Archive for the ‘maps’ Category

Geolocated websites on the go?

Monday, June 22nd, 2009

Want to quickly access location based websites, while on the go?

Then enter:

m.nearby.org.uk

into your mobile browser.

Very privative, only goes to the nearby location links service, and a few pages on geograph. But between them give access to a fair number of (UK esp) websites.

Disclaimer: Only tested on a Google Android phone so far. Doesn’t seem to pickup GPS position (yet). To be honest surprised not found something like this in the Android Market.

If works out will probably add direct links to other websites, and possibly make it configurable so can choose which sites to show :)

Posted in Experimental, Google Maps, Location Links, Nearby, geo, maps | No Comments »

Geo Photo Websites

Monday, October 27th, 2008

In my travels I’ve come accorss many different photo websites, many of which I would like to explore further but dont have the time at the time. So as somewhere to keep note:

Geo Photo Websites

Any I have missed or should checkout? Let me know in comments…

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Posted in geo, maps | No Comments »

Geograph: Watching the Fire build

Wednesday, August 13th, 2008

Coverage Animation As we near the Million mark on photos uploaded to Geograph British Isles, the coverage is really building up; and the project has definitly matured from just capturing a photo of every square (but that is still continuing!), to capturing each square in ‘depth’. We display the current coverage on the site as a depth map, but here we present some animations to watch the progress.

There are a number of interesting artefacts in this, if you are quick you can follow people as the hike long distance paths, but you can also see the people making concerted efforts to knock of hectads.

Of course the raw frames are available under Creative Commons, and a bonus prize to who can make an good mashup of these. The animations include both weekly frames, and monthly versions (labelled quick)

(the fire reference)

Depth Key

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Posted in Coverage Maps, Geograph, maps, update | No Comments »

Towards a standard Geotag Icon?

Sunday, March 2nd, 2008

Geotag DemoJust spotted a proposal for a standard icon to represent geotagged content, the homepage is at geotagicons.com, can’t say a big fan of the icon itself, but the idea is great.

<OT>Was sort of involved in trying to find a standard icon for GeoRSS (in fact they use my icon as the favicon ;) ), but not sure (in hindsight!) if that a good idea, really it just saying this is a geotagged feed, which really shouldn’t mean much different to the end user than the standard feed icon. If their feed reader is geoenabled - great, if not tough, although it can help people specifically looking for geo-content.</OT>

Anyway to try the waters, have enabled it for geotagged content on this blog, see the PhotoSpot category for example :)

(via)

Posted in Coordinate Converter, Nearby, maps | 4 Comments »

Where in Great Britain are people searching?

Saturday, March 1st, 2008

Great Britain usage Coverage map :: NearbyNearby Coordinate Converter >>>
Following on from the Coverage map for Google Earth Layer usage, remembered I been keeping a log from the Coordinate Converter specifically for mapping (but only for GB) , but never actully got round to it, until now that is! Click the image for a full 1px per km version!

British Isles searching Coverage map :: Geograph
Update: Inspired by the above, heres one for the Geograph Search, ok so actully its for the British Isles!
<<<Geograph Searches

Posted in Coordinate Converter, UK, maps, online maps | 1 Comment »

Where in the world are people looking? part 2

Saturday, March 1st, 2008

Following part 1 yesterday, have now plotted some maps per individual service.

Flash Earth Layer

Conclusions

  1. Google Earth does request a link for the initial view on startup - that point in the Atlantic.
  2. I guess North American installs have two slightly different default placemarks; has it changed, or maybe Canada gets a different one?
  3. But that doesnt explain the lines from there - people must have their links set to periodically refresh?
  4. Germany likes FlashEarth (or rather people like looking at Germany with FlashEarth link enabled)
  5. Many people leave the links open even when not in use - e.g. the British Isles links show worldwide usage, notably over Russia.
  6. MGRS notably has high usage in two areas.
  7. The Far east likes to know what direction they facing.

Update: In a total forehead slapping momont realised these unprojected whole world images, are exactly what is used in GroundOverlays, so the the pages now include links to view the higher resolution images directly in Google Earth, duh!

Example: View In Google Earth (don’t forget to try adjusting the tranparency slider!) [Update, to fix broken link, sorry!]

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Posted in API, Coverage Maps, Experimental, Google Earth, KML, Nearby, PHP, Web Services, maps, network-link, online maps | No Comments »

Export all MyMaps to Google Earth

Monday, January 7th, 2008

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Update, 2nd August 2008

Suddenly it seems that the KML export from My Maps no longer pages like it used to, basically making this script redundant - which was always the intention!

So if your file has under 1000 features, then just use the link ‘View in Google Earth’ to get all the data. If you want the
actual data you can change the ‘output=nl’ to ‘output=kml’ to get the KML data rather than a Network Link to it.

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Oh dear, I think I should stay away from the Google Maps Group, following a post (about saving directions to MyMaps) on there a few days ago, realised the KML export is paginated, but there doesnt seem to be a way to get at the following pages directly. It flummoxed me for a while until guessed at the params to get the additional pages, success.

Then a post on there today, made me realise others are coming against this problem, so in traditional hackers** style, here is a little utility to create a multi page network link wrapper…

Export all MyMaps to KML

** follow the link for the definition I mean

Update: 18th Apr, we now download the first page of the map, 1) to get the number of items per page, it seems the link itself is no longer reliable, and 2) it means we can grab the title automatically :)
(note the download is discarded so I dont keep a copy of the data itself)

Posted in Google Earth, Google Maps, KML, maps, network-link | 16 Comments »

The British Isles is burning!

Sunday, November 4th, 2007

It has to be said that when we started the Geograph British Isles project we certainly didn’t think it would grow quite a quickly as it has, nor that we could get such a submission rate, particulaly in adding depth - adding photos to a square once it was turned red on the map. Well to this end we recently introduced depth maps which colour the map based on the number of photos in the square. A preview is available here, but click the image for the normal Geograph map viewer in this new mode. Just goes to show how well photographed some areas are, but also a lot of the country only has the first geograph in the square, so much more depth to go!

Update: View as a time-based animation.
(includes raw frames as would like someone to make a better presentantion of this!)

btw, as I am colour-blind and unable to come up with the colour scheme, can only thank who ever created the colour scheme for CIS. (A very interesting package - worth playing with just for the data it has - I can provide a file to load geograph depth into it if interest!)

(yes the title is a tribute to this)

Posted in Geograph, maps, online maps | 1 Comment »

Building the UK one block at a time!

Monday, August 20th, 2007

Ever played Tetris? Know your geographical areas? If so then its time to play Statetris,

“Statetris is an interesting game mixing aspects of the popular game ‘Tetris’ and geography. Instead of positioning the typical Tetris blocks, you position states/countries at their proper location.”

…even better a UK version has just been released!

As the project diversifies to new areas, the creators are facing some interesting challenges to cope with our diverse world. For example the UK is a problem as its so tall, so doesn’t fit on screen as nice as some other areas, not to mention our confusing and changing geography! The Netherlands on the other hand is quite small, so has capitals added to add interest.

What’s your best time?

Posted in UK, geo, maps, online maps | No Comments »