locationportals.net

god, I love Jon Udell.

He’s started a new aggregator project for his city: ElmCity.info

He discusses it in these two posts:
An experiment in online community and Conceptual Barriers

This project isn’t anything too impressive quite yet, but I love it’s philosophy. It’s all about aggregating information - not that it has to be automated (done by computers), but that it has to scale well -even when it’s done by people. He’s not bothering by manually adding information that he doesn’t believe people could/would continue to add/update themselves. Sending him photo’s -no. Submitting them to flickr, yes. That’s simplistic, but I’m having trouble articulating the difference between some projects which have good sustainability karma from the beginning and those which will require ongoing manual contributions from the siteowners.

Right now he’s scraping some html calendars and combining … well, just read what he says:

“Online event calendars are one obvious target. The newspaper has one, the college has one, the city has one, and there’s also a smattering of local events listed in places like Yahoo Local, Upcoming, and Eventful. So far I’ve welded four such sources into a common calendar, and wow, what a messy job that’s been. The newspaper, the college, and the city offer web calendars only as HTML, which I can and do scrape. In theory the Yahoo/Upcoming and Eventful stuff is easier to work with, but in practice, not so much. Yahoo Local offers no structured outputs. Upcoming does, the events reflected into it from Y Local use hCalendar format, but finding and using tools to parse that stuff always seems to involve more time and effort than I expect. Eventful’s structured outputs are RSS and iCal. If you want details about events, such as location and time, you need to parse the iCal, which is non-trivial but doable. If you just need the basics, though — date, title, link — it’s trivial to get that from the RSS feed.
…
The idea is to repurpose various silos in ways that are immediately useful, but also lead people to discover better ways to manage their silos — or, ultimately, to discover alternatives to the silos.”

Another thing that he’s experimenting with aggregating is restaurant menus, through asking people to photograph them and tag them appropriately.

Definitely worthwhile to check out. and probably a good one to check back on in a couple months. Jon usually has unique approaches to problems. In between the non-technical, very manual, non-scalable approach and a Jo Walsh-style very seamless, automated approach.

aaron writes a great post about accessing location-based content while mobile. In six parts. He’s one of those white-hot coders that minors in philosophy. Totally lovely and free of the “the geospatial web R0X!!” attitude. Thank you, Aaron.

Papernets

“Small pieces of paper, loosely joined.”

Outside.in

Welcome to outside.in, the best way to discover the conversations that are going on in your neighborhood—whether that’s where you live, where you work, or where you want to be. See what locals are saying right now, and share your own wisdom with your friends and neighbors.

It currently only works for the US.

I interested, but not thrilled about this site. Anything in the geospatial web has potential, but I’m not a big believer in the approach of having people add themselves to each of these services. Maybe that will be different if there’s a real audience using one or two of these services, but it’s an obvious chicken-egg problem.

What I truly love about this site is the text. The have a few really good thinkers and writers behind this. The principles are very much worth reading through if you’re interested in this topic. It’s up there with the text on Sean Savage’s PlaceSite.

Ways to contribute is where we get to the meat:

Suggest a blog. If you know a blogger who is writing about local issues and events, use our suggest blog tool to add it to our database.

Connect your own blog. If you’re a blogger writing about local issues yourself, include a google maps link in the post for location-based posts, or just tag each post with a relevant zip code, to ensure that your entries get mapped appropriately.

Add tags. If you’re a registered user of outside.in, you can add tags to any entry, using our what/where/when tagging system. If you notice a review of a new bar that doesn’t have the establishment’s name as a tag, you can add it; or you can add the bar’s address; or a date and time for an upcoming performance scheduled there.

Suggest a story: If you’ve stumbled across something online that’s relevant to a neighborhood — a newspaper story about a controversial new office tower, say — use the suggest a story tool to add that information to our database.

Neat - but nothing out of the ordinary.

In terms of design they’re focusing on portal pages for neighborhoods instead of using maps as the primary view. I think that’s better than the typical “dots on a map” view. They’re advertising in between blog posts (which I guess is much easier done than trying to generate ads on the map).

I guess the problems I see here are the fact that they encourage people to submit other peoples blogs and they use them to generate advertisements. And whether or not they will get enough people to manually submit content.

I heard about this project a couple of weeks ago. It’s live now.

PlaceBlogger

It’s built by the Bright team with the Drupal content management system. The interface is decent, considering it just came out of the blocks. I’m sure that they have many plans to improve it. There are around 11 000 sites listed with over 900 being from the US. There’s 37 from Canada and that’s the second largest. I’m very curious to know how many sites were added by PlaceBlogger nd how many came from users.

