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Posted by Jason Birch in Google, Rant on October 21, 2009
Ever have something you can’t get out of your head? How about two things?
The first thing stuck in my head is the idea that Google is moving wholesale into the content business. They aren’t creating their own content, but they aggregate external content into a “walled garden” and encourage users to host content on Google properties, both actions ensuring that value remains solely exploitable by Google. For product and service folks this won’t matter much, but for people reliant on web content for their income the contraction of the web into mega-portals is definitely a business threat to be aware of. I personally worry that this business tactic may affect the vitality of the web in the long run. Case-in-point, with the recent launch of the real estate layer in Google Maps, realtors are incented to funnel their listings through Google Base rather than posting them openly on the web as GeoRSS or KML. This echoes the aggregation that is occurring in Google’s “Place Pages“, and is a worrisome trend.
The other thing stuck in my head is that stupid Sesame Street pinball counting song… actually I kinda dig it, which is probably why it’s staying stuck.
What I really want to do is to stop thinking about these things. I figured that maybe if I combine the two it will help me exorcise both demons, so:
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-J
Nanaimo meet OpenID. OpenID meet Nanaimo.
Posted by Jason Birch in Nanaimo, Open Source on October 6, 2009
How’s that for protocol?
If you’re anything like me, you probably use the password reset function on websites more often than the login function. This is a huge problem, both for security and for user experience.
The City of Nanaimo recognized that as useful as the city’s web applications are, requiring citizens to remember yet another password is not reasonable. Early this year the city did an initial analysis of OpenID, and Jeff Jacob–one of my colleagues–took on the task of developing the infrastructure to support OpenID and one of the first applications to take advantage of it. You can read the everyman’s description of Nanaimo’s OpenID initiative along with links to the OpenID-enabled services.
While the majority of users probably have an OpenID account already, it would not be responsible to require citizens to sign up for an external login service. A mix of forms-based and OpenID login capabilities may have been easier, but it just made more sense for Jeff to implement a city-specific OpenID provider using the DotNetOpenID open source library. This allows Nanaimo’s application login class to be more streamlined while presenting a consistent user experience, but more importantly it allows the city to act as a provider for third party / COTS web applications as these start supporting OpenID. Eventually Nanaimo citizens will be able to log into all city services using a single ID of their choice.
It is gratifying to see that during the City’s implementation phase many other organisations, such as the US Federal Government, have been embracing OpenID. Allowing citizens to access services using their own credentials is a key part of Nanaimo’s longstanding policy of providing easy access to the information residents and businesses need to live and do business here.
If you work for a local government and are interested in sharing information and/or code, please get in touch with Nanaimo’s IT department!
-J
P.S. As always, I am writing from a personal perspective. Opinions here are my own, and are not necessarily shared by my employer.
Google Place Pages Indexable? Not really…
Posted by Jason Birch in Google on September 24, 2009
Mashable hints that Google’s new Place Pages are potentially indexable. And indeed, they are. If you click on the Link button on any of the places pages, you can see that Google has given each of them a pseudo-URL:
While these URLs are certainly interesting, on closer inspection you can see that they aren’t exactly following Google’s established best practices for publishing dynamic web content. They can be reached by any number of URLs, and Google does not use the Canonical meta tag:
http://maps.google.com/places/ca/nanaimo/wallace-st/455/-city-of-nanaimo-city-hall
http://maps.google.com/places/455/wallace-st/nanaimo/-nanaimo-city-hall
http://maps.google.com/places/nanaimo/-nanaimo-city-hall
Not only does this mess up indexing, but it means that there is no common URL for things like Google SideWiki to latch onto for aggregating the comments made on these pages. For instance, you can see a comment at this URL:
http://maps.google.com/places/ca/nanaimo/-city-hall (or here if you don’t have SideWiki)
But not at this one:
http://maps.google.com/places/ca/nanaimo/wallace-st/-city-of-nanaimo-city-hall
It appears that rather than treating each place or business to its own unique hierarchical identifier on the web, Google is instead just parsing the URL for search terms, turning slashes into commas and dashes into spaces (mostly – special case for business names).
This is unfortunate, because if this hierarchical system was in fact in place, then this series of URLs would be very cool and spatially related:
http://maps.google.com/places/ca/bc/nanaimo/wallace-st/-city-of-nanaimo-city-hall
http://maps.google.com/places/ca/bc/nanaimo/wallace-st
http://maps.google.com/places/ca/bc/nanaimo
http://maps.google.com/places/ca/bc
http://maps.google.com/places/ca
(most of these but the last give you what you’d expect, so I was initially fooled into thinking this was more intelligent than it looked for a while).
While there is lots of potential for Google Place Pages to be cool, as it stands it’s just a slight advancement on using mod_rewrite to turn your URL into parameters. As @ajturner said, they’re using the web, but not part of the web.
-J
Vancouver’s Open Data
Posted by Jason Birch in Advocacy, Open Data on September 15, 2009
Congratulations to the City of Vancouver on the launch of their Open Data Catalogue.
They have launched with what looks like a couple dozen datasets (including orthophotography and other GIS data), with a custom license agreement.
This is a great start, and I understand that the folks at Vancouver are working on pushing out more data sets as rapidly as possible. Make sure to take their survey if there is something in particular you are interested in.
-J
Live from FMEUC, it’s the Tim and Jason show!
Posted by Jason Birch in FME on August 11, 2009
OK, so better late than never. At the always-awesome FME User Conference, Tim Taylor and I did a short presentation on Nanaimo’s use of FME Server.
I think we did OK, but I definitely need to spend a bit more time polishing both my presentation and the slides next time.
Check out other great FME UC Videos on Safe’s user conference website. There is a lot of valuable videos, with case studies and technical presentations which will show you how your business processes could be improved by using FME.
As an aside, I count myself fortunate to live within driving distance to two of the best geospatial conferences in the world. In these times of tight budgets, I am incredibly grateful to be able to attend both the FME User Conference and GeoWeb.
-J
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