WebProNews » Geospatial

People in London Love To Twitter

Chris Richardson — Fri, 01 Apr 2011 18:31:29 +0000

As discussed earlier, tracking the mountainous amounts of social media data is getting much, much easier as more and more companies include geospatial options in their services. Another process involves animating some of this data, overlaying on a map to show usage, travel routes, and well, just about anything else geolocation-based there is.

Consider the earthquake map from Japan. Granted, its geospatial data was based on seismic readings instead of Twitter or Flickr postings. That being said, the concepts are similar. As are the concepts on display in the “24h London Twitter Traffic” video from Anders Johnson.

In order to visually demonstrate his data, Anderson used the SIMULCARA technology developed by the Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis, University College London. The center’s ability to animate map-based data was demonstrated in their “Visualizing Public Transport Networks” videos, which tracked the movement of public transportation in the UK.

Instead of buses and underground trains, Anderson’s video tracked London-based tweets.

Anderson explains his work by saying the red circles are tweets and the yellow points are retweets moving in the direction the originating tweet came from. The results are quite impressive, at least in a visual sense:

It’s hard not to wonder about whether or not the content of the video is better than the content being tracked — considering it’s originating from Twitter. Furthermore, the frequency of the tweets in London notably increase during the evening, and that’s around the time people are going out for social calls. Apparently, even Londoners enjoy drunk tweeting as well.

Considering the date of the post, March 23rd, the data was collected before the England/Ghana friendly, so it’s hard to gauge what the topic(s) of discussion were.

Creepy Takes the Work out of Stalking

Chris Richardson — Fri, 01 Apr 2011 14:05:09 +0000

As the integration of social media continues unabated, there are questions and concerns regarding the reams of data in regards to the geoweb. Be it check-in services like Foursquare or services like Twitter, which also features location-based data, provided the user wants to enable this feature, the ability to track someone based on their social media use is easier than most would suspect.

Now, with applications like Creepy, ~~stalking your prey~~ developing a pattern of behavior for someone of interest, especially if they are ignorant in the ways of geo-technology, is even easier. According to Creepy’s developer, ilektrojohn, the application does the following:

creepy is an application that allows you to gather geolocation related information about users from social networking platforms and image hosting services. The information is presented in a map inside the application where all the retrieved data is shown accompanied with relevant information (i.e. what was posted from that specific location) to provide context to the presentation.

In other words, creepy aggregates user data from Twitter, provided the user has turned on the location feature, and data from EXIF tags from photos posted to Flickr, among other image-sharing sites.

This data is then mapped on a service like Google Maps, and presto. You can now see the geolocation profile of the user who was queried. Essentially, you’ll get a detailed geo-web based diary of the person’s movements and activities, based on their check-ins and image uploads. Granted, in order to use creepy, knowing the user name of the target in question is essential. While that isn’t much of a problem on Twitter, finding out this information about Flickr users, as well as other image services, may be more problematic. Good thing TwitPic is also represented by the creepy app.

Now, for those of you worried about this explosion in harness-able geo-data, and fear everybody everywhere tracking your every movement, Mike Melanson over at ReadWriteWeb.com has a perspective that might put people at ease:

So, should you stop broadcasting your location? I vote no. (And not because I want to stalk you, I swear.) I share my location all the time and for a number of reasons. It enables random and serendipitous connections to occur. I can look back and have all sorts of contextual information as I weave my way through the world. I can plug it all in to services like MemoLane and get a time-ordered snapshot of my own life, as I share it online.

Of course, this little tidbit at the end of Melanson’s post might make you reconsider:

This isn’t for everyone. If you have bad relationships with your exes or lawyers coming after you for bills, you might not want to live so publicly. And are we that far off from insurance companies gathering check-in information and using it to calculate your premiums?

Or how about unsolicited, contextual advertising based on your current location, delivered directly to your mobile device of choice? Does the idea of that creep you out? Granted, the Creepy app does nothing of the kind, but if a freelance developer can do something like this in their spare time, what kind of data collection utilities do you think companies like AT&T have?

Here’s a little art project video from Chris Oakley showing the potential of this tracking technology. While Oakley’s work is fictional, it seems quite plausible and quite surprising:

Still think all this geolocation data is benign?

Autodesk Donates to the Geospatial OS Community

Glenn Letham — Wed, 26 Sep 2007 19:40:13 +0000

More news on the open source front today as Autodesk has announced its intent to donate the source code for CS-Map to the Open Source Geospatial Foundation.

From the company… The donation of CS-Map, software from recently acquired company Mentor Software, will enable all open source geospatial projects to have access to powerful coordinate conversion technology, enabling them to support the projections and transformations necessary to support over 3,000 coordinate systems worldwide and giving them access to capabilities not previously available to the open source community.

Autodesk believes that this donation will help to accelerate innovation for the larger geospatial community through faster development cycles and lower costs.

This donation will free many customers and developers from the cost or need to re-engineer coordinate conversion technology and, thereby, “reinvent the wheel.” See more

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Locating Google Earth KML / KMZ files with Google Search

Glenn Letham — Fri, 16 Feb 2007 16:35:36 +0000

A tip… if you’d like to locate some KMLs for viewing in Google Earth there’s a very simple way to search ALL the KMLs available onn the web (they are simple text files remember).

Using Google Search simply type in the following string to search for a KML for Vancouver… filetype:kmz vancouver or filetype:kmz nanaimo – notice the vast number of results… you can refine your search or add even more detail if you’d like better results.