Ah - here’s the answer:

Collecting this list — and getting to know these places via the authentic, quirky, and funny voices of their placeblogs — has been a wonderful experience. I hope that you’ll enjoy this way of getting to know America at sidewalk level as much as I have.

Their definition of placeblogs:

“What’s a placeblog?
A placeblog is an act of sustained attention to a particular place over time
It can be done by one person, a defined group of people, or in a way that’s open to community contribution
It’s not a newspaper, though it may contain random acts of journalism
It’s about the lived experience of a place

Placeblogs are sometimes called “hyperlocal sites” because some of them focus on news events and items that cover a particular neighborhood in great detail — and in particular, places that might be too physically small or sparsely populated to attract much traditional media coverage. …

Placeblogs, however, are about something broader than news alone. They’re about the lived experience of a place. That experience may be news, or it may simply be about that part of our lives that isn’t news but creates the texture of our daily lives: our commute, where we eat, conversations with our neighbors, the irritations and delights of living in a particular place among particular people. However, when news happens in a community, placeblogs often cover those events in unique and nontraditional ways, and provide a community watercooler to discuss those events. ”

I wonder how they distinguish between blogs and “placeblogs”. I know that there probably isn’t a clear separation, but I would like to find out how they think about it.

This projects seems to have the goal of becoming a large, centralized directory. And certainly far from the interests of the geowanking / sematic web crew. I wonder if bloggers will actually self-submit?

Also interesting is the reuse of content rules:

Placeblogger content is available for reuse for personal and noncommercial purposes. We encourage download and use of the OPML files for use by individuals in their personal RSS reader.

We do not grant permission for any institution or website to use or republish either the OPML files, directory listings, text, images, or other media from the directory or other portions of the site without our written permission. We worked very hard to compile our directory and wholesale theft of our work for use elsewhere will not be tolerated.

I don’t agree or disagree - but it’s very worthwhile to see how these policies will develop. It’s a very tricky thing to put policies on aggregated information - especially when it’s about peer-published content. Not that that is a new problem, but there’s always the chance that it will develop in a way that specifically reflects the specific motivations of location-oriented bloggers.

This posting from one of the advisors, Jay Rosen was also curious:

When Lisa first raised the idea for placeblogger, the exciting thing to me was that the hundreds of people doing these kinds of sites could discover each other, learn from peers, and become a kind of online community of local news pioneers. Placebloggers, unite! in other words. Looked at individually, the sites are interesting. Together, they could be a force. (And possibly an advertising force.)

“Placebloggers, unite”. hmm… centralizing “hyperlocal” sites with restrictive uses on the OPML lists? And with the speculation about being an advertising force? I hope that’s an ironic rendition of Marx.

Here’s a video of Lisa presenting at the Berkman Center.

I request approval to join their google discussion group. Hopefully I’ll be able to find out more. Iwant to know if it’s another straight-up advertising business, whether it’s a hybrid “social entrepreneurship” thing and who has invested in them.

I haven’t put a disclaimer yet on the side of this blog, but I very much have my own thoughts about open source and open content, so I don’t want to suggest that I’m a neutral critic.

update -10 min later: I just finished watching the video. I have a much more positive view of Lisa’s motivation in starting this project. It doesn’t seem to have originated as a money grab from hyper-local bloggers. I encourage anyone interested in this topic to watch it over (can just listen to it while surfing other stuff).

I was invited by Glowlab to their Conflux Festival (confluxfestival.org) in Williamsburg, to set up wifi at the two festival venues, along with a captive portal. It’s a good opportunity for me, because I’ve set up a special-purpose wifidog auth server for it, and am operating this as four-day-long hacknight. The Wireless Toronto auth server is still running an old version of wifidog, and the new version I’ve installed for this is massively more usable.

So far I’ve got feeds from Flickr, Technorati and del.icio.us, a shoutbox, and a wikimapia frame up. Take a look @ conflux.pwd.ca

I’m trying as much as possible to use the standard wifidog content aggregation functionality, but for some things I’ve had to make some modifications. Post-festival, I’ll think about what content types would need to be added to the auth server in order to accommodate those extra pieces.

For now, I’m making frequent tweaks and getting essentially live feedback, since there are a lot of people using the network. It’s an ideal environment for experimention. (Except that I’m missing many of the festival events.)

I suppose that they’re not location portals, exactly — they’re festival portals. The wikimapia frame is centred on the venues, but otherwise there’s nothing geo-specific about it — only festival-specific.

