LOJOCONNECT.COM
location-based technology + journalism

By Satta Sarmah

On Wednesday, I was making the long trek from Chicago’s South Side to Evanston when an advertisement on the red line train grabbed my attention.

The ad was for Rubloff, the nearly 80-year-old Chicago real estate company, which is attempting to modernize its business by offering potential buyers valuable information and services on its Web site.

The content of the ad made me take notice. It mentioned something about an interactive map that also showed school statistics and demographics for neighborhoods with available properties.

Intrigued by the ad, I checked out the map online and learned that it also shows demographic information according to zip code. When I typed in my zip code, 60201, Rubloff’s map gave me stats on the different ethnic groups in the area, the average home price, annual household income and number of businesses in the community.

Rubloff’s map was somewhat impressive, but what struck me most about it was that it wasn’t powered by Google Earth or Google Maps. It used a program I never even knew existed–Microsoft Virtual Earth.

Google Earth and Google Maps seem to be the preeminent mapping technologies for news organizations and businesses. But the newest release of Virtual Earth may present some competition for these platforms.

Apparently, Virtual Earth was launched in November of 2006 as a replacement for Microsoft’s original mapping platform, Live Local. When it was launched, Virtual Earth included features such as 3D viewing, zooming and mash-ups.

The latest release of Virtual Earth is geared towards businesses. Microsoft’s Web site says the program will help businesses innovate online by “creat[ing] engaging applications for your customers and develop[ing] powerful ways to visualize business information by combining online maps with your integrated data.”

Virtual Earth also includes several tools and add-ins. One of them is the MapCruncher, which allows users to import and layer maps they’ve created into Virtual Earth. Though data created in Google Earth can be viewed in Google Maps, it seems that neither platform currently gives users the capability to import their own specialized maps.

Like the Google applications, Virtual Earth may be a good tool for conveying news and information. Though it has mostly been used for business solutions, Virtual Earth has also been used for civic purposes.

In March, people in France were able to visualize results of the country’s municipal elections using Virtual Earth. The mapping platform helped French residents see which political party won municipal elections held in nearly 37,000 cities and towns throughout the country.

By Hilary Powell

GPS has made the world feel like a smaller place, and now the technology is bringing people together socially.

A recent article in Digital Journal describes a Web site that lets users dog-ear their favorite spots on a map.

POIfriend.com allows users to save their favorite locations on a map, and share them with friends. The POI, which stand for points of interest, can be plotted on the highly interactive site and then sorted by category.

Perhaps what’s most impressive is that, according to Digital Journal, “anyone visiting your list can download the POIs to PCs or GPS-enabled devices.”

A Zoomerang online poll found that 60 percent of women said they would feel better navigating roads with a GPS system. A Web site like POIfriend.com is engaging that sense of security. It’s like getting advice from a trusted girlfriend or guy friend via mapping technology.

At least 85,000 points of interest have been downloaded to the site since it first launched in October 2007, which proves someone out there is interested in locative social networking.

By Hilary Powell

As we research the possibilities of Google Maps for our LoJo needs, the team realizes that it’s important to know the limitations of such technology.

In establishing our goals for locative storytelling, we must take into account that there are some places kept private, even in the virtual world.

For example, just last month, Google pulled Pentagon pictures of U.S. military bases from Google Maps. According to the BBC News, the military denied access to the company because “close-up, ground-level imagery of US military sites posed a ‘potential threat’ to security.”

In early April, reports surfaced in the blogosphere that the Singapore government is pondering a ban on Google Earth for fear the images infringe on the Singapore Land Authority copyright.

To ensure that the company protects individual privacy, Google has taken a few precautions. According to CNet News:

Now anyone can alert the company and have an image of a license plate or a recognizable face removed, not just the owner of the face or car, says Marissa Mayer, vice president of search products and user experience at Google.

By Satta Sarmah

We’ve seen interactive maps used to recount historical events like Martin Luther King, Jr.’s assassination or to make public data on city crimes and home foreclosures more accessible to average citizens.

Now, one organization in New York City is using an interactive map to build community awareness and promote much-needed development in neighborhoods across the city.

The Community-Based Planning Task Force of the Municipal Art Society has created an “Atlas of Community-Based Plans in New York City.”

The task force touts the atlas as the “only publicly accessible compilation of the city’s community-based plans.”

The map appears to be the first of its kind in any U.S. city.

Though it’s labeled as an atlas, it’s basically an interactive map powered by Google. Each trigger point on the map has links to a text pdf version of a community-based plan for a particular area, whether it be Coney Island, East Harlem or Chinatown.

The task force also made the atlas very user-friendly and location-centric. Users can search for plans by borough or by type. For example, you can look up community plans in Brooklyn or search for housing revitalization and water revitalization plans. The atlas includes current plans and plans dating back to 1989.

The atlas was initially created to provide local political candidates with in-depth information about improvement efforts in certain communities. However, the atlas is also being used as a road map for communities that want to mimic plans created in other neighborhoods.

Presumably, the task force has used the atlas to push community development efforts to the forefront of the city’s consciousness. In their explanation, the task force said they created the map because the city seems to be committed on paper to improving disadvantaged areas, but needs to put in more elbow grease to complete these projects.

