Finding and Getting Our Way With Google Maps

I have been using Google Maps for years since I switched from MapQuest. In all the years of using Google Maps I never came across a circumstance where any corrections were needed.

Until recently when I noticed my daughter's public school was missing from the map. I thought this was a problem as I had a fair amount of difficulty finding the school for the first time and considering that many people (myself included) rely on Google Maps to find places that I should correct the omission.

Google offers a tool to make these additions and corrections called Map Maker.

It's quite easy to use. There are text-box fields to enter or edit a name, address and contact info - all quite clear. The visual interface to plot locations on the satellite view is also easy to use, particularly if one is  familiar with GIS. It just requires using a simpler drawing tool to outline the shape of sites over Google's satellite view.

So I added my kid's school to the map and also decided to fix other sites in the area.

I did five changes:

1. public school added (by correcting existing entry)
2. park/garden added 
3. public ice rink added
4. change rooms (for pool and rink) added
5. variety store's location corrected (it was misplaced on the wrong street)

These changes took me no more than 20 minutes. There usefulness to newcomers or visitors to the neighbourhood would be significant, I'm certain.

So far I'm thinking that the tool and service (to everyone) is a great idea.

But then came their murky, dubious review process...

I appreciate the need for a review process to stop spammers, trolls, and vandals. But Google's review process is unnecessarily opaque and inconsistent.

Google will notify people of the status of changes made via a location's history webpage and email (although I found that email notifications only went out seldom).

Change #2, made it onto the map. It is the only correction that Google accepted.

Change #4 was added to Google Maps as I submitted it, but then removed a few days later.

Change #5 was quickly flagged as needing further investigation (the street address for the store was correct as is but Google had it marked as on a separate step - that is quickly able to see and shouldn't require investigation). Although I do get that with businesses they should check with the business owner to double-check.  About a month later and the wrong location is still on the map.

Change #3 was rejected as needing more information. No details were supplied on the precise or even nature of the required missing info except to a link to a general page about using the tool.

I was given the option to add more info to my change. The only info that I hadn't supplied was the telephone number and opening hours. I gave them our Parks and Rec department. Phone number and indicated it was only open during winter months and then resubmitted.

The second try at the ice rink seemed to have worked - partially. It doesn't appear by default on the map (as the park's seeming pool and off-leash dog areas do), but if you type in the correct name it will come up on the map.  That just raises another murky issue with Google Maps, why do they have locations that don't show up on a map unless you specifically search for them (particularly major public sites)?

Change #1 - the one that started all this - was rejected as the current (incorrect) information was deemed by a Google editor to be "more appropriate". I had provided a link to an official source - the Board of Education - which had the correct info as I entered it. What is more appropriate than the Board of Education?

This begs the question - To what authority does Google recognize?

Even worst Google did not give me the option to change or object to my entry (as I got with the ice rink). And Google removed all record of the change request from the tool's user history - so as to shut of any debate or trace of the issue permanently.

I got the name of the editor who rejected the change but Google provides me no way to examine editors' credentials or record. But it is safe to assume that they are not a Toronto government official or even a local, so why do they get such absolute, unchecked power?

Google does offer a forum that can provide some recourse and further information but it is unwieldy and frankly it is an unreasonable burden to make people use such a cumbersome process.

As a public service and a company and one that relies on user-generated content, Google has a duty to establish more rigorous, consistent, transparent processes.

I'm so put off by Google after this I will start switching to OpenStreetMap, a free, user-generated map. At least their review process appears quite transparent and any effort I put into improving them map doesn't add money to a corporate juggernaut.

Putting Facebook and Flickr on the Map

Online user-generated maps aren't new - they exploded years ago when Google Maps released their API in 2005. I've used web-based mapping services to build my own maps for everything from the places I've visited via TripAdvisor to a list of my favourite bakeries via foursquare. 

Of the various user-generated maps, the type I most frequently use is maps of my photgraphs. For a long time, I've been adding the location of the photos I upload to Flickr and Facebook, but only recently started exploring the functionality.

