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location-based technology + journalism

By Joyce Chang

Google and Walt Disney World recently partnered to launch a 3-D interactive map layer of the Orlando, Fla., attraction on Google Earth.

Google Earth has offered virtual re-creations of places or cities before, but the virtual Disney World is considered one of the most intricate models produced, and Disney executives have called it the largest corporate initiative on Google Earth.

The new map layer is mostly aimed at tourists, allowing them to plan their trips and view the rides, hotels, streets, souvenir shops, building exteriors, etc., before they go on vacation at the resort.

“Visitors can walk or fly around the park as they wish. Information on the park’s 1,500 attractions pops up on the side of the screen, along with photos, videos and booking details,” the Telegraph wrote.

The map layer even includes seemingly ordinary or insignificant items, such as the monorail, restrooms, picnic tables, benches, streetlights, signs and trees. But including those items in the map could be useful and takes the concept a step further, even more closely tying the physical and virtual worlds.

The map also includes photos, videos and reviews to help people maximize their time and decide which rides they want to go on the most, according to Popular Science.

Using Google Earth is more labor-intensive than using Google Maps. Users must download software and figure out how to use the program. A previous LoJo blog post about who really uses Google Earth included a Lifehacker poll that found the majority of people occasionally use the program for its gee whiz factor and a smaller, loyal group uses it regularly.

The new Disney World map layer may work because the people who would use it, most likely tourists or other occasional visitors, would also tend to want it for its flashy features, and are less likely to rely on it for professional or regular use.

By Hilary Powell

If you’re going out with the girls or the guys for a night on the town in a new city, a new mobile map application could help you pinpoint the place to party.

Citysense is a GPS-enabled service that highlights hot nightspots in San Francisco in real time. The technology is currently only compatible with Blackberry phones, but will soon be available with the new GPS-enabled iPhone.

On Google and Yelp, users can pinpoint locations called “hotspots.” These locations include bars, restaurants, and clubs. The Citysense Web sites says that a color-coded map details which of these locations is packed with unusually high activity.

And the mobile application is one that really gets to know mobile users. According to the Citysense folks:

The application learns about the kinds of places you like to go from GPS – without ever sharing that information. In its next release, Citysense will not only tell you where everyone is right now, but where everyone like YOU is right now.

I’m not so sure about a phone that can predict where I like to party, but the technology is certainly an example of a mobile social network that helps like-minded people connect.

According to a ComputerWorld.com report released in May, “millenials,” or people born between the years 1981 and 2000 are leading the move to mobile social networks and Mobile Web 2.0, which includes cell phone-based blogging, multimedia sharing, location-based socialization services, gaming and chat.

The number of users of these services is on the rise – in fact, a new study by InStat is predicting that by 2012, there will be nearly 30 million millennials.

That would be one large map on Citysense.

By Satta Sarmah

For many locative journalists, maps are the most efficient tool to tell a location-based story. Over the past 10 weeks, Team LoJo has relied on maps, GPS devices and other tools to tell our Chicago 2016 locative story.

We followed the lead of other news organizations, such as the Bakersfield Californian and The New York Times, which mostly rely on Google Maps for locative stories.

While that mapping platform has great capabilities, a quick Web search revealed other mapping tools that multimedia journalists should know about.

MapsAlive, an application used to create interactive maps and floor plans, gives journalists, real estate professionals and tourism businesses the ability to make any ordinary map interactive. It’s been used in various ways, from creating interactive directories of stores in a mall to virtual tours of national parks and as an interactive illustration of a crime scene.

Vermont-based company AvantLogic created MapsAlive in 2007 and says it wants the technology to be “the premier tool for creating online interactive map tours.” Interactive map tours are basically multimedia presentations containing information, images and text associated with particular locations.

AvantLogic says anyone with basic computer skills can create an interactive map tour on its Web site. Users must upload their own photos and maps (such as scans of print maps or maps found online). Then, they drag markers onto certain points within the map. Hit the publish button and MapsAlive will create an interactive map tour to your liking.