The atlas has certain implications for journalists, especially community and urban affairs reporters. It could be a good source for stories, provide reporters with an overview of neighborhood concerns on their beat and help them determine the efforts local politicians are making to address these issues.

By Ki Mae Heussner

I’m having blog envy.

Prompted by an AP Internet writer’s review of Google Earth, Lifehacker posted a reader poll this morning to find out how many people actually use the application, and already more than 3,000 readers have responded.

If only the survey (and poll) we posted last week could attract that kind of attention…

But despite the pinch of jealousy I felt upon seeing the numbers of votes, I was grateful for the info. Since hearing about Google Earth from my techie friends and family members (and especially since downloading it and testing the tool myself), I’ve wondered who among us really use GE. I’ve heard lots of people praise the technology as the latest marvel from those geniuses at Google, but I’ve heard very few talk about how they use the application in their day-to-day lives.

While Lifehacker’s poll shows that a significant majority (66 percent) of the respondents have done little more with Google Earth than “ooh” and “ah” at it before returning to Google Maps, it also reveals that a loyal contingent (23 percent) use the tool regularly for personal and professional use. Nine percent of the respondents identified themselves as KML file-toting Google Earth enthusiasts and 2 percent confessed that they’d never heard of Google Earth.

Pushing aside the green-eyed monster that re-appeared when I noted that the entry had been viewed nearly 12,000 times, I skimmed over the reader comments to find out just who these GE loyalists are.

If you’re a fan of Google Earth, it looks like you’re in good company. Here are a few of your compatriots:

- a graphics designer for a billboard company (who also thought it was cool to see the big yachts in the Monaco harbor)

- a hang glider who takes GPS tracks and lays them onto Google Earth to review, replay and share flights

- a tennis player who uses GE to scope out local courts and parking lots

- an entrepreneur with a site that monitors the locations of speed traps

- teachers of archeology and earth sciences, real estate prospectors, photographers

- runners, hikers, travelers

- parents

By Hilary Powell

Savage winds are common in the twister-prone prairies of the Central U.S., but, on Monday, southeastern Virginia was pummeled with an unexpected series of tornadoes.

In their coverage of the rare event, a number of news outlets used maps to help readers grasp the depth of the destruction.

But some industry watchers wondered why the use of location-based technology wasn’t more widespread and/or sophisticated.

The issue was brought to the team’s attention by a Roosevelt University professor in Chicago who recently took our survey on how locative technology is being used in newsrooms.

He was hoping to find even a simple, non-interactive map showing where the tornadoes hit in Virginia, but both the New York Times and the Chicago Tribune disappointed him, he wrote to me in an e-mail.

So I went looking for stories that used maps to explain what happened.

A Google search for ‘Virginia AND map’ resulted in a trickle of stories accompanied by a map, including one from The Examiner online. It used a basic Google Map, with a bullet point focused on Suffolk, a city where emergency crews were deployed after the storm. But besides clicking the dot — revealing the longitude and latitude of the location — there was not much interactivity involved.

The Virginian-Pilot’s online map of the area is a step up in terms of locative technology. The Pilot’s map zooms in on the Suffolk area and provides a tool that allows viewers to plot and enter small blurbs about their own “storm stories.” I wish those stories had added some pictures and maybe even home footage. If the map is going to be labeled “interactive,” let’s not skimp on the possibilities of that term. Still, the map key helps to break down details on road closures and major damage. It’s a strong example of using maps to localize a story.

Finally, after much online searching, CNN.com gave me the Flash fix I needed to better understand how the storms devastated specific locations.

These are just a few examples of how news outlets are using available locative technology to tell stories in interesting, forward-thinking ways, and they will help us determine where to go next.

By Ki Mae Heussner

Location, location, location. It’s the most oft-repeated mantra in real estate. But now that location-based services are sprouting up all over the Web, it’s starting to take on a new meaning to more and more professionals in the news media.

Charged with devouring as much as we can about mobile technology and its applications for journalists, team LoJo has been scouting the Web for updates on how newsrooms are adapting to and capitalizing on locative media.

During the past few weeks, we’ve encountered some excellent examples of location-based storytelling that seem likely to push more newsrooms into the emerging geo-journalism space:

- Earlier this month, the New York Times and Google announced a new partnership that allows readers to track articles geographically using Google Earth. (If you want to see what’s going on in Paris, for example, a few clicks on a Google Earth map will show you the latest headlines coming out of the French capital.)

- When protesters attempted to disrupt the Olympic torch procession in San Francisco, the Sacramento Bee used Qik (technology that streams live footage from videophones to a Web-based flash player) to broadcast live videos of the scuffle.

- And, just the other night, as we waited for the results of the Pennsylvania Democratic primary to come in, we were treated to a high-tech presentation on CNN, featuring correspondent John King and a gigantic, touch-sensitive interactive map.

These examples give us the sense that locative media is gaining a foothold in newsrooms across the country, but… we know that there’s a lot going on out there that we still don’t know.

So, to scrape together a clearer picture of locative media usage, we’ve posted a survey online.

If you’re a working journalist or work in the news media in some other capacity, please help us out and complete our (very short) survey. If you don’t work in a newsroom, but know those who do, please forward on the link below.

http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=Pw7knnDn37s7tY0C9sA2Pw_3d_3d

As always, we’ll share the results online, along with our own analysis.