Both Facebook and Flickr have really useful and fun photo map features, but neither meets all my needs completely. 

Facebook Maps
What I like about Facebook maps is that is easy to use. You don't need to know the address of a photo's location to map it. One can add the location by either dropping the photo on a map (a common enough feature) or enter its name and Facebook automatically will find matches (with good accuracy). One can also batch identify the location of photos based, which speeds up the process.  I also like how Facebook doesn't have a cap on how many photos one can upload without having to pay, unlike Flickr.

One of the most useful elements that Facebook's maps offer is that every location automatically links to a Facebook page with info about the location and if friends have been there. The content is mostly populated with Wikipedia entries, but I can see this growing into an interesting hub of place-info.

There are downsides to using Facebook maps. I don't like how when you click on a map to see a geolocated photo, it opens a small window that does not proportionality resize or centre the image, so inevitably the picture is displayed poorly. Facebook only has a map view, instead of also having an Earth view as most online maps now have.

The biggest problem with Facebook is critical mass. If my friends represent a snapshot of Facebook users, almost no one is mapping their photos (or other life-events as Facebook enables). I checked out my friends' maps and they are virtual deserts. It could be a great way to learn more about one's friends or gain some collective insight on places, but that value is only realized if enough people use it.

Also, although it is fairly easy to add location details to Facebook, it isn't easy to access this information. There needs to be a way to explore friends maps without having to go to each friend's page and click on their maps. It's social media, so the maps should enable collective display. Finally, the nature of Facebook - sharing info amongst friends vs. the world-at-large - means that it isn't feasible to share or export one's map or even photos.

Flickr Maps
I haven't used Flickr for years as I reached their 200 free images cap and don't want to pay.  But I wanted to experiment with their mapping feature so I deleted a bunch of old pictures and gave it a try - here's my Flickr map.

As far as I have found, Flickr has the best, publicly-viewable user photos mapping service (let me know if there are better ones out there). But I have had trouble with Flickr map being buggy and not displaying some geotagged photos and with it locking up frequently.

It is also way more difficult than other online map services to geotag a specific location. It doesn't accept the names of places (e.g. organization name or point of interest) or longitude and latitude coordinates, so one needs to know the specific street address to get the map to recognize the location.

Once mapped though, it is easy to view photos on a map. But Flickr doesn't allow one to customize their map beyond sorting by most recent or "interesting"  or searching. One can't have more than one map or customize their map by a specific set or some category.

I really like Flickr's Places feature.  Unlike Facebook Maps, the "Places" feature represents a vibrant social media effort. It displays the collective photos of a place either by recent or "interesting" (Flickr's secret sauce sorting algorithm). It also displays a map of the place that if clicked on opens up to display the geotagged photos charted on a map. Places also offers relevant groups and keywords.  Flickr Places' page for Fergus, Ontario is a good example.

Flickr doesn't enable their map to be embedded in another site, for that they do enable third-party apps.

iMapFlickr & MyPics Map
What Flickr lacks in extensive functionality, it makes up for fostering a wealth of third-party apps (via their "App Garden"). I found a couple, MyPicsMap and iMapFlickr that offer the map functionality that can be embedded in another site.

I tried out these apps on a new page of this blog, My Photos.  Both apps are free, offer some cool features, and are easy to use. They both allow one to display a Flickr collection or set overlaid on a map. Both use Google Maps and therefore offer zooming, scrolling, and map, satellite and terrain views.

On the top of the page, my travel photo highlights are displayed via MyPicsMap.  I like how it uses a thumbnail version of my photo overlaid on a map, so that one can quickly scan the world to see the global highlights.

MyPicsMap doesn't allow one to customize the default view and for some reason it chooses the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. It also seems to have faulty display as my images of India and most of Europe do not show up unless one zooms in.

iMapFlickr does allow one to customize the view of the map that is embedded and some other display options (such as height, colours, default map view, etc.).

