In preparation for today's talk, I wanted to catch up on the latest developments, partly by reading documentation, but most of all by building a prototype to teach myself the heart of materials. For a while now, I've been depending on geobloggers.com to provide a way for displaying geotagged pictures. Although geobloggers is a wonderful service that allows users to look at the wide range of pictures that have been geotagged, I still wanted a way to embed maps right in my own web pages. The Google Maps API provide an official mechanism to do so. (I will want to demo tomorrow what I have assumed implicitly here: that Google maps and Google Earth have opened up a whole new way of storytelling to millions of people.)

I have written a MoinMoin macro called FlickrMap, which does a search (using any of the parameters specified in flickr.photos.search and places them on a Google map. For instance

[[FlickrMap(user_id='48600101146@N01',tags="geotagged",tag_mode="all")]]

generates a map of all my pictures with the tag 'geotagged'

[[FlickrMap(user_id='48600101146@N01',tags="geotagged,2195hearstfood",tag_mode="all")]]

generates a map of all my pictures with both geotagged and 2195hearstfood (a tag I use to indicate a restaurant around my work place). See the ATDP talk page for an example of map generated by the FlickrMap macro.

There are lots of improvements to be made (see below), but the macro is a start. Things I imagine doing with it include:

• mapping only the flower pictures from a certain time period

• displaying my vacation pictures

• regularly drawing maps of things that I've seen

This previous list seems a bit underwhelming though I think that other applications will come to mind as I start to implement specific applications.

Things to do next on the mapping front include:

• do much better error handling, including checking for valid lat/lon, downtime in the API

• figure out how to center the map to where the pictures actually are

• figure out how to pick an optimal zoom level for the map

• allow the embedding of more than one map per page (That means wrapping the Javascript so that it can nicely embedded with multiple copies of itself) (I should refer to Coding For Portability, Part 1 » Thirteenth Parallel for help on these issues)

• recast the map as an AJAX application where the user can dynamically change the parameters of the search.

• make a version of the macro for pushing my pictures Yahoo maps and for Google Earth.

I have been experimenting with Yahoo maps and do have a map of some of my Flickr images that works some of the time (Yahoo map of my Flickr images) but have been running into the as-yet unresolved timeout issue.

I have started to tie Google Maps and Google Earth together. I wrote a Python script that reads the google map URL on the clipboard, writes a destination KML file, and sends Google earth to the destination. This GoogleMapUrlToKmlPy script allows me to "drive" Google earth to the same location as the center point of a Google map.

Here are some other links that are interesting:

• Google Earth KML Documentation documents KML 2.0, the XML format behind Google Earth. Nice to see it since several months ago, I had to reverse engineer the KML to make things work.

• Google Code: Google Earth KML Tutorial teaches us about how Google earth can send back info to a server, which can then reply with KML: a possible application is using Google Earth as a dynamic viewer of geotagged Flickr pictures. When you zoom to a particular spot on the globe, a query is sent to geobloggers to fetch pictures within view. (I see that geobloogers.com is already using some type of refreshing by studying . Yee the feed for my latest geotagged photos

• Keyhole Community: Viewing list of forums -- the Keyhole BBS system is recast under the Google umbrella.

• Google Earth Hacks - Lots of downloads, information and hacks for Google Earth.. You can see what folks are doing with Google Earth.

• Mapping Hacks covers mapping experimentation over a large set of applications and tools.