditional Geographers, GIS experts, technologist and developers in determing how best to utilize our respective strengths to produce better applications, services, and data. My presentation will address some of the common criticisms of Neogeography that are being addressed and in the process offer insights into the effects these solutions will have on the future of GIS.

Geo for non-geo’s

Two weeks later I’m speaking at DrupalCon with Jeff Miccolis, locally here in DC, on Drupal and the Geospatial Web. We will be discussing the specifics of geospatial data and services and Drupal modules and practices that are able to leverage these capabilities in CMS’s and portals.

The following week, March 13-17, I’m particularly excited about as I’m moderating a panel at SxSW Interactive titled “Neocartography: Web Usability and Design Evolved”. Designers, usability and interaction experts are utilizing more geospatial data and visualization in web applications and it’s important to consider the options, impacts, and potential future paths that they can help discover. More on this later.

Back into the lion’s den

A week after SxSW I am heading to Las Vegas for the American Association of Geographer’s Meeting. Last year Jesse Rouse shared that myself and my work was a particular topic of interest in the participatory GeoWeb session at the AAG meeting in Boston. So I’m very interested to partake in a couple of panels on neogeography and open-source geospatial software. In addition, I’ll be presenting at paper on OpenStreetMap and collaborative, participatory mapping.

And now for something completely different

A bit of a breather through April, where I’ll be speaking at JSConf here in DC on something not geospatial. JavaScript for vehicle simulation and immersive worlds, based on my work at Realtime Technologies working on SimCreator. There is a bevy of brilliant JavaScript innovators and leaders that are finally getting a chance to gather around what has become the most ubiquitous, but under-discussed, programming language.

In between those conferences there is also the triumverate of TransparencyCamp, Government2.0 Camp, and eDemocracy – obviously a very hot topic in the geospatial and broader technology worlds. It’s intriguing that there are 3 separate camps, all run by different groups with varying agendas and a chance to be the leaders in gathering people. Even *camps can have politicking.

I’m excited about all these chances to brainstorm with very brilliant people from a variety of domains. From GIS, to designers and open-source developers, Geographers, and goverati. Between the varied concepts, principles, and needs we can distill commonalities and collaborations. So please, check out my Dopplr profile and let me know if we can meet up at any of these conferences!

In terms of speed, I flew over 50,000 miles, and that doesn’t include the driving, trains, and other modes of transit – China, Kenya, South Africa, UK, and Italy. And home was an interesting concept, as I moved houses 5 times in 2008.

Beyond simple logistics, I was a part of some great events: CIFoo and FooCamp both revolved around similar concepts of the future of humans in technology, I shared my thoughts on neogeography, neocartography and traditional GIS at Where2.0, Stanford, FOSS4G, Future of Web Apps, and applied these concepts in helping with Twitter Vote Report. I captured these trends in an O’Reilly Radar Report that reminded me how hard it is to convey what is in your brain to linear sheets of paper with graphics.

I was also very fortunate to help with mapping of community and growth in New Orleans. The experiences learned from working with people – from Louisiana to Nairobi, food in Mozambique to food in urban gardens – are each amazing and informative in catalyzing the evolving set of capabilities and techniques.

Obviously a big event of 2008 was the company and technology that Mikel and I built, Mapufacture, joining with FortiusOne, which is shaping what 2009 will look like.

And most importantly, I had a great time – and met many new friends. Thank you for a great 2008.

I had a house…

Of course, for proper introduction to Kenya, my college friend Kate took us on a day hike up through the Ngong Hills – famous by a land-owner, Karen Blixen, and the setting of the book and movie “Out of Africa”. The real introduction came with the alert that you must register your hike at the Kenyan Wildlife Services office and hire an armed escort. In the past there had been various violent incidents, though this has dramatically decreased due to such efforts as more patrols, gates, and armed escorts. Despite the camouflage uniform and automatic rifle, our escort Michael was a terrific guide. He walks the hills several times a week and is very familiar, as are most local Kenyans, with the landscape, various towns and villages, flora and fauna.

