DefinitiveInk

outside.in GeoToolkit launches

So my blogging has been rather slow lately. Being a new father is part of it but another reason is that I've been hard at work on leading a great team of people in creating GeoToolkit. You can read the post about it on the outside.in blog. If you blog about places even occasionally you might find it interesting. Next up tools for sites powered by the GeoToolkit. I'm really excited about these so my blogging might be even slower still.

Map stats from the NYT

The NYT has a great article on the rise of maps made with web tools. A really nice overview with some interesting stats. There is a lot of mapping going on.

• 40,000 maps made on Platial
• 50,000 Google Map mashups
• 1,000,000 MSN Collection maps
• 1,300,000 Garmin maps of hikes, trails, rides
• 4,000,000 Google MyMap maps
• 25,000,000 Flickr Geo-tagged photos

Our drive up Rt 1 - LA to SF

I've been creating a Google Map of our trip up the coast. I really love MyMaps. My only real complaint is that I can't reorder the placemarks to make a linear account of our drive but no matter you can click on the placemarks if you want to start at the beginning.

I've also just realized that you can search for addresses and then add those to your map. I expect this trip log to grow.

What artists see and what the rest of us see or how to fit a sketch of a tree onto a piece of paper

Following up yesterday's post about George Brett's privates and eyetracking for good page design is this article from Cognitive Daily, part of Seed's network of blogs, about how artists and others look at objects. Which is the artist and which the psychologist?

Via Snarkmarket which I got to via a Kottke.org post. Happy Birthday Jason 9 years!

Better design through eyetracking with Jakob Nielson

"Although both men and women look at the image of George Brett when directed to find out information about his sport and position, men tend to focus on private anatomy as well as the face. For the women, the face is the only place they viewed....adds that this difference doesn’t just occur with images of people. Men tend to fixate more on areas of private anatomy on animals as well, as evidenced when users were directed to browse the American Kennel Club site."

This and other interesting facts can be found in an article about eyetracking and effective news design in the OJR. (via Tech Meme)

protopage v3

Got this today - very interesting.

We are pleased to announce Protopage version 3.0 - which is available now at:
http://www.protopage.com

There are 30 new features in Version 3.0, including:

-- Instant collaboration - set a password to let others see or edit your page
-- Color coded tabs and categories, to help you organize your information better
-- Listen to and watch audio and video podcasts
-- A new news reader, meaning you can zip through your morning news in record time
-- Cartoon support - see a Dilbert cartoon directly on your page!
-- 270 preloaded widgets, including 96 games, 71 finance widgets and 26 sports score widgets

Try the new V3 demo here:
http://www.protopage.com

Directory of visual information mapping sites and projects

Visualcomplexity is a directory of @300 different information mapping projects. Fantastic. (via coolhunting.com)

Westport Connecticut "teardown" map mashup

A map mashup of teardowns in Westport. Ct. A teardown is when someone buys a perfectly fine house, or at least a fie house for the people who lived there usually for decades, and then razes it to put up a much larger house. The map links to entries about the houses. The entries have open comments. The mapping app is made by a company I've never heard of called MapTeam, they are getting their map from sources other than Yahoo or Google which, though rare today, is possible.

Tags vs folders how a few details can be the difference between success and failure

In 1999 a company called Blink had a shared bookemarking service, over a million users, and 13 millions in the bank. Why id it fail and del.icio.us suceed. The founder Ari Paparo has posted an essay about some of the things that went wrong in their product development and their assumptions. Really valuable for anyone building new apps. (via Anil Dash)

TurnHere.com - a startup for local tour videos and real estate promos

Turnhere.com looks like a well funded new startup  aimed at local video but with a strong neighborhood tour and home tour angle. There is a tour of East Hollywood and also one of the penthouse apartment in the Piano Building in NY. Yahoo mapping is one way to navigate.