Instead of offering a thumbnail of a photo overlaid on a map, iMapFlickr displays a flag and then has a scrolling photo viewer below the map (similar to Flickr's map). This isn't as much fun for worldwide photos, but works great when trying to display photos mapped in close proximity. I used iMapFlickr for my local photos (it's the map of Toronto, below my travel photos on My Photos page).


Facebook, Flickr, iMapFlickr, and MyPics Map offer some impressive functionality.  Facebook has the existing social network that has tremendous sharing potential and Facebook also integrates well with specific place pages.  Flickr's has great photos of most places and some cool third-party functionality such as the latter two mentioned. But none of these services offer the degree of customization and social integration I'd like.

Also, I'd love to see functionality that enables these to be converted into an individual location-based service. Still looking for someone to offer that service.

Top 20 Most Important Developments of the Internet

The Internet Society is celebrating its 20th anniversary this year. They are a global organization devoted to maintaining a free, open, accessible, and viable Internet.

I've recently blogged about the Internet Society's call for people to submit ideas for a new Internet Hall of Fame they are establishing.

Internet Society is also marking their anniversary with a listing of what people think are the 20 most significant developments in the history of the Internet, whether an innovation, event, or product.

So I figured I would offer my top 20. I tried to combine technological inventions, commercial product launches, and events that have shaped the Internet.  I've linked to Wikipedia (#16) for more information on the topics.

Top 20 Internet Developments:

1. ARPANET - the military research network of the 1960s that became the Internet
2. Hypertext - interlinking of digital text and media, predicted by Vannevar Bush in the 1940s, developed by Ted Nelson and Douglas Engelbart in the 1960s
3. Email - invented in the 1970s and is the bedrock of Internet-based communications (honourable mention to Hotmail for making email more accessible in 1996 by offering the first free web-based email service) 
4. Domain Name System (DNS) -  gives us the ability to use plain language web addresses
5. MUDs (Multi-User Dungeon/Domain) - the first form of networked games, developed in the late 1970s and is the precursor to modern forms of collaborative and online gaming such as Massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPG) 
6. Archie - first Internet search engine (for FTP sites), developed at McGill University in 1990
7. World Wide Web (WWW) - Tim Berners-Lee creates the ultimate digital medium in 1991
8. Mosaic - user-friendly browser launched in 1993 that accelerated the popularity of the Web by displaying images and text together
9. Netscape's Initial Public Offering - the browser's phenomenal IPO propelled Internet development and usage
10. Secure Socket Layers - Netscape's encryption system, developed in the mid 1990s, helped make the web secure enough to allow e-commerce and e-banking to flourish
11. Travelocity - one of the first victims of e-business were travel agencies (who books in person anymore?) and Travelocity, which launched to consumers in the mid 1980s via CompuServe, was one of the first online travel booking sites
12. Internet Movie Database (IMDB) - launched first on USENET in 1990, IMDB was one of the first websites to popularize user-generated content, in the form of user ratings and reviews, thus being Web 2.0 years before the concept was created (honourable mention to Writing.com for also being one of the first UGC sites and one that encouraged more lengthy and collaborative content)
13. Classmates.com - widely popular website, launched in 1995, that was among the first to create what we now know as a social networking site (way ahead of Friendster, in 2002,  and MySpace, in 2003)
14. GeoCities - launched in 1995, popularized personal web publishing by offering free web hosting and  customizable homepages (honourable mention to Blogger with its 1999 launch it was one of the first and most popular web publishing tools and helped create the blog genre))
15. Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) - these guidelines, first published in 1999 by the W3C, have done more than anything else to enable websites to be accessible to people with various abilities 
16. Wikipedia - launched in 2001, two huge contributions: 1) open access to encyclopaedic information and 2) breaks down barriers of official knowledge by allowing anyone to participate in its creation
17. Delicious - launched in 2003, the social bookmarking site became possibly the first instance of folksonmies, that is collaborative user tagging of information objects (in this case bookmarks)
18. Streaming and downloadable media - from listening to the radio or watching video live (such as Victoria's Secret's annual fashion show, the first majorly successful webcast), to downloading music MP3s from Napster or iTunes, to watching videos on YouTube or through IPTV - the Internet has  fundamentally changed our media consumption and purchasing (or lack thereof) behaviour
19. Mobile Web and Internet-enabled mobile apps - mobile apps or mobile-friendly webpages have enabled ubiquitous access to the Internet, surpassing desktop access since 2008
20. Open-source software and standards - free programming languages, such as HTML, JavaScript, and XML (hence AJAX), and software, such as Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP and Perl (hence LAMP), have made it financially possible for anyone to build and host their own websites, breaking down prior elite forms of media production and distribution