Cradle of Civilization

Kate is based in Nairobi as part of her doctoral research on the pastoral farmers of eastern Africa – primarily northern Kenya. While here she is working with a number of researchers and attachés that are going a number of activities in the field on surveys as parts of larger teams in remote villages and areas, cataloging artifacts in the lab, collaborating with researches in the museum and around the world, and then deploying back to the field each season.

The more we spoke with them, and their current use of GPS and some GIS tools, it was apparent that there were some straight-forward suggestions of tools and techniques that they could employ to make better use of their data collection and meet their needs while also reducing their overhead costs of data and software licenses and meeting their objectives. A couple of evening chats over Tusker beers and nyama choma turned into a concept for a talk. So we met with the directors of the British Institute and Archaeology departments and proposed a seminar for the researchers and staff.

The result was that this morning we gave a presentation to a number of staff on the use of free, open and easy to use mapping tools for visualization, communication, and collaboration. For example, using APRS (such as the Garmin 520HCx) to do in the field location sharing, GPSBabel to store GPS tracks to KML, Google Earth for visualization and annotation, EditGrid and GeoCommons Finder! for online data sharing and visualization in Maker! (coming soon). In addition, we briefly talked about the use of Wikis, Content Management Systems, and Blogs to make it easy for researchers to publish work progress and information.

Another interesting discussion was around the lack of available road and infrastructure data of small villages along Lake Turkana and east Africa in general. Major providers such as NAVTEQ, and even Google have some data in major regions, but not very useful for the staff heading to remote areas. One project is the history and culture of Somalian banditry that now resides in northern Kenya. There is some data available in larger villages, but the smaller villages are not even on the map, let alone with any infrastructure data.

United Response

Another unexpected outcome of our trip to Nairobi was some great meetings with various individuals throughout many UN agencies. On arrival to Nairobi we were pleasantly surprised by the near complete mapping of the city in OpenStreetMap. A quick inspection of the metadata showed that the majority of the data came from a single person working at UNICEF that used Yahoo! satellite imagery to trace the city. We immediately exported this to our GPS units so we could have a detailed map on our excursions.

In addition to meeting with Bo from UNICEF, we also had in-depth presentation and discussions at the UNHCR-Somalia offices with the SIMaC – Somalia Interagency Mapping and Coordination. These are a group of cross-agency people that work together in data sharing, cooperation, tools, and discussions. They are faced with problems that we’ve heard repeatedly from other UN agencies about the difficulties in data sharing with regards to availability, access, and control.

We are still working through the specific outputs, but the overall interest and desire to help was very encouraging. Offers of data and hosting services. One potentially difficult issue is the provenance of some of the data. As many emergency and humanitarian response organizations may be familiar with, issues like copyright are pushed to the back in priorities. Responders tend to use whatever data it is they can get to achieve their goals. The result is that their built up datasets aren’t clear of IP and copyright. Hopefully, they can be pulled apart so that appropriate data can make it’s way into open data repositories and be more easily shared and updated.

Top-Down and Bottom-Up

Between the various discussions at the National Museum and the UN, there were two emergent patterns of innovation and coordination.

At research organizations like the British Institute and Museum, researchers and staff are very busy working on their specific topics, seeking funding, publishing, and getting back to the field. They have a need for collaboration and visualization but are typically just using the typical tools, banging their heads into walls and then moving onto the next issue. The higher-level coordinators are more interested in ways to store and share data between projects within a department, across an institution, increase external visibility, and capture knowledge on turn-over. They are looking at various options, what fits in timeframes and budgets, and then instituting pilot projects.

By contrast, larger bureaucracies like the United Nations are driven by workers and staff to innovate within their own groups and on specific problems. They develop and pull together configurable solutions, get buy-in across organizations but at a “low-level”. Eventually, these working solutions start bubbling up the organization chart based on successes and efficiency. Eventually, upper-level coordinators become interested and seek to institutionalize and mandate the use such tools. The unfortunate effect can be stagnation and over-weighting what was a loosely-coupled and straight-forward solution.