The cost to create these maps is free. However, MapsAlive charges $39 a year for a premium membership, which allows members to download the interactive maps to their computers or servers.

It seems much easier than creating an interactive map in a program like Adobe Flash, which requires some programming skills in order to write ActionScript.

MapsAlive has also made itself more competitive with other mapping platforms by releasing a second version, which allows users to input video and Flash movies , display data from an information database in real time, and create a categorized directory of locations on their interactive map tours.

By Joyce Chang

You’ve probably heard of or even used Google maps by now. Interactive maps have become rather commonplace tools that provide services ranging from driving directions to locating nearby restaurants on a customized mash-up. These maps are often informational and entertaining. (Who doesn’t like doing the 3D zooming in the Google Maps Streetview?) But a recent analysis piece in the Financial Times suggests that maps will take on even greater significance online in the future, becoming the interface to just about everything users do on the Internet.

The article offers an example by Erik Jorgensen, a Microsoft executive. If someone is going to a theater and wants to find other things nearby, such as a restaurant, it is often more useful and logical to search by location than to do a regular search.

John Hanke of Google Earth adds:

This type of search interface obviates the need to type in keywords – just go to a digital map and browse around. “Geography is another way, a different way, to organise information,” he says. “As human beings, we inherently understand geography.”

The article notes that this new “geoweb,” or a reordering of the Internet around a geographic interface, only works if information on the Web is indexed geographically by adding machine-readable tags to documents to indicate the locations to which they refer. Mike Liebhold, a veteran technologist who is now a fellow at Silicon Valley’s Institute for the Future, likens this to “sticking Post-it notes on to Web documents.” Jorgensen estimates that 60 to 80 percent of Web pages have geographically relevant information that could be indexed.

This way of thinking about the Internet is especially relevant to the mobile world. On location-aware handsets, people could use digital maps to see information about other places that are geographically closest, which matter the most, according to the article.

Ask for a restaurant and the handset would be able to show where the nearest one is, along with how to get there and an option to book a table by text message.

The article says that once highly detailed models of the planet are created, the “interplay between the virtual world and the real world could become much more inventive.” Ian Holt, of UK mapping agency Ordnance Survey, suggests that even location-aware spectacles could be created.

“As you look around, they will overlay data about what you’re looking at,” he says, like the “heads-up” displays used by fighter pilots.

The article says these are a stepping stone towards a future digital playground called “augmented reality” in which the real world is a basic framework on which to present information.

Virtual reality would be turned inside out: rather than retreating into a make-believe virtual world, inhabitants of augmented reality will be living in real space but with layers of data overlaid to deliver a supercharged version of reality.

 

Using these technologies, real or fictitious information could be “mapped” on to the real world to create new experiences, says Mr. Liebhold at the Institute for the Future.

The idea that mapping the physical world in digital form could be a turning point in the information age and the “plunging costs” of digital imaging and geolocation equipment are allowing companies to map, plot and photograph the world in great detail, according to the article.

By Satta Sarmah

At LoJoConnect, we’ve spent some time talking about how news organizations are using interactive maps to make public data more accessible.

But now this multimedia storytelling tool is being used by one journalist to map the slow decline of the news industry.

Any aspiring journalist or newspaper lover worried about the future of news may want to turn a blind eye to a new interactive map that charts newspaper layoffs.

The map is on a blog called Paper Cuts, which was started by Erica Smith, a graphic designer at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

Though 2008 isn’t even halfway over, more than 3,000 journalists have lost their jobs at U.S. newspapers, according to the blog.

The map is color-coded to show the differing magnitudes of the layoffs. For example, a white marker on the map indicates a layoff of one to 24 staff members at a particular newspaper (the Yakima-Herald Republic in Seattle, Washington and the Beaver County Times in Beaver, Pennsylvania fit this description), while a red marker on the map reflects a newspaper with more than 100 layoffs (big-name papers like the Washington Post and Newsday have had massive firings).

When users click each marker on this Google-powered map, a box pops up with the name of the newspaper, its parent company, the number of layoffs and the date these layoffs were announced. Noticeably, most of these layoffs were concentrated on the East Coast.