Soundscape mapping a list of links

This morning I attended a few sessions of the Knowing the World Through Sound Symposium at NYU. I wanted to see the first panel about the New York SoundMap that is being created by the NY Chapter of the American Society for Acoustic Ecology. The* NY Sound Map is a Google map mashup which links to audio clips of sound recorded in the urban environment. Nice start. They handed out a great list urban audio ecology projects that I've listed below. It really opened my ears to what a vast field and way of thinking. some people map decibel levels, others through soundwalks create more meditative experiences. The work below has already made me broaden some of the audio ideas I'm playing with. Some of the links below are very academic in nature. Ones with *'s seem to approach more of what I'm interested in.

Noise mapping concept for the uk sound map.
U of Minnesota sound map project
Soundmaps for the visually impaired
Brooklyn/Flatbush soundmap
Soundmap of a house
*Soundcities
* Berlin Soundmap
* The Sonic Memorial Project
*Tony Round Soundmap
*Toronto Island Soundmap
Ultra-red Sounding the Naked City
* SoundTransit
*Puget Sound Soundscape - yes that means unbderwater sounds!
* NE Scotland Soundscape - including some background noise from one of my favorite distilleries.

Wayfaring - map blogs

Two people, one very technical and the other not so, told me about wayfaring.com yesterday. A map creation and sharing tool. You create a map, people can leave notes, tags, bookmarks of other maps. Built with Ruby on Rails  with the google maps hooked in.

Antique Map Collection

The David Rumsey Map Collection - 12,600 historical maps online focusing on 18 and 19th cent. North and South American maps, all under a Creative Commos License. (via the excellent Social Design Notes)

SIFR

SIFR - flash based typography in pages. " Over the last several months, a small group of web developers and designers have been hard at work perfecting a method to insert rich typography into web pages without sacrificing accessibility, search engine friendliness, or markup semantics." Example page

Flickr Interesting economics

Anil Dash's post on Interesting Economics and flickr. Caterina's response. Anil's clarification.

 

Portraits of people compared to their gaming avatars. (via Kottke) Which if you read Anil's post somehow makes sense to click on.

Podcast tour of NY media landmarks

Podcast tour of NY media landmarks. Produced by the Online News Association conference committee. Narrated by Adam Glenn. I'm listening to it right now. Actually Mark Crispin Miller and I created a somewhat more radical version of this two years ago for CityReads but never put it out. Would have liked this to have had a map, also for the sound quality (scratchy which I applaud) it should have been less than 25megs..

Google Map Pedometer

An amazing Google map hack that enables you to plot where you walked and see the route, the distance,  and the calories burned. Just fantastic. (via Peter Merholz who also contiues his great web 2.0 as philosphy discussion)

Slate introduces audio tours of several museums

Slate introduces several podcast tours of the Met and the MOMA. Nice preview of them available from the site.

 

Rodger Clemons apparently named his four children,  Koby, Kory, Kacy and Kody , for the fact that he is a strikeout king.

 

 

Mapping the moon with Google

The first manned moon landing was 36 years ago today. The brainiacs at Google have come up with a great triubute to it with a google map hack (they can't really hack their own site) of the moon. Zoom in for a happy ending Easter egg. I never knew all of the landings sites were so close to each other. You can also get to this by clicking on the Google logo on their home page. I wonder how many people actually click on the graphic a day. This is the first time I've ever done it.

bzzzpeek......

bzzzpeek.com - A delightful site that features kids from around the world giving their renditions of animals and fire engines. It has a really playful interface that is like a kid's toy. A center screen surrounded by silhouettes of the animals with rollovers. Let's say you choose chickens. Then the center screen fills with several chickens in the colors of the flags of the nations the sounds are from. It is really delightful and, I could see it as a toy or a video game. In fact going back to a very early post of mine about not-for-profits and games it would be a perfect thing for Unicef to sponsor on nick.com or something like that.  The creators in the interview I heard on NPR sound like very nice people.