Somewhere in between these two methodologies there is a true solution. In reality, there has to be acceptance, encouragement, and flexibility from all parties. Implementors (staff, researchers, workers) need to be looking at various tools, building them into their workflow, and feeding use-case scenarios. Coordinators need to be aware of what their teams need, as well as the organization, and what successes can be easily, and without reorganization, be carried to other groups to organically build an organization wide set of solutions.

Asante sana

The entire week in Nairobi was very encouraging. There are endemic problems that afflict the country: government corruption, lack of quality infrastructure, and on the technical side, slow and unreliable internet bandwidth. However, almost across the board Kenyans are incredibly welcoming. I’ve never shaken hands with so many people combined with true smiles, kind words, and a ingrained feeling of camaraderie.

Our last night in town we went to dinner with a number of the team that are volunteering with Ushahidi. This was definitely the incredible cap that verified my optimism. The group were incredibly involved in a number of cutting edge technical tools and concepts. We met with a GeoDjango users doing vehicle tracking over APRS, an iPhone developer pushing mobile mapping interfaces, PHP framework builders, and a female civil engineer doing a wide range of infrastructure design and development (a interest of mine based on Corrie’s experiences). Thanks Laban, Jason, Brian, Mworia, and James.

And one last note – I encourage and enjoyable ride on a matatu, but make sure to wear your seatbelt! (and maybe bring some earplugs)

What will be really exciting about this succession of talks is that each will build on the next. Starting at an OGC meeting on OpenSearch-Geo and related community geosearch standards, carrying that to the Web2.0 Expo to talk about similar trends in technology and application as it affects businesses and developers – then to Africa to do on the ground workshops and talks on free and open data and code, and finally up to London to take the lessons learned about users in communities around the world and how the next generation of web applications need to be built to meet the needs and goals of people and not just serve a technology.

I know I’ll be continually working on slides and material the entire voyage.

If you’re around these cities and these times, I’d love to hear from you and get together. Mikel and I are putting up our schedule and notes on the OpenStreetMap wiki. Make sure and bring your GPS (or borrow one of ours)!

• OGC Geospatial Search Summit
  Atlanta, GA September 15, 2008
• Web2.0Expo NYC
  talk: Trends and Technologies in Where 2.0 – New York City, NY
  September 16-19, 2008
• Mapping & Community Workshops
  Nairobi, Kenya
  September 22-24, 2008
• FOSS4G 2008
  talk: Rebuilding a City through Community Participation, Neogeography and GIS – Cape Town, South Africa
  September 29-October 3, 2008
• Tech4Africa
  Johannesburg, South Africa
  October 3-4, 2008
• Mapping with Youth Assets
  Mbabane, Swaziland
  October 5-7, 2008
• Future of Web Apps
  talk Beyond Google Maps London, UK
  October 8-10, 2008

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Draft Magazine has an article in this month’s issue, “The Beer Drinker’s Layover” that outlines the microbrew selection in restaurants at various airports around the US. Many of the airports feature local breweries and selections on tap, increasing the attraction and local feel of an airport to it’s environs.

The sad part is at the top of their list of Airports to Avoid is Detroit Metropolitan Airport (DTW). Michigan has a large, varied, and tasty selection of microbrews. There are over 53 brewpubs and microbreweries in the state, and 18 in the immediate airport vicinity. It’s a shame that no restaurants in the regional airport highlight this selection by offering it on tap. You can, however vist the “Guinness Pub”, “Grey Goose Martini Bar”, or “Jose Cuervo Tequileria”. Not quite local selections.

While I don’t live in Michigan anymore, I do tend to fly through DTW quite a bit and would definitely welcome being greeted with my local favorites. Something like an Huxell Best Bitter from Arbor Brewing Company in Ann Arbor , French River Red Ale from Lily’s Seafood in Royal Oak ,or the very unique and well named Kentucky Breakfast Bourbon Aged Stout from Founders Brewing Company in Grand Rapids .

Note: the breweries above are marked up with hCards – however, not aware if there is an hBeer (perhaps hProduct?) markup.

The Magazine

If you haven’t seen it before, Draft is a bi-monthly magazine that covers the dramatically increasing micro- and local-beer scene and business. It’s kind of the Conde Nast Traveler for beer. What was most surprising was that I discovered at my family’s house addressed to my younger sister. I’m quite envious indeed.

