A Great example of community mapping and the immediacy of tools like the My Maps feature of Google Maps is this map by Oliver Williams who is collating images, videos and reports relating to the current river floods in England.
When I looked this maps was less than a hour old !!
Not only is this a potentially powerful way of communicating up-to-date information quickly, it is also great at telling the human story of such events.
Written and Submitted from the Google Office, London.
Great posting at the TUAW detailing the Zaprudering of the iPhone commercials which are running in the states this week. Zaprudering for those not steeped is conspiracy theory is the process of analysing meaning in the detail of a film, and derives from the famous Zapruder film of the JFK assassination.
iPhone hype and excitement is a the level now where any information about the features of the phone is blogged within minutes to an excited world, and where misinformation can cost billions to the investors of Apple.
So it’s interesting that one of the key features demonstrated is the Maps application, powered by Google, and its a great demo of what makes geographic information so valuable.
The user interface of course is great making full use of the gesture support, the application appears fully integrated with the rest of the phones applications, and most important of all for an LBS application, even though the phone is not location aware, the information presented is actionable – the vital ingredient in any LBS application..
Find a restaurant in SF and then call to make the reservation, and as TUAW points out, the restaurant in the commercial is real and is getting many calls because of their instant fame – a pretty good test of data quality.
Written and submitted from home, using my home 802.11 network.
As a follow up to the Google Developer Day event last week , Silicon.com has a great article on the adoption of mash-up culture at the BBC and their brilliant backstage project.
For other content owning organisations BBC Backstage sets a great example highlighting the way that forward thinking licensing of information can really aid the innovation process and develop truly useful new content driven sites.
During my time at the OS we made no secret of the fact that Backstage was an inspiration to the OpenSpace project.
Just imagine the mashups which could be created if other content owners in the public sector were as open.. indeed in just this last week, we are beginning to see a more innovative approach to publishing content with the reporting of Brents use of google maps and the Maritime and Coastguard Agency decision to publish some of it’s charts in KML.
A point I made during last weeks London Keynote (about 30 mins in, but its well worth listening to the great Chris di Bona) is that there are still huge amounts of geographic information still to be liberated from existing corporate silos, in addition to the user generated content we are beginning to provide the tools to create.
When you think about it, this is less a technology issue that it has even been – this is now really about information policy..
Written and Submitted from the Google Office, London.