Back in March, I wrote a post, Ruminations on Place, after a day walking around in Kyoto. I've been in Paris for a few days and I'm thinking more about Place, and what is a Parisian sense of place. Or rather, I should say, what is my sense of Paris as a Place. These are just some random thoughts.
I have passed approximately 50 - or it may be as low as 10 - souvenir shops selling postcards in distinctive black and white or sepia styles. Do an image search on "Paris France" - "Paris" gets you a lot of Paris Hilton stuff - and you'll see examples of it. It's a style that I realized unconsciously made up my sense of Paris as a Place, and made me long for a black and white camera.
Americans, I think, often have the stereotype that Parisians are rude, particularly when you try to speak French. Apparently, this is no longer true. Oh no, I didn't try to speak French, my partner is here with me and has a great accent, though not a lot of vocabulary, and it's be wonderfully fun. And everywhere we go, Parisians have been definitely not rude. I realize this too was part of my sense of the Place that is Paris, and strangely I feel a conflict between my internal sense of the Place and my current experience. At the same time I am of course happy to have that proven wrong.
Like many of my generation, I am used to relying on guide books for travel. My partner had one, which I will no name here, which had much inaccurate information. I am proud to say that the Google Places app on my Android device was really helpful in situations like "Oh, I need a place to eat now that I have time before the concert I just decided to go to." It was not so helpful in finding a breakfast place because breakfast isn't a big deal here like it is in the US. So we found a restaurant nearby, but not one that served crepes, which we wanted. Because apparently Parisians don't do that. But nothing in Places, or an online search, or a guide book would have told me that. So, still work to do.
Speaking of Places, and to earn my keep, the Places API is now open to everyone and has some really cool capabilities, check it out.
Showing posts with label Maps. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Maps. Show all posts
Thursday, May 19, 2011
Wednesday, March 16, 2011
Tragedy in Japan and how to help
Like everyone, I am horrified by the loss of life and homes in the recent devastation in Japan. The scale is enormous, and as we hear more about it, many of us feel hopeless to help and scared about what it means for the future. Aftershocks and worries about radiation are all over the news, along with calls for donations, and occasional worries about scams, people promising to help, but taking money anyway.
At the same time, I am consistently impressed by the people who jumped in to help. From the first responders, the military, to the nuclear workers working day and night to prevent greater tragedy. There are people on the ground in Japan doing great work, mapping transportation routes, helping people find loved ones, providing food and shelter.
The Google Crisis Response team has been putting together many of these resources here: http://www.google.com/crisisresponse/japanquake2011.html, including ways for people to donate money, maps of the situation, and links to the Japan Person Finder app.
The Humanitarian OSM Team is also on the ground, with more information here: http://openstreetmap.jp/crisis/ about how to help with their mapping efforts.
Millions have already been donated. Millions more will be needed. Please help out now. If you want to know more about what Google is doing, follow @earthoutreach on twitter.
If you have other creative ways to contribute, please feel free to leave them in the comments.
At the same time, I am consistently impressed by the people who jumped in to help. From the first responders, the military, to the nuclear workers working day and night to prevent greater tragedy. There are people on the ground in Japan doing great work, mapping transportation routes, helping people find loved ones, providing food and shelter.
The Google Crisis Response team has been putting together many of these resources here: http://www.google.com/crisisresponse/japanquake2011.html, including ways for people to donate money, maps of the situation, and links to the Japan Person Finder app.
The Humanitarian OSM Team is also on the ground, with more information here: http://openstreetmap.jp/crisis/ about how to help with their mapping efforts.
Millions have already been donated. Millions more will be needed. Please help out now. If you want to know more about what Google is doing, follow @earthoutreach on twitter.
If you have other creative ways to contribute, please feel free to leave them in the comments.
