This morning I was minding my own business doing a Google Search, when the flashing red notifier for Google+ went went off and sucked me in for a couple minutes. In that brief amount of time, I started off a chain reaction…

I saw a post by Matt Manolides asking for recommendations of geo people to encircle. Well, I mused, this is inherently a social platform, so let’s see if we can exploit some of its intrinsic properties to… who am I kidding??? I just figured I’d see if people would add themselves to a list.

The reaction? More than I counted on! About twelve hours after posting, my initial message had been commented on by almost 60 people, received 12 +1′s, and been shared 28 times.

Whoops...

This is where my plan(?) kinda fell apart. Though the experiment was a partial success, it also annoyed some people considerably. Many of the good folks that have (had?) me in circles also have each other in circles. And every time one of them chose to “Share” my post, all of the people who had encircled them would see it again. And again.

So, in closing, I bring you back to the title of this post: I’m sorry! If I annoyed you with this experiment, please try to forgive me. I won’t do it again… at least not until Google comes up with an equivalent to Twitter’s native ReTweet that filters out multiple notifications. :)

-J

P.S. If you aren’t on Google+ and would like an invite, just drop me a line by way of my profile.

P.P.S. Darn, didn’t quite make it a year…

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:

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 !!!!

-J

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

I feel that you must return my feelings.  After all, you indexed the entire KML collection of my city’s RESTful property database.

You seem shy to admit your love.  No matter how hard people look, you won’t reveal our secret.  Instead, you show a cold public face of centreline geocoding and pretty pictures.

Please Google Maps, won’t you shout our love from the rooftops, exposing our deep data relationship to the world?

Yours Unrequited…

-J

• How long until I start getting micro-targeted advertising? When I do, will these be phone-only, or will my location be used to target advertising on all Google services when I’m logged in?
• Where’s the API or the ability to update external services? Having more than one app fight over my GPS makes it go nuts. I want to be able to update my Twitter location, Fire Eagle, and more, from a single app.
• It’s missing history and export functions. Can’t even get my location as a KML? For added bonus, allow me to expose a network link of my current location
• Um, I can haz blog gadgit?

-J

I’m so used to Google knowing what I want that this was a bit of a surprise:

Google geo-meteorological search intelligence: fail!

-J

With this tool, you can read KML files from MapGuide, and read/write KML using FDO2FDO or Autodesk Map 3D. This provider is still early in development, so get your feedback in now while you can still have an impact on how it works when it’s released.

As an aside, this is the first (soon to be) open source project I know of which uses Google’s libkml.

-J

Basic improvements include:

• automatic pull from our FDM Computer Aided Dispatch (CAD… a popular acronym) database, removing requirement for dispatchers to manually update this list
• publication of the incidents in multiple formats (GeoRSS, HTML… KML planned for an intermediate update)
• integration with Google Maps

This is what the query interface for incidents looks like:

This is the embedded Google Map (using the GGeoXML class to hit the GeoRSS feed) showing incidents for the selected day:

This is the basic statistics interface allowing users to see incident activity for a date range (which also has a similar Google Map embedded):

And this is what the GeoRSS feed looks like in Google Maps

And now for the technical stuff…

Chris has put together a fairly strong process for extracting and displaying this information publicly, consisting of several components:

• A monthly FME process that reads the current 9-1-1 streets shape file and places it into a normalized database structure (one-to-many between lines and coordinates). This allows easy formatting of coordinates for different output formats (GeoRSS, KML, etc) in native ASP.Net.
• A SQL Server Integration Services job that pulls initial incident data from our CAD database, as well as updated information from the RMS (records management system), generalizes it to block ranges to reduce privacy concerns, and writes it our publicly accessible webserver.
• An ASP.Net web application that transforms an XML serialized data set into GeoRSS (and eventually other formats) using XSLT.
• An ASP.Net web application that provides the rudimentary user interface, including the incident query mechanism, incident statistics, and Google Maps integration.

The current applications are accessed via IFRAMEs because although our standard for web apps on our main site has changed from ASP to ASP.Net, our web site migration is still under way. Once the web site is redeveloped, these will be standard non-encapsulated web apps.

This is definitely just a starting point for us; the framework that has been used for this application was designed so that we can add other data sources that make sense for GeoRSS syndication, such as recent business licenses, building permits, etc. This aligns with our website redevelopment, where we are using RSS/Atom as an alternate access mechanism wherever possible.

As an initial project, there are certainly limitations with this implementation. For instance, we haven’t defined an API for pulling down specific categories or date ranges from the RSS feed. Also, because the GGeoMap class doesn’t expose properties of specific features, we were unable to link the incident rows with the map (pan and pop-up). There are third-party interfaces to Google Maps (GeoXML, EGeoXML) that work around this, and of course the option of just creating the lines ourselves, but we were trying to keep coding and dependencies to a minimum. There is a ticket in the Google Maps API issue tracker for this, so hopefully it will be addressed eventually…

Ideally we’d be using a spatially-enable database (such as PostGIS) as the underlying data store for this application, but we don’t have PostGIS in place on our public webserver yet.

-J

I am actually a bit surprised to see this. Base has not had the kind of recognition/adoption that I figured would be required for it to get the development resources it needs (an anonymous Googler once said that the problem with Base was that I was the only one who had heard of it). They still have quite a way to go though… For instance, I need a way of uploading KML representations into a column, and of course Base needs to be swapped in as an open back end to MyMaps. :)

-J

What I think is cool is that they are using the 15% of Mobile Maps users who do have GPS to populate their database of cell tower locations.

Once more cell phones support wi-fi (will this EVER happen in North America?) they’ll be able to take advantage of the same infrastructure to build their wi-fi location database.

-J