LSI Community Portal

The Wireless City (TWC) believes a Municipal Wireless Network (MWN) can revolutionize a city. It can educate, empower and inspire citizens. It can streamline city government, bolster economic growth and increase quality of life. But the full potential of a MWN can’t be achieved by simply installing wireless technology around a city. The Lifestyle Inspiration (LSI) Community Portal is the difference between a wireless network and a Wireless City.

The Lifestyle Inspirations (LSI) Community Portal is The Wireless City’s (TWC) community specific, subscriber-based online (intranet) web portal product. The LSI Community Portal is a proprietary portal designed by TWC’s innovative software development team for the exclusive use of TWC licensed city subscribers that is 100% CONTROLLED & EMPOWERED BY MUNICIPALITIES. Cities that choose to participate in The LSI Community Portal will be required to enter into a franchise agreement with TWC for its exclusive use and framework design.

They lay it on pretty thick - but I’m guilty of doing the same to some extent.

It looks like a straightforward, non-location-based CMS.

What makes The LSI Community Portal truly unique is that is it will be the only wireless “community intranet” portal of its kind with exclusive functionality and software development savvy to build communities from within cities that can then extend and integrate into the outside world. All of this from the power and technological innovations that TWC brings to the online community development experience.

hmm. . only one? really?

The LSI Community Portal also leverages interctive and rich media standards, encouraging subscribers to contribute content and materials in a completely collaborative environment that underscores the community aspects of the system. . . . In its effort to promote the unification of communities through Municipal Wireless Networks (MWN), The LSI Community Portal information architecture emphasizes the importance of integrating community and quality of life. The LSI Community Portal is framed around four channels of information and query to accomplish this objective: LSI Answers, LSI Business, LSI Directories and LSI Wellness.

Interestingly, LSI wellness seems to apply to some kind of lifestyle, personal coaching thing. That’s . . . a weird type of content. But very interesting to find out about them. From what I see, it appears that they don’t have any exisiting installs. If anyone finds out different, please let me know.

An important idea about portal pages is where do they get their content. There is a distinction (rather large at this point) between portal pages as a CMS or portal pags as aggregators.

example of a LP page from a centralized content managment system

PlaceSite

and

and example of one based almost purely on aggregation.
WirelessToronto Location Portal

I don’t think they bear ranking at this point, but I imagine that users would prefer placesite at this point. Mostly because of the feeling of the UI and the profile feature. A big problem that I see with WirelessToronto’s page is that the aggregated content is not . . . well aggregated. It’s divided up by block depending on which service it came from - which is not necessary a distinction that the users care about. We were having a similar problem for a while at ISF (actually, i think it’s ongoing) where we are dividing network-wide content and location-specific content. In our situation I think the UI bug is being because of technical but also because of ontological views of the people responsable for the system (myself included). We “see” the content as two very different things because we’re looking at it from the back.

Trying to figure out a UI that makes sense for aggregating aggregated data is the biggest part of my work on location portals. That, and figuring out what are the low-hanging fruit to aggregate - from a technical perspective and a getting user take-up of that service perspective.

I’m going to get Sean Savage to talk about his great work at Placesite and have someone from WT talk about what they’re thinking. But I’m really impressed by how many services WT is pulling in (events via upcoming.org, local artistic content from terminus1525 (although there is a manual element to that), geourl, and then toronto-wide content from kijiji + craigslist).

Probably wasn’t smart of me to take a month long vacation from blogging just as I was getting this started. But then again, this blog certainly isn’t about quantity of readers.

An article written by Julian Bleeker. I read it before, but I probably didn’t pay close enough attention.

A Design Approach for the Geospatial Web - Julian Bleeker, 06/07/2005

I’m not going to review the article. It’s short and too easy to read yourself.

In an effort to continue the discussion about the Geospatial Web, I would like to offer a brief description of an approach to designed location-based experiences that drives many of the projects at the USC School of Cinema-TV’s Interactive Media Division and Mobile Media Lab. This approach has three aspects: location awareness, location user interfaces, and collaborative mapping.

and

Let’s review the steps to creating location user interfaces:

* Provide a single, canonical system for marking the physical world. This is what latitude and longitude provide, and what GPS makes widely available.
* Tag data, content, and experiences using latitude and longitude. This is beginning to happen in exciting and provocative ways.
* Provide a mechanism to author that content and those experiences in real time, while one is on location.
* Share that content in real time with others in the world and on the Web, building on top of existing wireless voice and data infrastructures or tapping into new wireless data networks.

Would seem to be the message from the article if you want the cliff notes. He’s really into the collaborative mapping thing. I’m guess I don’t see that as what’s going to set things off. But that might be a timing thing - considering he wrote this article a while ago.