It’s interesting that news and non-news oriented Web sites are using mapping tools to locate and organize all sorts of information, especially news about the state of the news business. This map is a vivid representation of what journalists lament about as many of their colleagues pack up their boxes and seek work in a less volatile field.

For every journalist’s sake, let’s hope there aren’t many more color-coded markers added to this map.

By Hilary Powell

Since Hurricane Katrina swept through New Orleans in 2005, causing several hundred thousand people to evacuate, there have been varying reports on just how many people have returned to the city.

The Greater New Orleans Community Data Center has come up with a visual way to display population indicators, or ways to estimate how many people are living in the city.

One map uses color coding to show how many households are receiving mail. This mailing list data represents the number of residential addresses per block where the post office knows someone actually picks up the mail.

In April, the Center issued a press release stating that the city population had reached 71.8 percent of the pre-Katrina population, up from 49.5 percent in August 2006.

The map and related spreadsheet break down residents actively receiving mail within the city’s 6 parishes.

Another map uses home rebuilding grants to estimate how many residents have returned to salvage their properties.

The Web site’s data expert indicates the population estimates are constantly shifting. A map story form allows for the information to be constantly updated, as well as visually engaging.

By Satta Sarmah

The Lojo Team has been working hard to create a locative experience centered around Chicago’s bid for the 2016 Olympics.

We’re attempting to venture into a realm that many media outlets have yet to explore—or so we thought.

As I was surfing the Internet looking for topics to blog about, I came across an interesting feature on the New York Times’ Web site.

In its travel section, the Times has a feature called “Rome at Night.” The feature is accompanied by the usual multimedia suspects–a map and a slideshow.

But what makes the Times’ feature so distinctive is the inclusion of a “Walking Tour of Rome at Night” that users can download to their Ipod.

The tour is narrated by Ian Fisher, chief of the newspaper’s Rome bureau. Fisher also wrote the accompanying article.

Since I’m not in Rome, I obviously can’t experience the tour first hand. Luckily, the NY Times had the foresight to allow the audience to experience the tour online.

The Web site has a map of Rome with more than 10 locations that people can visit on the walking tour. Each location on the online map has two buttons–one for sound and one for audio. People can click on either button to see a photo or hear information about the location.

After seeing the Times’ walking tour, I decided to do a Google search to see if any other publications had done something similar.

It turns out that from 2005-2006, Slate Magazine had a series of audio tours that users could download from its website.

Slate’s first tour was for the Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art in New York City. Slate called it an unauthorized tour with “commentary museums don’t want you to hear.”

Perhaps the most interesting part of the tour is that Slate’s art critic, Lee Seigel, tells you which paintings are the most overrated and underrated at the museum–a perspective that only a journalism critic could offer.

In previous discussions about locative storytelling, we said it was a great way for newspapers to tell innovative stories that discuss the history of place or report on a once-in-a-lifetime event like the Olympics.

The Times and Slate tours show that this kind of storytelling is great for travel sections as well. However, the challenge will be for news outlets to offer something to travelers that they can’t get from a tour created by a tourism bureau or travel business.

I’m sensing more unauthorized tours are in the works…

By Ki Mae Heussner

If the honchos gathered for the Where 2.0 conference this week have their way, navigationally-challenged people like me will never get lost again.

Thanks to the booming location-based services industry, 3D maps, Google mash-ups, geo-tagged photos and travel directions are exploding out of every kind of digital device.

You’d think at some point, innovation in the geospatial industry would plateau.

But no. Geo-industry engineers and activists continue to unveil pioneering programs, applications and tools.

In Burlingame, CA this week, for the fourth year, the Where 2.0 conference convened “grassroots and leading edge developers building location aware technology… with the businesses and entrepreneurs seeking out location apps, platforms and hardware to gain a competitive edge.”

Sponsored by industry heavyweights like Google, Nokia, Microsoft and Yahoo, the conference provided opportunities for the bigger companies to announce new developments and smaller geo start-ups to make their debuts.

