Lost BoyA journal of no fixed aims or direction, by Leigh Dodds

Continuing yesterday’s hack here’s another stylesheet that converts RSS 1.0 annotated with geourl:latitude and geourl:longitude (e.g. geourl feeds) to the Google Maps format.
I added a form you can use to generate links similar to this one which shows bloggers in my area. Looks like I can shout out the window to contact some of them!

I’ve been itching to have a play with hacking about with GoogleMaps for a while now, especially so once their coverage reached the UK.
So as an exercise I thought I’d try gluing together Norm Walsh’s Where In The World service and the myGmaps.com proxy. The former problems simple location based data such as where a given user currently is, along with who and what is nearby. The latter provides a quick way to create standalone GoogleMaps from custom XML documents.
The result was a trivial XML stylesheet that converts from one vocabulary to another. Where there are links available, e.g. about locations or homepages, I’ve included them in the description associated with the map entry.
The FOAF mbox_sha1sum’s returned by WITW are hyperlinked to FOAFnaut so you jump directly from a geographical view of a person’s location into their “FOAF space” and view their position within a social network.
As WITW only includes basic data about nearby users (essentially just their username) I included the ability to “re-orient” a map around a given user. This basically means you’ll switch to looking at their WITW data, their nearby locations, etc. Crude but basically effective.
If you want to try it out, use the form on this page: WITW using GoogleMaps. It redirects via a JSP page, but all that does is simply build a pipeline URL that connects together WITW -> W3C XSLT Service -> myGMaps.com Proxy. The proxy then fetches the resulting map and displays it in your browser. Not the most efficient way to achieve this, but another nice demonstration of simple HTTP GET based service integration.
The hack is obviously limited, in that WITW captures locations anywhere on the globe, whereas GoogleMaps has limited coverage (US and UK as far as I’m aware). If you’re outside of that coverage you unfortunately just see a whole bunch of broken images instead of a map, although the locations and annotations still display. However with a visualisation available, I thought it might entice more people to sign up and try out WITW, add more locations, etc.
Let me know if you can think of any improvements.
Oh, and if you’re looking at GoogleMaps hacking yourself, then this Gazetteer Protocol looks like it has potential. More information available here. I need to try and clarify the licensing of the service and data though.
And in a similar vein, it ought to be possible to transform the geourl RSS feeds, e.g. mine, which now include latitude and longitude to achieve a similar effect but showing all bloggers near your current location. Hmmm, might do that this evening, if someone doesn’t get there first… Update: I did do it, see here

Just some notes on a few changes I’ve made to my blog setup.
Firstly I’ve added the Make Poverty History white band to the home page. Obviously not visible if you’re reading this in a browser but its a cause I do believe in, so why not go and click that link and find out how you can get involved?
Secondly, a while ago I altered my MT templates to spit out a scutterplan for my blog, which is now seeAlso‘d from my FOAF description. You can see it here. Pretty basic to start with, just a few FOAF and DC terms.
Thirdly, and you’ll have already noticed this, I changed my RSS 1.0 feed to include full postings. This was at user request, but was something I’ve been intending to do for a while. I much prefer being able to read full postings in my aggregator.
Lastly, I’ve been playing a bit with Feedburner. I was interested to see what facilities they offer for managing and tweaking RSS feeds. The interface is pretty slick and they’re offering some statistics on feed usage. I guess they have some relationship with the guys at Bloglines because now that I have a Feedburner version of my feed, when I click my “subscribe with Bloglines” bookmarklet, its the that version, not the one linked from my blog thats offered up my Bloglines. Presumably this has already caused endless debates elsewhere in the blogosphere. I don’t think I’m very happy about it as if there’s a “sanctioned” version of my RSS output I’ll link to it, thanks very much.
Frankly though the Feedburner features, while pretty inclusive, are not enough for me. I’d like the ability to splice together any number of feeds, not just those from a couple of services. E.g. my Feedburner feed includes my flickr photos and del.ico.us links. But what about my recent listening feed from Audioscrobbler? After signing up I wrote some code to do this, turned out to be a few lines using Informa. I’ll publish that as an example/service when I get time.
I am interested to find out more about how FeedBurner are capturing statistics. IMO, monitoring RSS feed usage is the next big issue (if its not already). More on that in another post.

If you’re interested in web service descriptions, and in particular RESTful service descriptions you should get yourself over to public-web-http-desc, a new W3C mailing list dedicated to precisely that topic.
From his introduction, Philippe Le Hegaret described the list as being …dedicated to discussion of Web description languages based on URI/IRI and HTTP, and aligned with the Web and REST Architecture. Unlike WSDL (Web Services Description Language), such languages are not targeted towards description of Web Services..
Le Hegaret’s posting includes some introductory pointers that round up a lot of the recent proposals in this space, including those from Bray, Cowan, Baker, Orchard, etc. This thread contains some other useful background.
The initial topic of discussion is the scope of the problem at hand, specifically: are we discussing a description language for XML services or any web service, regardless of representation formats? My vote is with the more inclusive option.
Definitely a space to watch if you’re interested in REST services.