As part of some continuing work with clients and heading to the OGC Technical Committee meeting to wrap up the OGC Web Services KML initiative (OWS-5 Agile Geography) – taking a very quick trip to Ann Arbor (2 days) and St. Louis for 3 days.

Stopping in Ann Arbor was really great. It’s the first city I’ve lived in long term that wasn’t attached to my attending school. When visiting my other alma maters I am primarily faced with nostalgia, but disconnect since all my acquaintances were transient like me and I know few people remaining in the town.

Ann Arbor, however, is like coming home. By contrast to my previous residences, as I wrote before I was fortunate to connect into a great community that is thriving here. Within an hour of sitting in a coffee shop I serendipitously connect with two great people – and had meetings, coffee, or hop tastings with many others. It’s great to be able to so quickly feel comfortable when traveling. I’ve understood one of the primary reasons of chains like Starbucks or Subway is to be familiar to travelers as they find themselves in otherwise unknown locales.

One goal of local search of user-generated is to give outsiders a view into the local life. However, they haven’t yet been able to breach the feeling of familiarity and reward that comes with visiting an old favorite restaurant or brew.

While our plans are still undecided for the future – it’s a great comfort to know I can stop into a great town like Ann Arbor and feel so welcome.

The common piece of information cited by people when talking about China is the sheer number of people. This is a fact and well covered. What isn’t easily conveyed is the affect the density and volume of this number of people has on the behaviors, mentality, and lives of the citizens of China. This is a country where there really are a hundred people behind you ready to take your job, or even several of them to do your one job. Individuals have to be tenacious and you have to get what you want. And this isn’t in a malicious or bad way. I wonder if it’s almost necessary for such a dense population to function.

It’s an organized chaos. The streets are very similar to what a westerner would expect, however there are probably 2-4 times as many vehicles and pedestrians on this street. That means that drivers abiding lanes, waiting to turn, and semblence of nominal laws would completely clog the system. Instead, vehicles are really only restricted by the curbs (mostly) and not hitting one another. In fact, in 3 weeks I didn’t see a single accident, which I found amazing. Crossing the road is like playing a game of Frogger, except that you’re the frog.

The pollution also has a deep impact on the populace. I didn’t have trouble breathing, but that was a common complaint by others. Instead, I felt pangs of light deficiency. For 3 weeks we never had a clear view of the horizon. Looking up the sky would be poking through with blue, and the sun would be a bright, but very discernable, disk – signaling a “clear” day. However, even flying over areas of the country there was rarely a break in the smog to see the landscape. This is also attributable to the extremely dry weather they’ve had that would otherwise “wash” the air. An obvious demonstration of why they’re working hard on making rain before the Olympics this summer.

Going out the the country-side was an amazing trip. 10 minutes on a bicycle and you go from “small town” of 600,000 people to farmlands and rice-fields bordering the beautiful Yulong river. You can walk through villages that probably haven’t changed in hundreds of years, except perhaps to get television. There are landmarks scattered around that would be entire theme parks in the United States, but in China served their original purposes to the local people today. The Dragon Bridge from 1400 AD that is still the only crossing for miles – or the Tang wall that guarded against armies about 1500 years ago and now just serves to separate some fields.

Hello, Bamboo?

I didn’t know what the term “hawking” really meant, and felt like, until I came to China. Combine the large population of available, cheap, workers, with the acquired knowledge and capability to manufacture, and people in cities looking for jobs and money, and you have an insanely overwhelming market of goods available at every corner. You’re constantly bombarded with shop owners, stalls, men on the street luring you into tailors, bags, and whatnot to sell. From these people you are a walking wallet and our favorite phrase became “Bu yao!” (don’t want)

Imagine if email spam were people. That is what it is like. At one market I was looking at a pair of shoes, but decided that though the price was right (approx. $4) I didn’t really like them. As I turned to walk away there were 8 other vendors behind me holding out either the exact same shoe for 1/2 the price, or a comparable shoe. If you show the slightest interest in something, it immediately turns into a bargaining game. They may even cry, throw a tantrum, complain that they are going out of business – but you can expect to pay 1/10th (yes, 10%) of what the original price was. They’ll seem incredibly hurt, but when you hand over the money, they immediately smile again and ask “do you want some scrolls?”

