Archive for the ‘RSS’ Category

Google indexes ‘Related Maps’ aka GeoRSS feeds

Saturday, June 27th, 2009

Just stumbled on this today, and not seen it noted anywhere yet, but (recently?) Google has exposed its index of ‘Related Maps’ on Google Maps.

If you open the ‘Show Search Options’ option, there is an entry ‘Related Maps’ – this mainly seems to be GeoRSS feeds its found out in the wild, but does include maps from ‘My Maps’, but strangely not KML files (which are mostly indexed in User-Created Content I guess)

Oh and if you where wondering, yes did find this when checking something out on geograph. (Note the link at the top to view Related Maps)

Still waiting for the day when we get good access to Googles GeoIndex, the AJAX Search API gives very limited (32 results max, and no urls! oh and doesnt include all the options included in the ‘options’ dropdown on Google Maps either), feels so this data could/should be exposed more?

More Maps.Live.com inc KML2RSS

Tuesday, October 16th, 2007

The people at Live.com (Microsoft!) have been making some huge improvements to their map system of late, adding lots of data in both 2D and 3D. maps.live.com has long been good in the UK as it uses imagery from getmapping which is at least 2m resolution, but 25cm in many places. It’s now been backed up by lots of Birds Eye imagry which are static photos taken at an angle, which is great for visualising cities. How these are available in the 3D view (which is currently downloading so havent tried it…) ! Also now supported is visualling KML, GPX and GeoRSS files.
Anyway that was kinda rambley, the point of this post was to highlight small feature I found by accident and not sure it been highlighted on other blogs, namly you can subscribe to a RSS feed for many collections, including a KML or GPX file directly, effectively giving a KML to (Geo)RSS converter!

Example: Recent Geographs KML file as GeoRSS

(looks like we can input any KML/KMZ url in there!)

RSS & GeoRSS to KML

Monday, April 30th, 2007

Spured on by comments on Stefan’s Ogle Earth blog, have created this little page as a wrapper to the excellent service provided by geonames.org to automatically convert a RSS feed to KML. It also does RSS->GeoRSS and GeoRSS->KML.

http://www.nearby.org.uk/rss-to-kml.php

Hopefully should make it a bit easier to load a (Geo)RSS feed into Google Earth in the style of a RSS feed – it auto updates.

… really need more to talk about, been kinda quiet of late…

Feeding GeoRSS and KML content to your Google Maps API based Map!

Thursday, March 22nd, 2007

All hail the new GGeoXml class, just introduced into the Google Maps API! Now you can easily (usually 1 or 2 lines!) add content that you have in KML/Z or GeoRSS to a Google Map in your API page.

This is the same functionality that has been on the main Maps site (well the GeoRSS support is new!) for a while: nice for this to migrate to the API.

TIP: to try it don’t forget to use &v=2.x in your api loader to get the latest version that includes the GGeoXml.

To celebrate here is a Geograph Demo – following some testing will make it an official feature.

GeoRSS for nearby blog!

Saturday, February 17th, 2007

In one of those duh! moments, I suddenly realised the ironicness of the nearby blog not being GeoRSS enabled.

So now thanks to the wonderfully simple but powerful GeoPress WordPress extension, feeds are now GeoRSS talking, however this has only really been of any use (which probably why not done before) on the recent PhotoSpot mini series where the blog post is tied to a location!

It also allows a minimap to be embeded into the post, I’m not so sure on benefit of that in my case so have put one in the last post to see how it looks…

Also taken the opportunity to install Akismet plugin to help trap spam, I have my own very simple capatcha that means I only get about 4-5 a week anyway.

Update: also found you can get a (Geo)RSS feed of a particular category, so can could subscribe to the photospot series.

RSS to geoRSS and Google Earth

Thursday, May 11th, 2006

Over at geonames a new RSS-to-GeoRSS converter has been added, whats significant is that because its at geonames it has access to the worldwide gazetteer, and therefere can attempt to geocode just about any RSS feed. Of particular interest is that it will maintain any georss in the original (all there flavours) and has a KML output, so it will visualise just about any (geo)RSS feed in Google Earth! (and will even work via a network link!)

Read about it here in the geonames blog.

Google Dables RSS feeds…

Sunday, April 2nd, 2006

I don’t know how many, if any, keep an eye on the Google Dables page, but you can now you can now subscribe to the RSS feed! It is also available in a number of other formats, see the Google Dables page for more info.

GeoRSS for geograph.org.uk

Tuesday, March 7th, 2006

all I wanted to say is added basic support for the simple GeoRSS to the geograph.org.uk RSS syndication feeds. While there have also combined it with PhotoRSS to create GeoPhotoRSS ;)