Similarly, if you’d like to locate an AutoCAD DWF format file try this search string – filetype:dwf nanaimo

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About the Author

Anything Geospatial: Tracking developments affecting GIS, geospatial technologies, location-based services, mapping, google earth and google maps. Published by the creator and editor of GISuser.com & LBSzone.com

LookLocal Mashup from Idelix

Glenn Letham — Mon, 22 Jan 2007 15:03:50 +0000

I recall first hearing about the initial Beta last year and thought to myself… WOW…

I can’t wait to see where this one goes from here. Well the Idelix Crew in Vancouver BC has expanded the LookLOCAL app in the form of Beta 2. Simply put, imagine searching for directions, a business listing, traffic conditions etc… using one application where you can toggle your map view between services provided by Google maps, Yahoo! Local, or Windows Live Local.

Now add to that even more functionality provided by an embedded birds-eye window that embeds the Idelix pliable display technology so you can zoom in on an area of interest within the birds-eye window. Forget about zooming in, waiting for a refresh etc… you can also toggle on/off satellite imagery within the birds-eye window… SWEET! When searching for a business (e.g.. Starbucks in Seattle) the hits are displayed on the side-bar in a very neat, organized manner.

This mashup is awesome! Try it for yourself at http://looklocal.idelix.com

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Flickr Goes Mobile

Glenn Letham — Wed, 22 Nov 2006 20:54:19 +0000

An update from the crew at flickr was launched this week in the form of a new, mobile friendly resource.

Enter m.flickr.com. also new this week is a “most popular” camera resource. From the flickr blog… We’ve updated our long-dormant and seemingly left-for-dead mobile site with a lot of new stuff. The highlights include recent activity, recent comments, support for Y! ID based login, search, and a new easier to type URL: http://m.flickr.com. As an example, see the GIsuser mobile flickr stream. Interested in knowing what kind of cameraphones people are using most for their moblogging via flickr? You can access this info via http://www.flickr.com/cameras/ A quick look shows us the following cameraphones are the most popular:
Sony Ericsson K750i Nokia N70 Nokia N73 Sony Ericsson K800i Sony Ericsson W800i – More details of these flickr updates can be found on Stuart Butterfield’s flickr blog - See also the GISuser flickr blog

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Google Maps Updates

Glenn Letham — Wed, 22 Nov 2006 16:18:49 +0000

Some interesting updates from the gmaps crew recently hit the google maps API weblog. Imagine this… view KML files with google maps…

To view a KML or KMZ file on Maps, just go to Google Maps, and instead of searching for a geographical address like 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway, 94043, search for a complete Web address (including the “http://” part) of your KMZ file, like http://kml.lover.googlepages.com/cropcircles.kmz. Also suggested… do you need your own web space to upload some files? Try Google Page Creator. http://pages.google.com/ View entire photo sets as self-contained KMZ files, as exported by Picasa. See more on how to do this via http://hikesandbikes.blogspot.com/2006/10/life-of-geolocated-blog-post.html Finally, path and polygon drawing tools are now in the free November 1 beta of Google Earth. More on the latest beta at http://earth.google.com/earth4-beta6.html - thanks to the gmaps API blog for these updates!

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GPS Data Integration With Google Earth

Glenn Letham — Tue, 21 Nov 2006 13:40:21 +0000

Telespial Systems is providing government agencies from around the world the tools needed to help manage and deploy asset and geographical data during times of emergency.

According to the company, the Trackstick line of products are rapidly becoming the standard GPS data collection tool for local and federal government agencies across the globe. The Trackstick Pro is an advanced GPS data logger capable of continuously recording its own location histories for extended periods of time and coolest of all it integrates with Google Earth for some interesting results and uses. The Trackstick Pro records Date, Time, Location, Speed, Direction, Altitude, Signal Strength and Temperature. All information can be instantly “dumped” via the included USB cable and software. For more on this see http://www.trackstickpro.com/googlefederal.htm

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Mobile Media Developer podcast series

Glenn Letham — Mon, 13 Nov 2006 18:26:14 +0000

Something for you mobile techies…

The Khronos Group has launched the first in their Mobile Media Developer podcast series. In this new series, the developers behind the industry standards for 3D, 2D, video and audio for mobile devices describe how the new technologies work and how they can be used by developers, carriers and manufacturers to create applications for mobile phone, handhelds and game consoles. See Podcast web pages at http://www.khronos.org/podcasts/

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Boring Google Earth US Election Maps

Glenn Letham — Thu, 09 Nov 2006 18:50:32 +0000

Not sure if anyone else noticed this or not but did you catch the graphics that are being used by ABC news and Good Morning America etc… to show the results of the election?

The graphics that show the electoral boundaries extruded as 3D objects on top of a nice white map is totally boring to say the least. I’m amazed that with all the data floating around that the cartographers for the news giant used Google earth to display these images – not that there’s anything wrong with that, however, my thinking is that the images displlayed could have been made to be a little more exciting. Simply put, the maps are boring and are not in any way indicative of what you can show off using Google Earth. Did you see any maps that got your attention? the simple, white State map with 3D objects is about as plain as can be and looks like it was thrown together in about 5 minutes. If you want some decent results you might consider looking at http://www.electoral-vote.com/. Note, election results are easily viewed inn google earth via the 2006 election guide layer – see Google Earth – Layers – 2006 Election Guide.

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