The pervasiveness of the market was succinctly demonstrated as I was biking along the Yulong river. The popular thing to do along the river is to hire a bamboo boat and a local to pole you up and down the river. Being the winter, tourist low season, there were swarms of boat owners and locals trying to sell a boat ride. They know they can get your attention by saying “Hello!” very clearly and then whatever it is they are selling.

So when leaving the village I rode past a small group of childen who were laughing and skipping past me, and upon seeing me shouted “Hello! Bamboo?” and then continuing to run and skip along down the next street – the phrase perfectly mimicking their parents offers of a ride, but in this case it was the only english words these children knew and to them it was a common greeting. (though I imagine their parents had very clearly explained about us westerners)

When in 中国…

Corrie and I took some mandarin classes and plastered various bits of our apartment with signs denoting the Mandarin (and Pinyin for pronunciation) words for the items or ideas. I think knowing a little bit of mandarin made a big difference on our trip. In the cities, you can pass with English, especially cities like Beijing that are recommending 400 words and phrases that every cab driver should know for preparing for Olympic tourists – but even then English isn’t strong or prevalent. China, I imagine, has the same problem that American’s do – it’s such a big country that there rarely is an opportunity to practice a foreign language. So while you may learn English in school for years, they will probably not have ever, or not often, spoken with a native English speaker. There were many times that our Mandarin was as good or better than the English of the person we were talking with.

Also, knowing some Mandarin just made the entire experience a lot more fun. Our pronunciation definitely needs a lot of work, but the people were typically very understanding, and were excited that we knew and spoke some of the language. My vocabulary doubled in the 3 weeks I was there and we’re definitely planning on maintaing and extending our knowledge of the language. Just need to find a local culture group.

China is a country that is outgrowing itself and trying to figure out how to live in a modern world. They produce 3-million engineers a year (compared to the US’s 100,000 engineers a year) but it’s a commonly accepted fact that the currently common Confucian style learning system promotes memorization over analysis and interpretation, so the workforce typically lacks ingenuity. There are more people than jobs, and businesses are required to hire a number of employees based on the square footage of their buildings. This leads to idle workers who have little more responsibility than greeting or looking busy.

I’m looking forward to more trips to China – I will have to increase my Mandarin skills so not to get teased by my pronunciations. Thanks to my old friend Sam (and to Facebook for letting me know that she lived where I was traveling to) for 3 days of “local life” in Nanjing. I passed on the turtle soup and duck brains.

Mapufacture Map of my trip

Using GeoPress, I can add locations through the web interface, but I’ve also added in-body location tagging, such as including GEOPRESS_LOCATION or geo:lat= and geo:lon= to set the location. This makes it easy for me to use an offline editor like Ecto, or even Wordpress’ email a post capability to easily post to my blog without necessarily having to login and use the web interface. I was hoping to have an N810, complete with built-in GPS, to take along, but unfortunately the developer discount codes aren’t working yet, so I was stuck with my N800 and an old iBook.

It’s getting easier to create a travelog enroute by utilizing a number of tools and then aggregate these together. Another great example is the BBC’s Bangladesh River Boat trip that uploaded GPS tracks, photos, twitters. For some reason, the potentially very useful Plazes doesn’t really fit into my workflow and I don’t find it very easy to update my locations quickly. Perhaps I need to investigate the API and make a simple offline widget for building up a set of travelled locations that can sync when I get back online.

More thoughts on China and travel soon.

Tags: travel, china, stream, lifestreaming, twitter, flickr, tumblelog, geopress, geoblogging, geotagging, posting

After much traipsing about the world, I finally made it back from the wonderful, wild world of New Zealand.

Let me state first, and foremost, you must go. There is little doubt why Lord of the Rings was filmed there. The landscape is simply stunning, the people are friendly, the native Maori culture is engaging, I have a new appreciation and fascination with birds (yay Weka!), and the beers are amenable when you can find a brewpub (the wines are already well known).