Runner-ups:

• Open access publishing - the Internet made it effective to share information freely and widely, with resulting open access journals, such as First Monday (about the Internet) 
• Internet porn - legendary driver of online development and adoption
• Forums and chat rooms - excellent new forms of multi-person communication
• Recommendation systems - using our collective data to help identify things we may like, the music site Pandora is an excellent example of the power of this, the Netflix Prize contest helped propel development in this area
• Google - revolutionized search engines and the first great online-only company
• eBay & PayPal - perfected microsales and consumer-to-consumer commerce
• VoIP & Skype - no more long-distance telephone charges
• Craigslist - the first widely popular online classified website that assisted in the demise of newspapers
• Foursquare - the first geosocial network and location-based service to hit critical mass
• Internet of Things - everything will soon be wired to the Net from cars, refrigerators, and closets

As you can see I had a hard time, limiting myself to 20.

I'd love to hear other people's thoughts on what should be on the list (or off), and any corrections, such as missing predecessors or international developments that set the trend.

"Meeting the global community, and finding out they are all my mother"

As I find user reviews on websites so helpful, I was eager to read today’s CNET article "A bad review for review sites" by Michael Kanellos.

I love user reviews as they have the potential to offer an honest, non-marketing hype, review of a product, place or service.

Amazon has offered customer reviews for years and I have bought products based on a good oval showing and a few particularly useful individual comments.

User reviews do tend to fixate on bitchily minute details or meander to completely irrelevant, personal anecdotes. Kanellos humorously summarizes the innate problems:

The Internet has ushered in a new era of human interconnectedness and will likely radically transform industry, scientific research and the structure of society. It's also made us into a bunch of old ladies. Perhaps no other time in human history has there been so much nitpicking. All you have to do is troll a site like Yelp.com for a few minutes to find a cavalcade of complaints disguised as constructive criticism or--just as bad--positive, and largely tangential, compliments… It's like meeting the global community, and finding out they are all my mother.

User reviews have also been co-opted by either the company being reviewed or users with a hidden agenda.

For example, we love TripAdvisor and have used it for years, generally with good results. I think initially there were only helpful travellers using it, but now I think companies have finally discovered it and are trying to skew it.About four months ago, we went to a resort in Mexico. We had to read a lot of reviews to find some that were not just travel memoirs or useless marketing hype. When we returned, my wife wrote a review with some positive and negative details – within minutes my wife’s review was labeled by a handful of “users” as unhelpful. I’m convinced, though I can’t prove it, that the company had its PR staff monitoring this and burying anything remotely negative. It isn’t conceivable that there were that many people, within minutes, who would have been checking out that review and would have voted it unhelpful.

The idea of flagging helpful reviews or rating them is a great way to separate the wheat from the chaff. But there needs to be some sort of IP tracking to prevent companies from skewing results.

I don’t know many people and of the few people I know there’s no one in the same boat as me in terms of life stage nor do they share the same tastes as me, so user reviews offer an excellent source of advice - that doesn't come from my mother.

Can a million penguins typing away create the great novel?

Penguin books and De Montfort University started a project to create a novel through a wiki.

The project, A Million Penguins, believed to be the first attempt of a wiki-created novel, started last week and quickly got about a hundred edits an hour from around the world.

