I was this close to posting soldierant’s Gobbledy Gook map, but, well… I guess I wanted to make a point with his user experience map, done in collaboration with the smart folks at Experience Dynamics.

Take a careful look at the role of your competitors and a user’s expectations and goals. Yeah, we’ve all got some work to do.

Too bad the free seminar schedule hasn’t been updated for 2006.

Update: I forgot to properly credit Ryan Eby for pointing this out to me.

design, design success, diagram, experience dynamics, map, soliderant, usability, user centered design, user experience

I’m a big fan of the WP Geo plugin, but I want more.

My biggest complaint is that I want to insert coordinates using Google Maps or MultiMap URLs, rather than insert them in the modified story editor. So I wrote a bit of code that reads through the URLs in a post, finds the “maps.google” or “multimap.com” URLs, fishes the latitude and longitude out of them, and adds some geocoding tags to the body of the post.

Take a look at how it works with these posts in my archive…

You should see one or more blocks of links like the following (from my Osceola Weekend post):

geolocation: geo:lat=44.006336, geo:lon=-71.547260, geotagged, geolocation:44.006336,-71.547260 geobloggers

Go ahead and click the “geobloggers” link. I could have added these links using the old Geo plugin, but I still would have had to insert the coordinates separately. Actually, that brings up a good point: my code also inserts post metadata in the same format the Geo plugin uses, so I can take advantage of all the good functions it has, like the one that inserts the “<meta name=“ICBM” content=“44.006336, -71.547260” />” tag in the header of this post (caveat: I had to disable the add_action code in Geo that feeds the postmeta table, as it was conflicting my code).

I’m releasing this now, to start some public discussion, but please recognize that it’s a very early beta.

Download: bsuite_geocode.zip
Install: place unzipped “bsuite_geocode.php” file in your wp-content/plugins folder and activate it via the WP control panel. See the WordPress Codex for more detail.
Use: write posts as usual, adding links to Google Maps or MultiMap as appropriate. Links to those sites that have latitude and longitude components will be used to geocode the post.

Example of a working URL:

http://maps.google.com/maps?ll=19.355507,-155.072365&spn=.191780,.318003&t=k&hl=en

Example of a URL that won’t work (note how there’s no “ll=”):

http://maps.google.com/maps?q=decker+canyon+rd,+malibu+california&spn=0.019857,0.039750&hl=en

I’ve got a lot of features and uses in mind, so consider this only a start. Please post bugs and suggestions in the comments.

Also, see these previous posts on geolocating the news or geolocating everything or just search the archives to understand why I’m so excited about things like this.

tags: beta, blog, blogmap, blogmaps, blog gis, geo, geocoding, geolocation, geotagging, gis, google maps, lat, latitude and longitude, lon, map, maps, mapping, metadata, multimap, plugin, plugins, wordpress, wordpress plugin, wp plugin

We laugh at the single minded foolishness of the Axe Gang in Kung Fu Hustle Jackie Chan’s The Legend of Drunken Master, but do we laugh when we see it in our own security policies? To intelligence staffers and border guards working under a policy of hammers, all the world is a nail. Here’s an example:

In August 2001, US Customs Agents stopped and searched Ahmad El Maati, a Kuwaiti-born Canadian and a truck driver crossing the US-Canadian border at Buffalo, NY. The search uncovered a photocopied map of a Canadian government complex with “coded” numbers marking certain areas. Customs agents claimed they had found a “terrorist map,” and somehow El Maati found himself in prisons in Syria and Egypt, where he claims he was tortured for information about the map.

An article in the Globe and Mail reports:

in the past four years, the “terrorist map” has taken on almost mythic qualities. It has figured in various leaked accounts describing thwarted al-Qaeda plots to blow up targets in Ottawa, including the Parliament Buildings and the U.S. embassy.

But…actually…

the map — scrawled numbers and all — was in fact produced and distributed by the Canadian federal government. It is simply a site map, given out to help visitors to Tunney’s Pasture, a sprawling complex of government buildings in Ottawa, find their way around.

Atomic Energy of Canada and Health Canada Virus labs that caused so much suspicion have been gone from Tunney’s Pasture since 2000 and 1999.

Even better, the trucking company El Maati was working for explains that the truck was a replacement while his regular truck was in for maintenance. The map and much of the cab’s other contents likely belonged to an Ottawa-based employee who regularly made deliveries in the capital region, including to Tunney’s Pasture.

Summary: A Canadian citizen is held, questioned, imprisoned, and tortured for driving a company truck that happens to have a publicly distributed parking map of a government complex to which anybody might expect the truck to make deliveries.

Thanks to Jonathan Crowe’s Map Room for the pointer.

tags: ahmad el maati, border guards, buffalo ny, canadian, canadian border, egyptian prison, failed intellegence, imprisoned, intelligence error, intelligence errors, interrogated, map, mistake, ottawa ontario, parking map, syrian prison, torture, tortured, us customs

It would reasonably appear that here in the US, there’s only one map site: good ol’ Google. But until Google adds maps for countries other than the US, Canada, and UK, the rest of the world will have to look elsewhere. Enter the UK competitor: Multimap.com has been serving the world outside the bubble since 1996. From their self description:

Key features include street-level maps of the United Kingdom, Europe, and the US; road maps of the world; door-to-door travel directions; aerial photographs; and local information.

