da widget site

Have a look at April 29th Garfiled and you’ll learn that Jon Arbuckle has a GPS-enabled mobile phone. He’s only missing friends to call him. Maybe he needs to get started with Buddy Beacon.

Google announced Google Street View which features high resolution 360-degree street level views from major urban cities. I was impressed.
Shortly after the announcement, Greg Sadetsky found a way into the inner works of Street View. At wherecamp (held on the Yahoo! campus in Sunnyvale, CA) a few developers, including me, had a look at what Greg had found out. We soon realized that it is fairly simple to get the image tiles and soon we started to compile a short list on how this could be used outside of Google Maps. For more info see the Hacking-Google-Street-View page.
My idea was to get street view images onto the mobile phone. A few hours later it was done. And I mean done. It is live on WHERE!. Developing for WHERE is great… very short development cycles.

Mikel Maron has a good post about what else happened around Hacking Google Street Views.

If you are interested how Google collects the images and stitches them together, have a look at Frank Taylor’s post: Technology Behind Google StreetView - Immersive Media.

I am sitting here at the Google Developer Day 2007 in the San Jose Convention Center. Lots of colored boxes and bubbles… waiting for the big show…

…and I had to leave for a meeting. Oh well, at least I got coffee, a t-shirt and half of a keynote speech.

We’ve presented our WHERE application here at the Where 2.0 conference in San Jose. The response and interest of so many people has been exciting and motivating.
Also the interest from other web sites and developers is looking promising to add many more widgets to our gallery.

Here a post from ÜberPulse with a quote from me.

More from Where 2.0 later..

Cheers,
Markus

A wikipedia for geographical data… how great is that? Very. GeoNames is just that and what makes it even more interesting, are its aggregation of data from various countries and the webservices it offers. Dopplr (see my previous post) also uses their webservices. Especially the postal code services are of great value for many applications where a lookup by zip code is sufficient. Data is also available for download if you’d prefer to integrate it into your application.
Users can also add/edit data in a wiki style edit interface. This is using the power of the internet: users from all over the world contribute to GeoNames. Hats off!

Another great post about GeoNames at TechCrunch.

— Once in a while, you find a web application that, beyond having a bit of a ‘cool factor’, it is also useful. This is what it takes for any product to be successful and DOOPLR has this potential.
I am actually a bit jealous because I had about the exact same idea (I am not trying to brag… congratulations to the DOOPLR team). See, I am lucky to know many people around the world. We communicate through an online group where every so often, somebody from the group travels e.g., to San Francisco and wants to see if anybody happens to be in the area around that time (this actually really just happened a few days ago). Now there are about 150 people in that group and keeping up with everybody’s address and travel plans seems almost impossible… DOOPLR to the rescue:

How does Dopplr work? It lets you share your future travel plans with a group of trusted fellow travellers whom you have chosen. It also reminds you of friends and colleagues who live in the cities you’re planning to visit. You can use the service with your personal computer and mobile phone (source).

As of now, DOOPLR is per invitation only. I am hoping to grab one of those invitations at the where 2.0 conference. In that case, I will report back.

A tweak to search blog entries and pages — The default WordPress search box only searches the blog entries. I have found many people looking or providing a solution that also searches static pages. I finally settled for Advanced Search by Alex Günsche. It offers several options to search your WordPress content from a separate search form. I didn’t want to use a separate page and incorporated the advanced search into the default search box. Anybody interested, here is how I got it working:

1. Install Advanced Search.
2. Edit searchform.php to use the advanced search… here my example as a text file.
3. Done. Try it out by searching for a word in one of your static pages.

Hope this helps,
Markus