Pre-Conference Palate Cleanser

As we get ready to head out to Colorado for the 2008 NSGIC Conference, here's an interesting new experiment in art, culture and geography from Yahoo and Flickr: the ybike.

Librarian-activist and web-stuff speaker Jessamyn West posted the photo at right recently in a post titled "the internet got you a bicycle?"

It’s basically a purple bicycle with a cell phone and a solar powered battery charger. The cell phone has a camera and a GPS unit and is mounted behind the handlebars. The bike takes a photo a minute when it’s moving.

The photos are posted to flickr, with a "ybike" tag and geospatial information that feeds flickr's photo map application.

A number of these bikes have been passed out. Aside from Jessamyn's, I have found bike photo's from Eddie (who also posted pictures of the bike and its auto-camera components), Josh, dogseat, tarikh, and folks at the flickr offices.

It looks like they have covered Vermont, New York City and San Francisco (at least). If they want a steady stream of photos of beautiful downtown Dover, Delaware, at Lunchtime, maybe they should send me a bike too.

My doctor and my blood-pressure monitor would approve.

LiDAR as Rock Star?

The rock band Radiohead has released a new "video" made without video. The optical portion of the "House of Cards" single was created using two laser-scanning technologies. One for close-ups of the band and another, a more traditional-feeling LiDAR, for landscapes.

The band partnered with Google for the release and has included data set downloads to allow fans to remix the spatial data themselves.

This has been making something of a splash among the geo-bloggers and music press alike. At least one geo-blogger has some screenshots of playing with the singer's head.

This may be the start of Music Video for the Nation.

(NOTE: The final sentence of this post is a gentle form of self-parody. No offense was intended; none was taken.)

I'll Meet You At... How'd The Dow Do This Morning?

The web-comic xkcd has touched my geo-nerd heart today with a single-panel comic that explains an approach to geocaching based on the daily opening of the Dow Jones Industrials. There's a more expansive explanatory wiki entry that may build into a geo-comic-caching-nerd-core-social movement (or something).

Basically, it is an algorithm that takes the date and Dow and mashes them into new and more or less random post-decimal portions of lat-long coordinates. Users select the pre-decimal part using a map interface. The result is a random point where geo-hashers can agree to meet.

The official xkcd meetups happen every Saturday afternoon at 4:00 PM. If the coordinates for your area are in the ocean, a military base, or somewhere otherwise unreachable, that meetup is of course postponed. Unless, of course, you own a boat, are a soldier at said military base, or are James Bond.

I think it's a charming idea and one that should appear on more than one GIS/geo-related blog this week.

When We Get Hi-Res Local Imagery Out to as Many People as Possible

Indiana is one of the states that has gotten their high resolution orthophotography added to Google's Earth and Maps systems. The photos are hi-res enough that the image-hunters at the Google Earth Community have spotted an Amish horse and buggy on a rural Indiana road.

As communities will, they looked deeper, researched the presence of the Amish in Indiana, and have collected and published a series of placemarks showing photographic evidence of where a few members of the Amish Community happened to be on an unspecified day in late winter/early spring of 2005.

While I was interested to see Amish folks visible on Google Earth (they are a part of Delaware culture as well), what was coolest about this for me was to see "IndianaMap Framework Data" credited on Google Earth.

Well-played, Indiana Geographic Information Council! (Via Google Earth Blog)

Clearing Up Google's Take on New Orleans

Google now has recent, high resolution, and most importantly, Post-Katrina imagery loaded to Google Maps and Google Earth. This is in response to a recent storm of criticism over the loading of pre-Katrina imagery last fall.

Google took this seriously. John Hanke, the Director for Google Maps/Local/Earth, posted about it this morning on the Official Google Blog (About the New Orleans imagery in Google Maps and Earth).

...we recognize the increasingly important role that imagery is coming to play in the public discourse, and so we're happy to say that we have been able to expedite the processing of recent (2006) aerial photography for the Gulf Coast area (already in process for an upcoming release) that is equal in resolution to the data it is replacing.

Hanke did note that the change to pre-Katrina imagery took place back in the fall of 2006. He expressed some surprise at the very recent storm of controversy.

The folks at Google should recognize the speed that ideas can move on-line, and the momentum they can generate, even when they are very late in getting started.

Update: Adena and her folks over at All Points Blog make a very good point (Will the Google/Katrina Affair Finally Push Metadata on GM/GE?) about the helpful role that metadata might have played in this situation. had there been any metadata.

We Call This "Leverage"

The GeoLibro blog has an interesting thought about the US National Grid and Google.

In a posting titled "Mountan View, CA Now Our Prime Meridian?", the author notes a casual on-line reference to "Google Earth Coords" and muses:

...if the U.S. government is serious about us learning and using the National Grid (USNG), they need to have Google use it for U.S. locations.

Indeed.

Let Us Not Forget the Art Inherent in Geospatial Data

The image above is taken from Robert Kosara's EagerEyes site. He is experimenting with what I think of as functional visualizations of data sets.

In this case, he's connected all US ZIP Code centroids in ascending order to create a "ZIPScribble" map. He's also calculated a version of shortest path among all those points to create what he calls a "Traveling Presidential Candidate Map."

I'm not sure we'd call this GIS, but it is an interesting new way to see a data set we've all worked with in more prosaic applications. (VIA URBAN CARTOGRAPHY)