In short, it’s probably the best place to point any random set of coordinates. Example: my story about the Chernobyl tour should probably have included this street map of the region. (Yes, Google will now give me a low resolution satellite photo of the reactor, but photos and maps offer different value for different uses.)

My only complaint is that the service lacks the AJAX features that make Google Maps so great. But that might be changing. A post at The Map Room tells of a new feature for UK regions: a map overlay follows the mouse on aerial photos. Take a look at this example. Nice trick, eh?

tags: aerial photographs, chernobyl, google, map, map site, mapping, maps, maps of the world, multimap, online maps, rest of the world, road maps

Geolocation by GPS my be the most straightforward approach, but we mustn’t forget the other ways to get lat/lon coordinates.

All current cell phones support aGPS positioning to comply with federal E-911 mandates, but not all phones make it easy for the user to get that information out of them. Still, some do and GPS-enabled moblogging is becoming common in Asia and Europe, and there’s at least a public proof of concept going in the US.

Then there’s ethernet/WiFi. Plazes is a kind of social networking application that allows users identify their location based on their network fingerprint. Using the assumption that networks are typically stationary, Plazes then associates lat/lon coordinates to that network based on information submitted by user who ‘discovered’ the network. Plazes’ real trick, however, is to show me who else is online nearby. Problem is, I live and work in New Hampshire where I appear to be the only user online north of Virginia.

But the Plazes folks didn’t invent the concept of using network information to identify location. If I wasn’t so lazy I’d find the story I read a couple of years ago that mentioned it, but this June 2004 article in New Scientist tells the story of one such effort: PlaceLab (extra coverage at Engadget and ExtremeGPS). A Google search turned up Herecast and now Engadget is reporting on AllwaysOnGPS, a replacement GPS driver (for Windows PCs) that mixes GPS and WiFi derived location data to provide the most accurate info despite changing coverage.

Finally, one of my favorite solutions is to use Earthcomber in manual mode. The Palm application allows you to scroll around a map and mark locations as though they were waypoints in a GPS. And though that’s neat, it’s the mapping features that make it a winner. It’s far better than those lousy tourist guides in cities. I used to go to AAA for maps and guides in preparation for a trip, but now I check Earthcomber for area maps and updates.

Technorati Tags: agps, cell phone, coordinates, geolocation, gps, lattitude, longitude, map, mapping, maps, moblogging, network, networking application, palm, picture phone, social networking, wifi

Jonathan Crowe points out this Risks In Global Filmmaking Map by Aon, the entertainment industry insurance company. Go view the PDF or a full-size PNG for all the details.

Technorati Tags: aon, industry, entertainment, filmmaking, insurance company, map, risk

The above image is my followup to my Nevada Test Site Tour post from last month and comes courtesy of Adam Schneider’s very useful GPS Visualizer (you really need to see it full-sized, though). I still don’t have a cable to connect the ancient Magellan GPS I used to a computer, so I manually entered the waypoints I marked into the form and selected a few options, and viola.

Here are the points so you can have your own fun (the image above doesn’t include ‘A’):

name,desc,latitude,longitude
A,Atomic Testing Museum,36.114444444444445,-115.14916666666667
B,Main Gate,36.645833333333336,-116.00194444444445
C,Mess Hall,36.66083333333333,-115.99722222222222
D,HazMat Spill Test Facility,36.801944444444445,-115.96944444444445
E,Railroad Bridge Test,36.79944444444444,-115.93666666666667
F,Control Point,36.93444444444444,-116.05111111111111
G,Bilby Crater (208KT),37.06027777777778,-116.0225
H,Ice Cap,37.08083333333334,-116.04555555555555
I,Sedan Crater (100KT),37.177499999999995,-116.04833333333333
J,Aircraft Anti-terrorism Ground Training Site,37.055,-116.10166666666666
K,House Damaged By Effects Test,37.04555555555555,-116.07833333333333
L,House Damaged By Effects Test,37.04222222222222,-116.07

Click on the links to go to Google’s high-res images for each area.

Related: Vegas Guide Part Three: Nukes and Moon Hoaxes and Chernobyl Tour.

Technorati Tags: gps, las vegas, map, mercury, nevada, nuclear

A an old John Udell piece at InfoWorld hints at GeoURLs, but the GoeURL site is down, and has been for a while. The concept sounds interesting: you mark pages with coordinates, then use GIS to map those pages to geographic locations, finding pages and people of interest along the way.

To join GeoURL, you add this kind of metadata to your homepage:

<META name=“ICBM” content=“42.93564,-72.27239”>
<META name=“DC.title” content=“Jon Udell”>

I got interested in this sort of thing (geolocation) a while back, and I haven’t quite given up.

Update: Bjørn is right, GeoURL is back and I should have updated this post ages ago. Look here for more about geolocation on MaisonBisson. …And Bjørn’s website is worth a look too.

Technorati Tags: geographic, geolocation, gis, map, metadata, semantic web