Some Advice for the Traveler

A couple of bits of advice: go a little off-season, like March. “High Season” isn’t Disney{land, world}, but it’s still a little more difficult to find some accommodations/reservations. Apparently March is an excellent time: still warm, calm weather, and the baby seal pups are just becoming curious and exploratory and are fun to play with.

Rent a camper-van, one of those mini-van conversions with a bed and little cook area. This will allow you to camp besides streams, in the mountains, picnic with astonishing views, but still allow you to navigate the roadways and stay in better accommodations every once in awhile.

Prepare thyself for some exciting driving. The roads are almost all two-lane, incredibly windy (think looking over a cliff less than a foot away), narrow, and on the wrong-damn-side. And that’s just the highways (because they’re paved). But everything is very well labeled/signed, but take along a GPS-system too, just to make sure you’re going the right way.

Don’t eat Vegemite – it’s something that was made in times of dire need, which we don’t live in, so don’t eat it. Munch on something like cute cuddly lamb instead for goodness sake.

But what did you do?

All said, we drove more than 2700 miles through (deep-breath): Auckland, Waitakere Ranges, Nikau Caves, Whangarei, Matopeka, Russel, Kauri Forests, Poor Knights Island, Rotorua, Taupo, Tongariro National Park, Wellington, Picton, Renwick, Nelson, Motueka, Abel Tasman National Park, Hokitika, Fox Glacier, Te Anau, Milford Sound, Invercargill, the Caitlins, Dunedin, Oamaru, and Christchurch.

The great part about driving around a country like New Zealand is the ability to stop and enjoy the view or tramp through the woods whenever the fancy strikes you. For us, this was quite often. As a rule of thumb we added 20% travel time during any of our trips for these stops.

On the road IT

Each night I spent probably about 30 minutes dealing with “data management” – downloading GPS tracks, pictures, annotating, journal entry. There really must be a better way to manage this much data, especially en route, but also not be overwhelmed with it on return. I’ve found that internet access on travel is unreliable. Even when it is available it can be expensive, and restricted to a kiosk-type machine without any ability to upload your own data through them.

The photos are available on my Flickr page. I still need to go through an geotag them, as I was having problems geotagging the EXIF of RAW images using some of the automation techniques. I’ve also put up a blog of the travels in the GeoPress demo blog at http://location.highearthorbit.com/travel.

Over the next week I’ll be cleaning up more photos, and uploading the megabytes of tracklogs I’ve accumulated to OpenStreetMap in order to hopefully kick off interest in the project in New Zealand (or at least to other OSMers traveling to NZ)

Unfortunately, due to traveling through Wellington on New Years Day, I didn’t get to meet up with some of NZ’s finest mappers, ProjectX Technologies (developers of ZoomIn), or Mark Zeman (developer of TripperMap).

It was a tremendous endeavor that really introduced us to a lot and was thoroughly enjoyable, if a little fast paced. After just 3 weeks in New Zealand we spent 2 days whirlwind through Seoul, South Korea, and then back to Washington, DC via San Francisco, and a long 10 hour drive back to Michigan.

More to come…

I have some rather exciting announcements to share, but as it’s late, and I’m all kinds of jet-lagged/worn out, I’ll post about it later.

I tried last minute to setup a meet-up of New Zealand mappers such as ProjectX Technologies and TripperMap Mark Zeman – but I was late and it’s high-holiday-traveling season here, so we had to drink on our own.

I have to say, there still isn’t a good tool for dealing with all the GPS and Photo data and information. GPSPhotoLinker doesn’t currently handle Pentax RAW files, and I frequently have to jump to Parallels Windows to use Garmin’s manager for getting and dealing with maps.

Along the way I’ve been drawing up ideas and plans for a piece, or interconnected pieces of software that would simplify this process both on the trip and for dealing with when you get back from a trip. Something that handles a mixture of travel planning, updating/downloading en-route, and then cleaning up and publishing from afterwards.