Some of the highlights include:

- Nokia’s announcement to extend its mobile navigation system to the Web with Ovi.com, where users will be able to save map locations and routes and then synchronize the saved information with their phones. The application also allows users to save routes to their phones as they walk or drive around a location and then upload that to their Ovi maps.

- The launch of Concharto, an encyclopedic atlas of history and happenings that anyone can edit. Because the mark-ups are time-coded, it charts history better than other kinds of interactive maps.

- A presentation by John Hanke, director of Google Earth and Maps, revealing that there had been a 300 percent increase in geotagged annotations on Google’s mapping services in the past year. Increasingly, he said, the content is rich media, with links to photos and YouTube videos.

By Joyce Chang

Google launched a new maps feature on Wednesday to facilitate mass sharing of user-generated content, including photos, videos and customized maps that people have created about locations worldwide.

Users have been able to create and share customized Google maps for a while, but this feature makes it easier to do so with the public, not just a few select friends, through a special link. Any user who types a city or location to search for in Google maps can click on an “Explore this area” link, which then displays all the aggregated user-generated content for a location.

A post on CNET.com says the following about the new feature:

For instance, a search on San Francisco brings up photos of the Golden Gate Bridge, the city enveloped in fog (a not uncommon sight), and sunsets. There are videos of penguin chicks at the San Francisco Zoo and video from a YouTube user event.

 

Underneath that is a list of popular searches (such as parking garage, De Young Museum) for the location and then user-created interactive maps, including one showing the scenic 49-mile drive and car chases from the movie “Bullitt.”

Similar to Google Earth, photos are pulled from Google’s location-based image service, Panoramio, and videos are from YouTube.

Google maps have evolved from primarily a navigational tool to include diverse ways of representing information on a map. Other recent additions include the option of placing links to Wikipedia articles within Google maps and a real estate search.

I think Google’s new features add more value to the site to help set it apart, since location-based sites and services sites seem to be hot right now, but I wonder how it will work as more user-generated content is added.

For example, when viewing a Google map of Chicago, I saw plenty of beautiful photos of landmarks that looked like they came from tourist brochures and that gave me a greater sense of each location. But there were also seemingly irrelevant videos that were geo-tagged but had nothing to do with that particular location. If the site becomes cluttered with irrelevant or even incorrect content, will users stop paying attention? It’s both an advantage and a disadvantage that these user-generated features are so open and not really subject to much quality control or administration. Another consideration is the addition of a search by keyword function for the user-created maps. Right now, scrolling through the list of customized maps is manageable, but as more content is added, I can see the value of having a search option.

Other news from Google this week includes its debut of an API that allows developers to use Flash when creating Google maps, which is similar to a feature that Yahoo has had for a while.

View a demo of the new Google maps feature for sharing photos, videos and customized maps:

By Hilary Powell

I’m green with environmental envy about a site launched by Google overseas.

While researching how a successful 2016 Olympic bid in Chicago may impact carbon emissions in the city, I felt pangs of jealousy about how advanced one country is in tracking, well, their dirty tracks.

Last October, Google rolled out an interactive map that serves as a carbon footprint calculator and allows users to view the carbon footprints of others. Dubbed the UK Carbon Footprint Project, the site also allows users to make a personalized home page, iGoogle, with a carbon footprint newsfeed.

Carbon calculators can help determine an individual or household’s carbon footprint, or the “quantity of CO2 emitted to the atmosphere as a result of household energy use, transportation and waste disposal in one year,” according to BP’s Web site.

Team LoJo was specifically interested in how these calculators could be combined with interactive maps to track carbon counts from one destination to another.

One interesting aspect of the UK Carbon Footprint Project is that it allows residents to share information about their emissions and to compare their carbon footprint to the national average.

According to the Project:

On a personalised page, you can track your progress, update your carbon-reducing actions and see a Google Map featuring the footprints and actions of everyone taking part.

And the site has good reason to track carbon emissions. According to the Project’s website, the UK’s carbon footprint is more than 500 million tons of CO2 per year.

This technology has yet to step over to the United States. The good news is that, in the meantime, BP and other websites provide a basic calculator to track individual emissions.