Tag: google

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Looking back on this post before I fire it off it seems even more of a mixed bag than usual. As usual fairly garbled, but the first half contains some wonderful links and the second what looks to me to be a great resource.

I spent the first part of yesterday morning (and the last hour or so this morning) following a trail that either started in a tweet from cogdog or a post recent addition to my feed reader.
Tony Hirst’s OUseful Info is a great source of ‘mostly over my head’ mashup info and other stuff, eg: We Ignore RSS at OUr Peril or « feedshow – A Feed Powered Web Page Presentation Tool

To Comrades in Non-Programistan – A Message from Feedistan included a great youtube: DataPortability and Me (Get Your Data Out!) and had me laughing. It also pointed to The Party Line of The Peoples Republic of Non-Programistan which was created (as far as I can see) to support a presentation at the Symposium on Mashups, you an watch the recording of the Welcome to the People?s Republic of Non-Programistan session which features laugh out loud fake Russian accents.

The point of the Non-Programistana is to open up mashups to non-coders, although they will allow some html. They point to Exhibit and give interesting examples: Industrial Warfare – Version 4.

This lead me to Exhibit part of MITs SIMILE Project:

SIMILE is focused on developing robust, open source tools that empower users to access, manage, visualize and reuse digital assets.

Exhibit can be used to

Create interactive data-rich web pages

and there are some great examples that can be popped from the Exhibit homepage.

I have been talking to some Glasgow colleagues about filling the 5-14 database gap that has appeared when we got upgraded to windows xp. I had suggested a few online examples that children could use for querying databases and Zoho Create for creating databases. While the querying examples went down well, Zoho seemed too imageless for catching primary children’s imagination. It also look a little like a spreadsheet for some teachers. likewise lazybase.

Exhibit looked like it might fill this gap, so I’ve spent the rest of yesterday morning playing with it. The Getting Started tutorial is very straightforward and will allow you to work through an example on your own desktop. I started with an idea from our own curriculum, information about the EU. The idea is that the children could research basic facts about the EU and add them to a google spreadsheet. With the number of countries in the EU a fair sized class could get one country each.
Exhibit allows you to build a simple html page which will read the spreadsheet webpage and create an interactive database. Amazingly it allows multiple views including a nice timeline and table views. One of the Exhibit examples incorporated famfamfam.com flag icons, interestingly these are name with ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 country codes, I could add a column to the spread sheet and include these, it was the easy to show the flag on the records:

I have been playing with Google chart maps, which use the same iso code so it was simple enough to add these.
Anyway in a couple of hours i was able to put together a google spreadsheet and a Exhibit Test. The latter will need more work, but you can get the idea. I think this will work in class and hope to try it out next term. I need to know a bit more about logging on multiple uses with the same ip address to a spreadsheet, but I hope to quiz Tom Barrett about that. I also need to find out a bit more about creating forms for google speadsheets.

The workflow would go like this:

  1. I’d start a spreadsheet with the correct column headers
  2. Put together a webpage to pull the data via exhibit.
  3. The children would research the required info (wikipedia)
  4. the children would add the info to the spreadsheet, directly or via a form
  5. The children would query the webpage to compare EU countries.

At the moment this would only work as a one off, a webpage would have to be created for each time the lesson was carried out for a class. A quick look at the Google Spreadsheets Data API would suggest you could create a spreadsheet automatically, by uploading a blank this could then be loaded by a hph version of the Exhibit Test page which would dynamically load different spreadsheets (with the same headers). Unfortunately this would violate the Party Line of The Peoples Republic of Non-Programistan, and more realistically be beyond my limited skills.

As I just wrote at the start of this post, it is a bit of a rag bag, but it tells the tale of my Sunday morning’s fun, following a web of links and playing with a great tool. In the afternoon I went for a walk

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I’ve updated my Sandaig Google Maps Experiment a little this weekend, getting ready for some international co-operation this session I hope.

I added a few schools and a wee popup control to the page to point to the school chosen.

the interface I made for editing the maps proved far too clunky for children to use, so I’ve been thinking of redoing that as a step by step process.

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The questions are at the end feel free to skip down there if you know anything about gps.

I spent quite a while over a year ago messing with the google maps api. eventually I made an interface for creating maps, uploading photos and placing them on the map. This gave me a lot of fun, but I found it too time consuming for children to use.
The earlier this year Google My Maps came out which was a lot neater than my effort, and I’ve used it a few times, mostly pasting in the links flickr provides to add photos.

Cort-ma-Law from Lecket hill This week I stared another one with a few photos from a walk.
I was a bit frustrated about placing the photos on the map as I found it hard to figure out where place where in the rather featureless Campsies.

Flickr map Sorry

I switched to using flickr own maps but found them it a bit slow (that might be my aging mac).
I found it even more difficult to get the photos placed with any accuracy on flickr maps, although the interface for adding and looking at the photos is very slick, especially when you grab a bunch of pictures and throw them on a single spot.
Perhaps I just do not go far enough so need to much detail on a map to make my walk look like a walk rather than a spot.

All this made me think about my previous experiments, especially as there was an article in macuser about using the flickr and google maps apis combined. I had just finished using phpflickr to make a community gallery so though this might be quite quick.

Unfortunately the macuser article relies on a flickr api flickr.photos.geo.getLocation which depends on you having placed the photo on the flickr map (I was beginning to go round in circles).

Then I remembered Adam Burt‘s Applescript for getting geo tags from Google Earth ready for pasting into flickr. Adam does amazing things with blogs, google Earth/maps and geoblogging.
The appleScript copies to the clipboard geo tags of the location showing on google earth at that time.
It is much easier to figure out where you are on google earth, it has a smoother gui than google maps and a better resolution (of where I was at least). so I geotagged a bunch of photos, grabbed a new google maps API key and got busy.

Flickr googlemap mashup

Of course at that time I didn’t know about flickr.photos.geo.getLocation depending on flickr maps.And I didn’t know a tag geo:lon=-4.704382114809 would be returned from the API as machine_tags=”geo:lon=4704382114809 geo:lat=56258859999999″ ie without the minus sign or point so I spent a fair bit of time staring at a blank map, as the google maps API didn’t understand what I was sending to it. Anyway to cut a very long afternoon short, I delved deeper than I had been before into the data returned from flickr.photos.getInfo and finally clunked together a couple of files, the first uses phpflickr to grab the info from flickr and store it in a file, the second pulls that info using the google maps api and create a map.
I did try pulling the information and creating the map all at once, but that took too long. The data from flickr obviously does not need to be updated very often so that job was hived off, speeding up the maps creation. The unfinished product is here: John’s Flickr Map Mashup.

This is just scratching the surface of what could be done, it would be better maybe to create different maps for different days or for particular tags. if all of my tagged photos go on the same map it might eventually be too crowded and need some pagination.

Help wanted: I’d like to know a bit more about geo tagging and perhaps GPS:

  1. Would it be possible to get data from a GPS device and add it to the EXIF data of a photo before uploading it?
  2. Does Flickr undersatand embeded gps data?
  3. Is there a cheap enough GPS device that would work with a mac?

I am thinking of a work flow that includes the tagging of photos before uploading, maybe in iphoto with AppleScript or a SuperCard project, I think I’ve done some EXIF data extracting so imagine that adding can’t be that much harder.

Any ideas that do not involve a lot of expense gratefully received.