Thursday, March 10, 2011
Ruminations on Place
Sunday, I was on a panel with Steve Chase, Hurricane Chase, and Murata Takehiko at the Yahoo! Japan Geolocation Conference (#geoconf). Yahoo! Japan (a distinct entity from Yahoo! Inc. btw), put on an excellent conference, and had announced that they would be contributing data to Open Street Map, in a similar fashion to Bing and MapQuest. There was a lot of excitement in the room, with many OSM participants present (by design I imagine). And there were inevitable questions about Google's future involvement in the project - something I'm interested in personally but can make no commitment to on behalf of Google of course. But more importantly, to this blog post at least, a question came up about whether Google would contribute Street View imagery to OSM, and whether there were any OSM related projects developing open versions of Street View. As a panelist, and someone who can't avoid talking, because I'm just that way, I had to answer of course. My answer went something like this, speaking as myself not foreshadowing a future Google product:
I don't think in the future, Google should have to be driving all the streets in the world. Ideally, we will move toward a time in which everyone is providing data about the world in open formats, in ways that are search-able and crawl-able. What makes Street View so compelling, I think, is that it gives us a sense of place, a sense of the essence, be being-ness of the location we're looking at. And in fact, in places where we don't drive cars, you can still see geolocated photos. Look at Moscow, for instance, with Pegman selected. There are photos all over. Ideally, this is something self-perpetuating, something people want to open up.
That got me to thinking, especially after reading Ed Parson's recent post about a 1930's video of Teddition. He, and the commenters, talks about what can be seen there, and what has stayed the same. Ed ends with this statement:
I don't think in the future, Google should have to be driving all the streets in the world. Ideally, we will move toward a time in which everyone is providing data about the world in open formats, in ways that are search-able and crawl-able. What makes Street View so compelling, I think, is that it gives us a sense of place, a sense of the essence, be being-ness of the location we're looking at. And in fact, in places where we don't drive cars, you can still see geolocated photos. Look at Moscow, for instance, with Pegman selected. There are photos all over. Ideally, this is something self-perpetuating, something people want to open up.
That got me to thinking, especially after reading Ed Parson's recent post about a 1930's video of Teddition. He, and the commenters, talks about what can be seen there, and what has stayed the same. Ed ends with this statement:
"We are lucky to have rare video like this for it’s completeness but at the same time it’s disappointing that for future generations Google Street View which could offer a similar resouce has had to be mutilated to accomodate privacy concerns."
Indeed, there is something we miss out on. I am not arguing for doing away with privacy, I'm just ruminating here on pictures and meaning. The word "place" has many meanings in English, but they are interrelated. The reason satellite imagery, and particularly street view imagery is so compelling is that it relates something that standard maps can't, a sense of the place or essence of a location. And that place-ness, that sense that is tied to location, time, people, trees, buildings, smell, sounds, all of that is incredibly powerful, and I think Street View is only starting to touch on what that means to people.
I've been in Japan this last week, and at two GTUG meetings, I did demonstrations of custom Street View. In particular, people were interested in this simple holiday greeting from Digitas. In it, the developers added some panoramas to their Street View application through the API, which of course anyone could do. The panoramas lead off street into the digitas office where employees hold up signs and there are thought and word bubbles around them. This conveys a sense of the place, a sense of celebration and fun and associates it with Digitas. I hope it really is that fun to work there, they seem like really nice folks in the picture!
The point I'm trying to make is that by this simple set of panoramas and a few lines of code, they were able to extend the sense of place that is the city around them, and change it to create a view of the place that is their company.
I know there are lots of academic writings on this subject, but frankly since 1994 I get bored when post-modernism or marxist dialectics get mentioned, so my forays into those studies have been unsuccessful at moving me. I read the works of China Meivelle, or Armistead Maupin instead, each of whom conveys vividly this sense of place
Today, like most days I have free in cities not my own, I walked. I walked around Kyoto. Not to find temples or castles, but to find that sense of place. I walked around, a lot, often going back over the same streets, visiting occasionally the same shops. I tried my extremely limited Japanese, and people graciously helped me out. I walked not just the big streets, but the small ones, gathering into myself my own impressions, my own sense of Kyoto-ness. Of course, this is very different from living here, what the place is like, and especially different from being a native. I tried to take pictures (posting them later) that captured this sense. How will technology solve this? Street View, satellite imagery, they are a start, but I believe augmented reality applications are going to be the best bet for capturing the "-ness" of a place. And I believe at some point, most of us will be involved in that capturing. The popularity of check-in applications, the rise of geotagged photos and videos, providing reviews, Foodspotting, and more are already starting it. It's only been 6 years since Google Earth and the Maps API came out, I wonder what we're going to see in another 6 years.
