wanderingken.com

It’s official. I’m moving. The fine folks at Lonely Planet have convinced me to abandon good old Edmonton and join their innovation lab in Sydney, Australia.

I’ve been working remotely with Lonely Planet for 18 months now, helping geo-tag their vast array of travel content and building a platform for expressing this content in spatial ways. You can see it already at work on lonelyplanet.tv, Hotels & Hostels, the lonelyplanet.com world guide, and our facebook app. As of June, I’ll be joining them on-site as digital mapping manager and looking to push this work to maturity as well as finding new and interesting ways to provide location-based services for Lonely Planet’s intrepid traveler community.

As for Spatial North, it’s going into a bit of hibernation but I’ll be leaving enough lights on to keep Quikmaps ticking, so if you’re a fan, don’t worry, keep doodling!

Wow, I like TwittEarth. I’m not big on the monster icons, but, hey, the experience is still very cool.

TwitterVision has a 3D live tweet map too, using Poly9’s (great studio in Quebec City) FreeEarth application.

I’d love to see a trip animated in FreeEarth. Perhaps a mashup with Dopplr? It would seem easily possible.

Update - Turns out panoIds are only unique to a session, and so my example is broken and no longer useful. Unfortunate, really.

Let the fun begin! Street view support is baked into the latest (unofficial, 2.103) version of the Google Maps API. Check out Google Maps Mania and Mapperz for some good coverage and a couple examples. If you’re a developer, Mike Williams, as always, has dug through the code and produced some speculative documentation.

Street view support is essentially comprised of 3 classes: GStreetviewOverlay, which creates a tile layer overlay for areas having street views, GStreetviewClient, to look up panoramas by lat/lng, etc.., and GStreetviewPanorama, which inserts a flash movie into the DOM and manages points of view.

I can imagine plenty of applications for this (walking tours anyone? Can we make this work with GDirections?), but here’s a simple one for now - since a street view panorama is simply a flash movie initialized via flashvars, you can actually set up a panorama without a map, like so:

Getting your hands on the right parameters is rather cumbersome, so I’ve written up a quick little app that’ll permalink a view for you, similar to maps.google.com, plus give you some iframe code to embed. Check it out. (Disclaimer: You may encounter intermittent JavaScript errors on info windows in IE. Sadly, I can’t hack it because the bug is in code dynamically served by Google.)

A little heads up on how the example works, since I had to go off the radar a little: A view is defined by panorama id, yaw (rotation in degrees around vertical axis), pitch (rotation in degrees around horizontal axis), and zoom level. If you’ve got these parameters, you can set the view using streetviewclient.getPanoramaById and panorama.setLocationAndPOVFromServerResponse. The API has a routine to grab yaw, pitch, and zoom (getPOV), so that part’s easy, but there’s no routine to grab the current panorama id. It’s stored on an exposed object, though, so this little hack does the trick, at least until v2.104:

Enjoy!

I had the good fortune of addressing the Minnesota GIS / LIS Consortium today at their 2007 conference, pontificating on matters I termed ‘GIS 2.0? Neogeography and the Social Mapping Movement.’

As promised to those of you in attendance, and for those of you who weren’t in attendance but would like to see the presentation materials anyway, here’s the link.

Enjoy!

… is launched! I’ve been working with the fine folks at Lonely Planet on the application for a while, and it’s great to see our little baby toddle out the door. If you’re wanting to check it out (and you should be!), here’s the link. Better yet, add it to your Facebook account.

We’ve built lots of ways for you to explore the world of travel, all based on a Google map, including travel videos, destination info, flight prices / booking, hotel / hostel reservations, places to eat, drink, and see, and, finally, new to the facebook app, trips. Click on the trips tab, or on ‘Create a new trip’, and you can create your dream trip, report on a trip you’ve already done, or document a trip in progress. Your trip will be visible to anyone exploring Lonely Planet’s maps on Facebook and elsewhere, and will be especially highlighted for all your Facebook friends. As an added bonus, you can query where all your travel buddies are today, have been, or want to go.

We’ve included all the regular Facebook application goodies, including a box for your profile (where am I now? Where have I been?), updates to news feeds, and a little link either under your profile photo or on the left-hand applications list.

Anyway, that’s enough of my wordy descriptions - go add the application for yourself!