The first few paragraphs seemed disjointed but did contain the memorable sentence:

“He fumbled in his pocket for his cell phone but accidentally fumbled his own genitalia - it felt good so he continued for a while.”

With such a promising start I continued on, but it lost me after the first few sections in its meandering pointlessness and alcohol infatuation (even for me). The wisdom of crowds thus results in lots of descriptions of booze and drugs - surely the inevitable fart jokes will follow.

The editor’s blog is an interesting read. It chronicles the challenges of managing this Herculean project with vandalism, Chinese text thrown in, and subsequent divergent novels that have already emerged and discussions of how to maintain structure or allow it to be a fluid work with people working on the ending while the beginning is constantly being rewritten.

Cool experiment. Just hope our species can resist the lure of fart jokes.

Travels online and off

Just got back from a week in Mexico, hence the Webslinger hiatus.

Mexico
Checking out the ever-useful TripAdvisor and the recently-discovered Debbie's Caribbean Reviews we found an area of Mexico that was safe from the ongoing attacks/murders of Canadian tourists there. We would never have been able to find a truly safe destination in Mexico and a resort that fit our various needs, without being able to research online. Online comments and forums also convinced us to stay clear of Dominican Republic, which we almost went to. So in the end, we had a pretty good trip thanks the Internet.

But once there, a week without Internet access was hard for me, but I managed. The ever-present blender drinks certainly helped.

Along the theme of travel, here are a couple related sites:

43Places
A website I discovered shortly before leaving, is 43places.com Users can enter the 43 places they most want to go and indicate there progress. Here's my list (just got 2 down). You can share tips and reviews on the location and share with others who share your destinations. This combines the right amount of personalization, user generated content and community. Okay I already had a list so this site just takes that to the extreme!


Moto-MoJo
Colleague and MediaGleaner blogger, Liz is off to Europe for her own Long Way Round motorcycle adventure. She started a blog about her trip. Her many problems and great struggles in Brugge make for good reading. Not that I wish more problems on her, but a smooth trip wouldn't have been nearly as compelling. Check out Moto-Mojo (but start at the earliest entry).

Down the road
Found another site that seems promising, Virtual Tourist. I'll be checking it out more as we plan our summer trip to St. Pierre & Miquelon, Newfoundland & Labrador. Plus Yahoo Travel seems to be expanding lately. Just filled out an online survey for their site that seems that they offer way more cool stuff than I ever could find. (I did write a whole bunch of destination reviews for them so I hope it comes to something!)

It's all about me!

It's my birthday today, so this blog is all about me! (Even more so than usual.)

Master of my domain
First, as my birthday gift to myself, I registered my own domain, www.glenfarrelly.com
It redirects here for the time being.

Despite being in the Internet field for about eight years now, I never registered a domain. GoDaddy.com quickly turned up as the favoured domain registrar. I wanted a Canadian company but they (eg. 10Dollar.ca) are not as cheap ($7 per year) or offered as much extras. So far, so good with Go Daddy.

glenfarrelly.com will soon be the destination - for me, my mother, and possibly my wife.

For your viewing pleasure?
In honour of my birthday, I tried out Levi's personalized ad campaign. It's creepy, but unique. But you haven't seen anything like this before and after viewing this, you won't want to.

Glen stars in Levi ad - Rated "R" (terrifying)


Even more Glen
I've been cooking up a lot of stuff lately and over the years.

• My LinkedIn Profile


• My wiki project - Famous Torontonians


• My Movies Ratings on IMDB


• MySpace page


• My del.icio.us bookmarks


• My Diggs


• My volunteer work - maintaining Heritage Toronto


• My lens on Toronto history & culture


• My Amazon List of best Toronto non-fiction


• My favourite trip photos on Yahoo Photos


• My Wikipedia contributions - not many, yet


• My Quicken.ca/MoneySense.ca years - not much to show since the site was merged/purged with Canadian Business - but here's my RESP Calculator


• My first website, BonnieStern.com that I worked on professionally - I coded it (in ColdFusion), structured the site architecture & navigation, aided design and overall direction (surprisingly, while updated, it is still much like I left it in 2000)


• My online travelogues at Bootsnall (from 1999)


• My Wedsite
  


• My first online portfolio - embarrassing now


• My first job in the Internet - interning at Canadian Geographic, maintaining their website and writing online articles
  


• My school years at Classmates.com

Wow: this is way more than even I want to know about me.!