Tags: newzealand, gps, travel, maps, geo

After you’ve gone around and collected all the things you’ll want to do, you actually go into your travel planner. Here you can pull back up short descriptions, web sites, phone numbers and addresses of any of the collected items. You can also drag and drop these into a calendar to build up your itinerary. When you put successive activites in different regions a small link will appear that will give you travel information between the areas. This includes driving times and distances, airline carriers, or rail options.

If you’ve selected a “pre-designed trip” it will be brought into your calendar as several days of activities. For example, I brought in a 3-day driving trip of the southern cities of Dunedin, Invercargill, and Te Anau. I then added accomodations at the end of each day and other activies to do on the route.

And of course, after you’ve built up your calendar you can then view a map of your collection or your actual itinerary along with suggested or defined routes.

After you’ve done all this, you can then share your itinerary and contact information with a travel agent, friends/family (so they know where you’ll be and how to get in touch), or for your own use for saving or printing along the way.

For general information that isn’t part of a location you can add your own “Notes” and attach these at any point in the trip. This may be for suggestions you’ve received from friends or contacts.

Overall, NewZealand.com is an incredible resource and should serve as a model for any travel site.
Gusto uses the model of gathering up sites and locations, but just isn’t quite as smooth as NZ.com does it.

A couple of things I wish the site did:

• The map and calendar hold a lot of information and should be resizable to view larger
• Export a set of driving directions and option GPX file for loading into a GPS or Nav system. Obviously this also includes exporting GeoRSS and KML for viewing in other maps, feeds, or GoogleEarth
• iCal export of itinerary

Tags: travel, newzealand, gusto, maps, mapping, webbyawards, gpx, georss, kml, ical

Of course, this is a bright time in online tourism. There are a lot of resources out there for travelers who want to find out more about destinations and share their travels.

Over the next couple of days I’ll be reviewing some of the excellent New Zealand travel resources we used to plan our trip and of course arm ourselves with all the necessary mapping and neogeography tools.

Of course, I’ll be posting geotagged photos to Flickr, and using GeoPress in my Travel Blog.

Here is a quick list of basic travel sites for gathering & sharing travel stories:

• TripHub – Easily plan and organize your trip for free
• MapSack – Travel in the Know
• TripTracker
• GeekyTraveller
• World66 & WikiTravel
• TravelBlog – GlobeTrotting Documented
• Gusto – travel + lifestyle
• TrekEarth – Learning about the world through photography

hCalendar info

RubyConf*MI: Saturday, August 26, 9AM-5PM, at Science Building at Calvin College, Grand Rapids, Michigan

It’s just a 1-day conference, but should be a great time. Get to see David Black, author of Ruby for Rails, speak, as well as SouthEast Michigan’s own Patrick Hurley.

If you’re in the Grand Rapids, Michigan area, stop by.

Tags: ruby, michigan, grandrapids, conference, rubymi, rubyconfmi

Technorati Tags: barcamp, unconference, chicago, barcampchicago

You should also check out Sustainable Detroit, which is working to promote the idea of sustainable living. Power to them!

Technorati Tags: michigan, sustainable

It’s a great example of a useful mashup/data display (since he entered the data, and isn’t really pulling it live from another source, it’s not really a ‘mashup’ – but then again, what is a ‘mashup’?) The data Greg used is available from his FAQ.

While all of the food, drink, etc. is cute, and very much intended to keep employees at work, rather than wanting to go home, I feel that the overall effect was attained that Google is a dynamic, creative environment. There aren’t the age-old water coolers to flock around, but small kitchens, couch circles, and whiteboards. People are free to decorate their cubicles, and there are even “famed” cubicle decorations that are explicitly shown on the tour.

Overall, it seemed like a good effect for a large company to try and maintain a sort of “small-company”/startup feel. Of course, this is only on a 40 minute tour, and no experience actually working with the management and teams, but it still gave a good feeling. Everyone was smiling.

The Real Deal

After all of the “oohs” and “ahhs” of the campus (and getting to eat in the Google “No Name Bar”), we came to the real point of the day, Google strutting some geo-stuff.