We’ve been humming along in semi-stealth mode but this post will make it official: We’ve relaunched Geobirds, lifting the curtain on a massive facelift and redesign. Taking cues from Facebook, among others, and utilizing the artistic talents of Dave Gillis, Geobirds now features the world’s first localized bird guide, a Google Earth layer, an activity log organized by locality, and tabbed navigation. Those are the big changes. Other new features include user profile pics, browsing sighting photos, submitting bird lists all in one go, contextualized related content, and, if you live in the U.S., sending bird alerts to your mobile phone. BirdBrain has also undergone an overhaul.

By far the most significant feature, however, is friends / contacts - you can now add fellow Geobirds members as your friends and use these connections to track the birding activities of the people you care about.

I won’t take any more time here, other than to post the obligatory screenshot. At this point you need to stop reading this launch post and start browsing the actual site. Enjoy!

Great news to report on the Spatial North business front: Spatial North has entered into an agreement with Total Trucking Management Ltd. (TTML) to provide the web-facing portion of TTML’s TripDAWG asset tracking and fuel tax calculation system. We’ll be building a custom product on top of TTML’s existing tracking, but not web-enabled, infrastructure.

According to TTML,

TripDAWG (D-A-W-G stands for Data Acquisition with GPS) uses a GPS receiver and a mini-computer to collect the distance for IRP, IFTA, mileage tax returns and off-road fuel rebate applications.

Its purpose is to save you time and money while improving the accuracy of your information.

Essentially, Total Trucking places custom GPS receivers on trucking fleets, which record timed position measurements, using cellular networks to transfer the data back to a centrally managed repository. These measurements are then used to calculate distance traveled in various juristictions, for managment and tax calculation purposes.

We’ve been going hard at Lonely Planet Labs lately, adding functionality, data, and capacity to LPMaps in an effort to get some pieces out the door this summer. That, combined with our upcoming GeoBirds relaunch and my recent engagement (just got the real diamond ring yesterday, and will post a photo soon:), has resulted in a little lag on posts here at wanderingken. Rest assured, there will be plenty to announce over the next few weeks, so keep posted.

All of this brings us to the raison d’etre for this post: GeoBirds’ BirdBrain is the Adobe Site of the Day for today, June 28. If you check quickly, you might also find us on the front page.

GeoBirds was developed in Flash, formerly a Macromedia and now an Adobe product, and we used Fireworks, also formerly a Macromedia and now and Adobe product, for most of our image editing tasks.

We’re rather proud of our inclusion (award, I suppose), but we won the award for the legacy BirdBrain, and we’ve actually got a much nicer version in the works, to launch with the rest of GeoBirds 2.0. Check it out and send us some feedback!

In late March, my trusty old Toshiba Tecra, following 3 1/2 years of reasonably healthy service (minus a burned-out hardrive and that time I spilled water on the keyboard), decided its circuits were too old and therefore the screen should never turn on. And although I managed to restore usefulness by taking it apart down to the last component, putting it back together but leaving out most of the screws in the base, and giving it a chiropractic adjustment (a slight twist on the base and a couple bumps on the table), the necessity of hourly such adjustments left me in need of a new machine.

And so, thought I, “Macs now run Windows”, and promptly decided that the machine for me was an Apple MacBook. 2 machines in 1 and I can now finally test in Safari. The problem? Apple was supposedly shipping a major operating system upgrade in a month or two, and who wants to buy a machine just before that happens? Well, it turns out my decision last week to purchase one anyway was wise, as Apple announced yesterday that OS X Leopard, the new operating system, would be delayed until October, because Apple needed to borrow key engineering and QA resources in order to deliver the Apple iPhone. Now I’m quite surprised Apple would make this admission publicly, as it suggests rather poor foresight, but then again, this is the Web 2.0 and successful Web 2.0 companies are transparent and open with their users, no?

In any case, I now have a 13″ MacBook, booting both Mac OS X Tiger and Windows XP, and I like it.

We’ve been up and running for a month now, operating in stealth mode, but I can now finally make it public: lonelyplanet.tv is live!

LonelyPlanet.tv is a new video sharing website for travelers, produced by, of course, Lonely Planet, with Google maps implementation and integration performed by yours truly. LonelyPlanet.tv is the first Lonely Planet site to take my mapping work live.

As part of the launch, we’ve widgetized the maps — here’s a little map of the most watched videos in Europe. Click on the markers to head over to the main site and watch the videos.