The Internet really does enable - even encourage - narcissism.

e-Ventful Websites

A Casecamp participant, in promoting the event, alerted me today to the free website Upcoming.org.

Upcoming.org
It's an excellent Web 2.0 example (I hate that term, but it's a useful concept) but I think its functionality far exceeds the confines of just its own website.

Upcoming.org started in 2003 (again I'm discovering these things late - I feel like I've been in a como for the past 2-3 years). Many sites have done event listings and enabled organizing and promoting personal events (evite, for instance). The problem with these is that most websites just didn't have enough event listings or they only did a certain type of event (to use Toronto as an example, Toronto.com, Now and Backbone seemed to miss a lot of significant events and never broadened listings beyond their respective focus). evite et al were great to help host and promote events but didn't offer listings.

Event listings are no easy feet to do either. There are thousands of events going on in Toronto, probably in just one month. I hate to think about a city like New York. How did websites publish this before? I take it they'd have some sort of streamlined process, but ultimately every event must have had to some sort of manual review and some level of manual coding or inputing. A ton of work and explains why so many sites did events so poorly (badly organized, missing events, outdated, etc.).

What's cool about Upcoming.org, now owned by Yahoo, is that it greatly expands the potential and amount of listings.

Upcoming puts the listing creation into the hands of users to create private events or promote public events. Events are organized by city and type (eg. music, arts, festival, commercial, arts - they actually need more types to encompass trade events as for now they all go under "other")

Judging by the number and breadth of events listed, the site has critical mass, they just need to expand beyond their comparative ghetto. That's why I think their service would be way more useful if repackaged in Toronto.com. People already go to this site for this type of information and their editorial and community can add value beyond just a listing.

Upcoming.org does encourage community by having you flagging events that you are attending or considering. You can then see which of your friends are going or share events with friends easily.

Meetup.com
Another, cool event website is Meetup.com.

Meetup seemed to take the idea and basic functionality of Yahoo Groups (which I have loved and used ever since I found others, a group even, of people as devoted and talkative about Xena, Warrior Princess as I was).

The problem with Yahoo Groups is that it is a lonely world and while it's great to post and email other Xenaphiles, it's nice to actually meet people in person some time. Meetup.com is devoted to groups that actually meet in person. Many types of groups and in your city! Even web-geeks needs some human contact every now and then - or just a beer/coffee.

While I registered with Meetup four months ago (I even joined the Toronto Web Centric Meetup Group) I haven't been able to actually been to a meeting yet.

Here's the rub... the Internet has enabled not only great social networking but also bringing unique, and yes often bizarre, groups together. It enables organizing public & private events and promoting them. But it still hasn't found a babysitter for me! Can't leave my two-year-old with Net Nanny.

You are the Time's person of the year!

It's been a few days, but I just found out that YOU are Time Magazine's Person of the Year.

They mean the you in the sense of Web 2.0.

The content-creating, forum-posting, avatar-living, blog-ranting, review-writing, video-producing, social-networking, online-collaborating, web-living YOU!

Along with their declaration of the role of the individual in shaping the new Internet and the resulting cultural changes, Time has put together a suite of good articles.

My favourites articles are:

• Enough About You - how user-generated content and increasingly niche news/info sources allows people to not hear about things they need to know about
  
• Andy Warhol Was Right - the Internet as the ultimate narcissist vehicle, "On the Web, everyone is famous to 15 people."
• Web Boom 2.0 - why the build-up of Web 2.0 is not a bubble about to burst
• My So-Called Second Life - are people's Second Life as pathetic as their first?