Now, coming to Google, I wouldn’t have been able to pick out Sergai or Larry from a lineup. So I was surprised when 3 guys came up on the stage in the demo room, and 2 of them were introduced as such. My first thought, “wow, they look really young”. Not your typical ‘white-hairs’ (at least not yet), but guys that looked like it would be fun to hang out with.

New stuffses

As has been announced/discussed elsewhere, Google released a new version of GoogleEarth with yummy interface goodness, and the really cool ability to display nice models using textured 3D geometry and raster images. This is all handled by the new and improved KML 2.1, which is the XML geo-format Google inherited from Keyhole and competes with GML and GeoRSS.

One of the really strong messages from the demonstrations was “Where you look is where you search.” GoogleEarth is “just another browser”, like Firefox, though it is a much different paradigm.

As the program lead of GoogleEarth posed, consider the following situations. A user wants to find out about Shakespeare. They can:

• Navigate to Scotland and then search for Shakespeare. This would display important locations in Shakespeare’s plays
• Go to a Shakespeare website and find a map of pertinent locations

Both are valid means of search, with different basic paradigms of what a user wants to find out (spatially pertinent information)

Where are the Pixies

I managed to get myself into the Pixie Hunt, which was a photo scavenger hunt, geek style. Each team was fitted with a cellphone, GPS puck, and list of tasks they had to get their photo taken doing. Standard embarassing stuff like: Make a Human pyramid including at least one stranger, or have a team member give a stranger a rose using their teeth.

The new premise was that photos were uploaded after taking to a Flickr pool, geotagged, and scored by the server. Your team could also see the other pictures that had been taken by other teams for the same task.

The game was fun, as it involved lots of semi-tired, hopped up geeks running around San Jose generally menacing the population. Restaurant Maitre ‘d are incredibly useful in these situations. Utilize them.

However, there were some logistic issues, which illustrates why it’s worth having conferences like Where. The phone application was slow, and a little difficult to use (disclaimer: I was not the captain of the team, so I didn’t get to hold the phone. I just got to stand in awkward positions while the captain had to deal with the interface and slow camera). Also, we had a bluetooth GPS puck with us, which should have geotagged all of the photos. However, at the end of the hunt, we didnt’ see the results.

What should have happened was there should have been a Map display of all the teams routes, where they took pictures, and how they all overlapped. We would be able to see if we all took our photos of being thrown out of a restaurant at the same restaurant, or if we had our Guiness pint in a real Irish pub, or just some local pool hall dive.

It was still a fun game. It would be neat to have a “generic” scavenger framework where a user could quickly fill in their scavenger tasks, upload it all to any players’ phones, and the server would handle the responses. Perhaps YAP (Yet Another Project).

And so, after a full day of fun, its off to bed.

Technorati Tags: where2.0, where2con

I have been gathering a lot of waypoints, tracks, location histories, notes, geo-photographs, etc. Yet when I want to put my location in a blog post, an email, a website, an article, or add metadata to a file, I have to dig through many programs, files, and then copy and paste. Perhaps even convert between DMS and DDMMSS.

This application should be enable me to store my waypoints and tracks. These would either be loaded from GPX files, hand entered, CSV files, drawn on a map, or geolocated by an street address. In addition, these tracks and waypoints could have time component.

I can then add notes or photographs to these locations and tracks, share these with friends, or easily search for things like “what photos have I taken in Southern Germany before 2004?”, or “what’s a good 3-5 mile hike I’ve done?”

Lastly, this tool would easily allow me to do local searches, enter the location latitude/longitude, address, or track information into text fields, as GeoRSS, XML, Microformat, or anything else. Place it directly on my clipboard for pasting, or pop-up a window with the information for me to edit, fill-in, then copy and paste. Or provide a Mac OS X service/hotkey that I would quickly enter this information into the current field in a program, or website.

Any other ideas on what this type of application should do or look-like? Is it a web-application? A desktop application would let me use it “in the field” where I may not have net access. So it could run a local-webserver if that were the case. But my data would have to be able to be private, though shareable is nice too. I could bundle up a track and photos/notes and send them to a friend or post them to a webpage.