Sunday, January 9, 2011
It's 2011: Time to think about the future of Geo
It's fairly traditional to start a year with either a retrospective of the previous year, or a look forward. Or, of course, both. In that tradition, I'd like to start the year thinking about some trends that I think are going to be important for Geo this year.
Powerful Easy Analysis Tools
This is the year. In 2005, the Google Maps API and Google Earth broadened the use of geography tools far beyond the traditional GIS crowd, sparking a debate between so-called neo- and paleo-geographers that lasted for years. In the last year or so that debate seems to have calmed down a bit, as traditional GIS tools adapted to the web, and neo-geographers, were everywhere. So there's room for a fresh controversy.
The Google Maps API, followed shortly by a host of other APIs from Yahoo!, Microsoft, OpenLayers and others, allowed developers to easily place maps on their site. But as I pointed out in my Ignite Spatial talk in September, developers and GIS professionals aren't the only ones who want to share spatial data. In fact, I'm guessing the vast majority of spatial data, by volume if not quality, is in tabular form. Geocommons has recognized this for years, providing easy tools for uploading, combining, and sharing spatial data. With the addition of Google Fusion Tables, and easy mapping of spreadsheets and sharing of data, powerful tools for data analysis are in the hands of anyone with a Google account. I won't call them "low-end" tools, though certainly they lack the power of ESRI's tools, or any of a host of other proprietary and open source GIS applications. I predict that this year will see a lot of people migrating to Fusion Tables, and others using the API to back-end store the data. Which leads us to
Cloud
OK, I almost had to slap myself for saying "Cloud." After all, of all the buzzwords going around, I think it is the least penetrable to people not "in-the-know" and perhaps has the most number of definitions. To make matters worse, Microsoft has diluted the term even more with this wacked commercial campaign. However, it is being used a lot, so let me be clear, I think this is the year of Cloud Data Hosting.
I predict more and more spatial data will go into "The Cloud." We're already seeing that happening with services like SimpleGeo, Microsoft Azure's support for spatial data, and many other services. Fusion Tables of course has an API which I anticipate will be useful for a number of spatial data storage services.
Cloud Analysis
It's still early days on this. I think that 2011 will be the year of early adoption. In particular, tools like Google Earth Engine will allow you to run high-end analysis in cloud data centers. Some of these tools are already out there, but the introduction of Earth Engine allows you to do things we're used to in the spatial world, namely raster data analysis, but do it faster and cheaper than before.
Location
Well, really, who am I kidding? 2010 was the year of local and location. Facebook's Places and Places API were a very powerful entrance into the location and local scene. Google Places with Hotpot is a big entry into the local market, but it came pretty late in the year. 2010 was about local, 2011 local will become mainstream, such that everyone will have forgotten that it wasn't part of our sites. Remember when there weren't maps everywhere? That was only 6 years ago, now it's taken for granted. Local will get that way by 2012. When of course the world ends, right? That's what the movies tell us anyway.
Prediction posts are fun, because rarely are you held to them. But really they tell you more about where you are now. The things we can't talk about, or don't know about yet, those are the real surprises. Happy New Year everyone.
Powerful Easy Analysis Tools
This is the year. In 2005, the Google Maps API and Google Earth broadened the use of geography tools far beyond the traditional GIS crowd, sparking a debate between so-called neo- and paleo-geographers that lasted for years. In the last year or so that debate seems to have calmed down a bit, as traditional GIS tools adapted to the web, and neo-geographers, were everywhere. So there's room for a fresh controversy.
The Google Maps API, followed shortly by a host of other APIs from Yahoo!, Microsoft, OpenLayers and others, allowed developers to easily place maps on their site. But as I pointed out in my Ignite Spatial talk in September, developers and GIS professionals aren't the only ones who want to share spatial data. In fact, I'm guessing the vast majority of spatial data, by volume if not quality, is in tabular form. Geocommons has recognized this for years, providing easy tools for uploading, combining, and sharing spatial data. With the addition of Google Fusion Tables, and easy mapping of spreadsheets and sharing of data, powerful tools for data analysis are in the hands of anyone with a Google account. I won't call them "low-end" tools, though certainly they lack the power of ESRI's tools, or any of a host of other proprietary and open source GIS applications. I predict that this year will see a lot of people migrating to Fusion Tables, and others using the API to back-end store the data. Which leads us to
Cloud
OK, I almost had to slap myself for saying "Cloud." After all, of all the buzzwords going around, I think it is the least penetrable to people not "in-the-know" and perhaps has the most number of definitions. To make matters worse, Microsoft has diluted the term even more with this wacked commercial campaign. However, it is being used a lot, so let me be clear, I think this is the year of Cloud Data Hosting.
