July 12th, 2005
- In the new release of Google Earth, there's an exciting feature that lets you dynamically load geographical data in from other sources. They even have an markup language for it called KML. People have already started putting Flickr photos ontop of the maps.
- On a similar note, if you have a Geotagged RSS feed that you want to put onto a Google Map, you should consider giving this utility a try.
- The newer versions of Microsoft Word save their documents in an XML format. So it was only a matter of time before someone wrong an XSL template to generate these documents.
- Do you have a lot of text that you want converted into speech? You should check out the say command on OS X.
- Google now has built in currency conversion. I've been waiting for this for a long time, considering that you've been able to convert units of measurement and weight for the longest time, this step only seemed logical.
- Interested to see how the moods of large-scale communites fluctuate over time? The Livejournal Mood Browser does just that, with informative graphs too!
- What's better then a free textbook on Graph Theory? Not much!
Tags: graph, rss, osx, data, geo, theory, free, livejournal, xml, xslt, geotag, google, earth, kml
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February 10th, 2005
Google released an interesting application the other day called Google Maps. Apart from the fact that it's very well designed and very easy to use, there's some fun stuff going on in the background that I really want to tinker with. More information concerning the actual tech behind the site can be found in this article.
One of my favorite commands back with Google Local was being able to search for '*' near a location, this would give you a list of results that are immediately close to you. The same thing has carried over to Google Maps, with one exception: The data is now semi-available in a easy to parse XML format. For example:
http://maps.google.com/maps?q=*+near+rochester,+ny&output=xml
will return a list of everything closest to the center of Rochester. And to make things even easier, you can use the URL:
http://maps.google.com/maps?q=*+near+rochester,+ny&output=js
to import the data straight into your web application. This is a very cool thing.
One of the features that I wanted to do with one of my projects a while back, Google Local Social Network (GLSN), was to provide results inline to the user - now it seems as if that's possible, in a big way. This is because another feature is available in XML format: Directions! Using just another form of the URL above you can get a nice, parseable, set of directions to navigate to your destination, for example:
http://maps.google.com/maps?q=buffalo,+ny+to+rochester,+ny&output=xml
I can't wait to play around with this some more, but whenever I get the time, GLSN is definitely due for an overhaul.
Tags: corp:google, maps, xml, xslt
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