This article was paired with a presentation he gave at the O’Reily Where 2.0.

another resource.

I forgot about this page of notes from our BOF on location portals at the London WSFII.

This was a bunch of top level CWN people, hard core coders, semantic web, and GIS people. Sorry for not including links, but I’ll address each of these areas with explanations over the next few months. This is to give a taste to the newbies, and to quickly point to a resource for people who already grok these things.

And again, if anyone else has any useful links, please forward them to me.

Location Portals Roadmap

1. Participants
2. What applications do we want to run on our location portals?
1. Mapping Annotation
2. Displaying geolocated content
3. events
4. peer produced / micro-produced content
5. civic data
6. user interaction & communication

Content discussion :
Participants
Saul Albert
Jo Walsh
Schuyler (erle)
Benoit Gregoire
Francois Proulx
Michael Lenczner
Chris Holmes
Max Hovarth

What applications do we want to run on our location portals?

1) Mapping Annotation

* thingster (anselm) - thingster.com (rdf world modelling project)
o rdf world modelling project
o meant to be an application generator
o could persuade to export usefully
o source code? (no)
* tagzania
o could persuade to export usefully
o not much of a ui
o single developer
o placey del.icio.us
o source code? (no)
* placeopedia
o spatial rss / kml export
o (aka yourhistoryhere.com / history flavoured client)
o source code? (on request)
* openguides.org
o wiki + spatial metadata
o some basic mapping capacity
o source code is available (CPAN / deb)
o publishes rdf / rss1
o has a tagging-like category system
o has an api

2) Displaying geolocated content
* Mapbuilder.sf.net / - googlemaps like interface to OSGIS compliant web services using map server or geoserver eg: freemap.in /
* Ka-map - ka-map.maptools.org / - NOT RECOMMENDED (CH)
* 6 months for the tools to mature / getting the data / -
* google maps / -
* use google maps on a tie-in
* standards & open components
* use google for the time being
* google map widget in mapbuilder

3) events
* evdb.com
o rss (not good)
o upcoming.org
o rss (not good)
* evnt.org
o restful api
o use our users user account details to aggregate information
o requires multiple logins for the moment
o collectively shout at EVNT.org
o AP: what do we want? - Search by location/distance

4) peer produced / micro-produced content
* tying rss feeds to locations
* podcast etc.
* artistic content (audio video etc.)
* geolocated authoring platform
* AP: write use cases.

5) civic data
* scorecard.org
* crimemaps.org
* (where do you pass this off to government?)
* theyworkforyou.com /
* AP: ask these guys if the code is available.
* publicwhip.org.uk - provide hansard
* troubleticketing (otrs.org) / hiveminder.com

6) user interaction & communication
* with bells on
* rendezvous
* itunes (music sharing)
* javascript based jabber client
* ajax application (?)
* service discovery
* ichat
* subethaedit / moonedit / [WWW] http://jotlive.com/
* wikis / etc.
* zeroconf / games
o forums
o chat
o mdns responder
o foaf
o ajax based p2p darknets with foaf

I mentioned this earlier. It took place last week in Washington at the CTCNet conference.

Beyond Community Wireless: Portals as Tools for Community and Economic Development

Objectives:
1. To generate ideas and strategies on how wireless networks and webportals can improve neighborhoods.
2. To distribute/disseminate resources that participants can readily apply in their own communities.
3. To share tools for mobilizing community leaders, social service programs, and small businesses.

Summary:
As community and municipal wireless networks propagate as a means to bring Internet access to underserved urban and rural residents, how are we leveraging this technology to build community? What are the opportunities for social and community service programs to integrate their outreach activities with telecommunications services? How can wireless networks contribute to the process of developing a cohesive, vibrant community? This session will explore the critical link between wireless technologies and local content, and the potential for wireless web portals to represent the next step in community and economic development.
Presenters:
Karen Archer Perry - Principal Consultant

Laura Forlano - NYC Wireless

Sascha Meinrath - Champaign-Urbana Community Wireless Network (CUWiN)

Catherine Settanni - The Community Technology Empowerment Project

Davis Park - Little Tokyo Service Center, a Community Development Corporation

This is fantastic! It’s exactly the kind of focus we need to get things moving. I wish I had been able to go to this. I had been invited for this panel, but couldn’t make it.

The presentations are all available (except for Laura’s, which will be online soon). I don’t have time to review them right now, but I’ll go through them soon and write a run-down. And maybe Sascha or Laura will be able to give us a first-person report.