Technology, Books and Other Neat Stuff

So, let's start with a ferry and see where we get.

After all, we don't have to be in San Francisco until Wednesday morning, and the Oregon Coast is looking most tempting.

Hmm. Forks. Now where have I heard of that town?

(Somewhere out there is a Blues Brothers quote with my name on it, involving sunglasses, fuel and Chicago.)

I've been playing with the beta build of Google Maps for Mobile on a couple of different phones (a Blackberry and a Windows Mobile device) and different networks, and I have to say - it's looking pretty decent. The biggest change is a good one, with the introduction of My Location. It's a definite "does what it says on the tin" feature, as it uses a database of cell tower locations to show you where you are, within a kilometer or so. That's enough to get you located, and able to use the mapping tools to find exactly where you are.

I've found it a lot more accurate than the stated error, usually getting me within a street or so of where I am (and as it doesn't use GPS, I can use it indoors or in the Tube). I've used cell location tools before, and this is by far the best and most accurate. Some place you at random places on the map, while others just fail to have decent UK databases.

Here's Google's own YouTube whiteboard animation of My Location in action:



So, are there any quibbles? I'd like it to support Google Maps new terrain feature, but I suspect that the build cycles are out of sync here - especially as the terrain view came out around the same time as the latest build of GMM...

Here's an interesting tree map graph of this page's structure, mapping the HTML that makes up everything you can see. Go here to make your own. The nodes are colour coded as follows:

What do the colors mean?
blue: for links (the A tag)
red: for tables (TABLE, TR and TD tags)
green: for the DIV tag
violet: for images (the IMG tag)
yellow: for forms (FORM, INPUT, TEXTAREA, SELECT and OPTION tags)
orange: for linebreaks and blockquotes (BR, P, and BLOCKQUOTE tags)
black: the HTML tag, the root node
gray: all other tags

Quite fascinating. I obviously have quite a complex template in play! That and the tables I occasionally use...

Original linkage from Chris Green

Sometimes you get the oddest bits and pieces when you wander around the various stalls at a conference exhibition. However, I think one of today's pieces may just win a no prize.

Where 2.0 is a conference about digital mapping and the neogeospatial movement. The conference's sessions cover everything from using GPS fitted pigeons to map California's smog, to building mashup ecosystems around Google's and Microsoft's mapping platforms. If it's anything to do with maps and computers, it's part of Where's remit.

Why oh why oh why then, did I pick up a paper set of roadmaps of the continental US?

Actually they'll come in useful nxt week in Florida, as our GPS only has west coast maps!

Over at IT Pro I've been writing about Danyel Fisher's "How we watch the city" paper. It's a fascinating look at how we can use geographical search data to see how places grab our attention. I'm becoming more and more fascinated by the idea of "attention", and how we can work with collections of attention data. I suspect it's going to become one of the key approaches to understanding interaction context.

I've been reading a fascinating paper by Danyel Fisher, of Microsoft Research. He's one of the folk behind the SNARF email triage tool, and is currently looking at how people use online maps.

"How we watch the City" is surprisingly beautiful (in the way many computer-mediated visualisations are). To show how people and searches gravitate to specific places he's created an application that draws a heat map over Microsoft's Virtual Earth, letting him zoom into the "hottest" searches, bright clusters that illuminate the virtual space of the search engine. With access to the services search logs, he can show just how searches relate to geography.

Here's one of his images, a look at how map searches of Las Vegas focus on the Strip.



Our eyes are bright in the digital world.

A fascinating map of the link interconnections between blogs over a six-week period, from Discover Magazine. It's an extension of the work detailed in Matthew Hurst's Data Mining Blog, which I've linked to in the past.

The blogosphere is the most explosive social network you’ll never see. Recent studies suggest that nearly 60 million blogs exist online, and about 175,000 more crop up daily (that’s about 2 every second). Even though the vast majority of blogs are either abandoned or isolated, many bloggers like to link to other Web sites. These links allow analysts to track trends in blogs and identify the most popular topics of data exchange. Social media expert Matthew Hurst recently collected link data for six weeks and produced this plot of the most active and interconnected parts of the blogosphere.

I'm actually not too sure about the conclusion drawn about LJ:

3 SHOW ME YOUR FRIENDS This isolated, close-knit online community of bloggers uses LiveJournal, an online host that primarily serves as a social networking site. This blogging island is just barely in touch with the rest of the blogworld.

Of course I may just have a more outgoing reading list than many people here...

[Update: pulling out a useful comment by del_c that succinctly makes the point I was trying to make: "I bet that cluster is by definition the live journals that are linked to each other and not the blogs. I bet the live journals that are heavily linked to the blogs, and linked by them, are in the pack where they don't stand out like the cluster does. The existence of the cluster with a gap tells us that there is a difference between the two types of live journals, not that there is a difference between all live journals and all blogs."]

For a developer series I'm currently working on for a magazine, I have used the Google Maps JavaScript API to render a map in a Salesforce.com custom S-Control. My first cross-service web API mashup...

..and it works!

Huzzah.

Obligatory Geek Post

If you're in the UK and want to find out what airline flies where from where, Flightmapping.com seems to have a pretty comprehensive database (even if its flashy European map isn't quite as accurate).

Just ignore all the adverts...

A map of LiveJournal interconnections, using citations for 24,000 LJ blogs.

Part of a fascinating blog mapping project. Click here to see a link graph of the set of blogs in general...

Original link via BoingBoing

I've finally worked out what happens in the middle of "Hummingbird Futures", and working on the scene where the tramp reappears, outside San Francisco Public Library (before going in and looking at the records of the Golden Gate Raptor Observatory which will be where he finds the pointer to the location of the bad guy). I'd originally decided to have him fade in, sitting on a concrete bench, ready to go in through the library doors.

And then I realised - I couldn't remember if there were concrete benches there. I've driven around the Civic Plaza many times (usually looking fro somewhere to park when going to Citizen Cake), but I just wasn't sure if the benches I'd vaguely remembered were there.

What to do? I could IM a couple of folks I know who live in SF, and who were online. But they're in a different part of town.

The solution was simple. I fired up Google Earth, typed in "san francisco public library" and clicked "fly to". A quick zoom, and a spin around the building, and it was clear there weren't any benches. However, there were steps. A solution. And a new tool for my writing arsenal.

And now, back to the story...