I predict more and more spatial data will go into "The Cloud." We're already seeing that happening with services like SimpleGeo, Microsoft Azure's support for spatial data, and many other services. Fusion Tables of course has an API which I anticipate will be useful for a number of spatial data storage services.
Cloud Analysis
It's still early days on this. I think that 2011 will be the year of early adoption. In particular, tools like Google Earth Engine will allow you to run high-end analysis in cloud data centers. Some of these tools are already out there, but the introduction of Earth Engine allows you to do things we're used to in the spatial world, namely raster data analysis, but do it faster and cheaper than before.
Location
Well, really, who am I kidding? 2010 was the year of local and location. Facebook's Places and Places API were a very powerful entrance into the location and local scene. Google Places with Hotpot is a big entry into the local market, but it came pretty late in the year. 2010 was about local, 2011 local will become mainstream, such that everyone will have forgotten that it wasn't part of our sites. Remember when there weren't maps everywhere? That was only 6 years ago, now it's taken for granted. Local will get that way by 2012. When of course the world ends, right? That's what the movies tell us anyway.
Prediction posts are fun, because rarely are you held to them. But really they tell you more about where you are now. The things we can't talk about, or don't know about yet, those are the real surprises. Happy New Year everyone.
Friday, October 15, 2010
Presentation at NACIS
I presented today at the North American Cartographic Information Society annual meeting, on new features in Google Earth Pro, Fusion Tables, and the Google Maps API. NACIS focuses a lot more on design, on cartography, and therefore it was a very interesting conference to be at, different from the usual GIS and developer conferences I present at. I sat in a session on rethinking the bike map afterward. Unfortunately, I had to leave after that, so didn't get to participate in much of the conference.
Here's my slides. There were a lot of questions on all aspects, but particularly on imagery.
Monday, June 14, 2010
Slides from BarCamp Nairobi/ WhereCampAfrica
So, it was pretty free-form, and I didn't stick to the slides, but there's still good links and resources here.
And, I hate this, but OpenOffice on the Mac corrupts PowerPoint export somehow. This prevented me from converting to Google Presentations, so I created both a PDF version and an OpenOffice version.
The images in the Eye Candy section are clickable.
BarCamp/WhereCamp Nairobi
Over the weekend, I attended BarCamp Nairobi, which was combined with WhereCampAfrica. It was a great event, which filled both the iHub and Nailab spaces. Despite a fist fight that developed between myself, Stefan Magdalinski, and Mikel Marron, the event was otherwise very friendly and cooperative.
I went to great talks on:
- Shika (a local ICT4D organization working in the slums in Kenya. If anyone has a link, please pass it on in comments)
- AkiraChix
- OSM
- Seven Seas Technologies and entrepreneurship
- Map Kibera
And too much more to post on. But like all Barcamps, the most interesting stuff is in the halls. I learned a lot about the emerging tech community here, and the difficulties of getting work in the face of a small percentage of the population being online. Like most of the developing world, they are jumping straight to mobile, largely skipping a large scale computer market. And mobile devices are where most people get their net access.
Of course, the event had to break each day for World Cup games, which were put up on the projection screen at the iHub.
It looks like the iHub is the place to be. My only regret on this trip is that I won't be here on the 26th, when the iHub hosts a big LAN party for gamers.
For those of you in Nairobi, I'll be presenting tonight at the iHub for Mobile Monday, about 20 minutes on using Google Mapping technologies on mobile devices.
Saturday, February 21, 2009
Slides from Visualizing the Past
I presented at Visualizing the Past on Google Geo technologies and their use for historical visualization. I didn't get to the part on the Google Visualization API, but the links are in the slides.
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