• YouTube and Checkout for the non-profit
  (tags: non-profit)

I’ve just spent an hour or two (Saturday morning would be the quietest time for traffic to my blogs) updating this blog, BiNS and The Kitten Channel to the new Wordpress release 2.3. No major problems, but it is still squeaky bum time.

The Google sitemap generator plugin requires an upgrade to verion 3.0, and and plugins or themes that use the old catergories database tables directly (and not the recommended API) will fail. Unfortunately that, at least for the moment, includes the map function of the GeoMashup plugin I’ve been using on BiNS. I think I could fix it, but as it is well supported by the author I’ll wait for the official fix.

Haven’t noticed anything else wrong tho’, and the plugin update checker in the new version will be great.

• Try This - social answers
  With Try This users can ask a question like, “Where can I get good sushi in Arlington, Virginia?” and the community make suggestions. Users can comment on the item. The community can also vote on the items they like. Users can also search for items in the
  (tags: SocialMedia geekery work)

With the current news story about the two young tennis pros suspended over their social networking profiles, it struck me as odd that: the basic tenant of not putting stuff online you aren’t happy for anyone to see hasn’t got through and they they were using Bebo.

Danah Boyd did some interesting thinking on social class and social networking, based on particularily US soldiers and Facebook and MySpace. Basically she put forward the theory that the “officer class” used FB and the others MySpace. Does Britian have a third divide?

Stephen Ireland the Man City footballer has been revealed recently as calling himself “Daddy Dick” and saying “football is shit, why did I end up doin[sic] it?” - again on a Bebo profile.

Bebo seems to be statistically popular in UK (old ref I know), but it seems to exist under the radar of the media. MySpace is for bands, FB for the media and Bebo for who?

• Abusing Goodwill
  On how companies can hover up your online creativity, for nothing.
  (tags: Media2.0 Geekery blogs flickr)

I’ve just let other people see my new project up your end, (amazing what popping a url in your facebook status can do) which is a little toy for geographically mapping Birmingham things on the interweb. It uses geotagging, and here’s a little explanation of how it works.

Other people’s feeds

Although some sites, such as Flickr, will pump out geotagged feeds they aren’t necessarily in the correct format for overlaying on a Google map (there are three competing geotag XML formats for a start). Luckily, the Location Extractor operator in Yahoo Pipes will sort that out, as well as generating geo information from posts in feeds that don’t expressly geotag (upcoming.org’s feeds are a good one for this as venues have addresses). While you’re Yahoo Piping, you mas as well filter in some other ways: I restrict some of the longer feeds to ten posts, and the Flickr pictures to those that contain a Latitude of 52 (Birmingham in the UK is at 52°N, the many other Birminghams aren’t).

Your own feed (if you use Wordpress)

You can dispense with the whole fiddle of Piping your feeds if you are creating them of course, and you can geotag items accurately without having to oddly list the full address of what you’re talking about. Birmingham: It’s Not Shit is based on Wordpress, and as such there are plugins to do the job for you. I’m using Geo and GeoMashup (which will generate Google Maps with your posts on with just a quick inline tag, see BiNS). I first tried the seemingly more powerful GeoPress plugin (also available for Moveable Type blogs), but despite working well as a tool to use it wasn’t generating valid XML for me.

Geo places Latitude and Longitude boxes just below your post editor, but also allows you to store locations and select them from a drop-down menu. Locations are stored in the plugin options page (which will also set a default location - your house? The centre of town? - for posts you don’t expressly tag):

The only problem with this is that until you build up a database you’ll be spending ages finding the geolocation for each post - and there aren’t really any simple web-tools that do it for you.

Although, GeoMashup will place a handy Google map on your post editing page, as well as a Find location box - you’ll have to click on the map to reveal the lat and long for the position you find and then copy and paste them into the Location fields higher up.

Fill your stored location database, you’ll need it!

Building the map

Pop over to Google Maps and get yourself an API key, you’ll also find plenty of example code. View Source at this page to see the bare bones of the code up your end uses. For overlaying RSS feed information it’s quite simple:

Use GGeoVml to load the feed:

var geoXml = new GGeoXml("http://www.birminghamitsnotshit.co.uk/feed/");

And then add.Overlay to place it on the map as you draw it:

map.addOverlay(geoXml);

You can add as many overlays as you like, although it is slow to draw too many - that’s why the toggle buttons are handy. You also waste processing power and time by placing markers off the viewable map - that’s why filtering the feeds was useful earlier.

And so…

I’m not sure how useful it is at the moment, adding all the feeds at once is a little slow and the Pipes are sometimes flaky. In fact it doesn’t have a great deal of practical use at all. It’s still an interesting visualisation, though and I feel that the real killer application for geotagging is about to hit us - so anything you do to make your work tagged correctly will give you a leg-up as soon as it hits.

If you’ve got a Birmingham based feed and geotag the entries, let me know (email up the right) and I’ll add it to the map.

• Post less to be read more
  No matter how good your material is, too much of it can cause feed-overwhelm and unsubscribes. Based on input from close to a dozen top bloggers I’ve interviewed, it takes an average of three days for a new post to propagate well in the blogosphere. If
  (tags: Geekery blog)
• Myspace News ’steels’ content
  Framed pages of blogs and news sites, complete with MySpace News branding and MySpace URL, are being indexed by Google as original content, stealing search engine placement and direct links from content creators.
  (tags: News, Myspace, content, copyright)

• The HTML Coded Character Set & URL Escape Codes
  !
  (tags: webdesign blogging escape html reference development)

I’ve just finished altering the front page of our kitten blog site, The Kitten Channel. It’s always aggregated Flickr pics and YouTube vids tagged kitten, but where it used to also try for Zooomr pics and Google video it now pulls in blog posts and sites (Technorati and delicious respectively). This was because I felt that Google video and Zooomr weren’t updated often enough to provide our patented* “river of kittens”.

The front page now uses roughly the same code as the from page of upyerBrum, with Magpie RSS to pull and cache the feeds.

*Not really

• Social Graph: Concepts and Issues
  (tags: article blog facebook socialnetworking socialgraph web2.0 visualization)
• Facebook as personal brand
  Not only does it connect people with other contacts, but it also, either intentionally or unintentionally, evolved into a powerful platform for aggregating all online activity to showcase a professionally wrapped package of expertise, personality, network
  (tags: Media 2.0 Workgroup Geekery)
• Birmingham airport on Flickr - Photo Sharing!
  (tags: upyerbrum)