OUseful Info

MyMaps GeoBlogger - Blogging From Google Maps

I've been thinking about contextualised blogging interfaces, lately, in the sense of lightweight publishing and syndication from an environment that supports the easy creation of structured posts, such as posts about a series of events structured in time, or space.

The Displaying Google Calendar Events on a Map Yahoo pipes mashup may be viewed as using the Google Calendar environment to easily create posts associated with a particular date, and then optionally associate location information (described in natural language) with each posted item. If the date information is removed, the order of posts that appear in the calendar feed can be readily reordered, changing the presentation order in the published feed, simply by moving the posts about in the calendar view. (The body of the post in this case would be contained withing the Calendar event description.)

Google Calendar thus provides an interface for creating - and managing - a series of ordered posts, and does not have to be viewed as just a calendar...

But what if you primarily want to blog from different geographical locations, (without the aid of GPS support!)? It would be really handy if you could just click the relevant location on a map, and write a post exactly from there...

...which is why I tidied up and extended the Yahoo pipe mentioned in A "Google MyMaps RSS editor" and added a couple of extra features, like being able to add a 'publication date' for your post, as well as a link URL: Google MyMaps Blogging Pipe - http://pipes.yahoo.com/ouseful/mymapsblog

The pipe effectively allows you to use a Google My Map as a "geographical blogging surface". Each marker on the map corresponds to a separate post, or feed item. The 'View in Google Earth' link from the MyMap can be passed to the pipe and a valid geoRSS feed will be produced as a result.

As well as adding geoRSS lat/long tags to the RSS feed, the pipe is capable of:

- adding a date to each post: to give the post a date, use a construct like: date: February 7th, 2008. You can also add dates like "today", which will give the post the current days date whenever the pipe is run - meaning you can associate 'relative' post dates with posts made from the map.

- associating a URL with the title of each post, in true RSS fashion: to give an item a url, use something like: url:http://example.com or link:http://example.com/foo/bar.html

Here's a very poor example MyMaps geoblog, and here's an example MyMaps geoblog feed.

To generate the MyMaps geoblog RSS feed, get hold of the "View in Google Earth" URL from the MyMap:

and paste it in to the Yahoo MyMaps geoblogger pipe, then get hold of the RSS feed URL from the pipe:

To prove the date stamping works, you can view the feed via a 30 Boxes calendar (look for February 2008; link generated using the 30 Boxes Calendar mashup machine; for some reason the calendar doesn't display the description content, but a Grazr widget does).

The mechanics of the pipe are pretty much as described in the Google MyMaps RSS editor post, at least insofar as the creation of the main item and geoRSS feed components from the "View in Google Earth" Network Link wrapping KML URL go.

The link and date are then extracted using a regular expression, and the two Pipes date blocks used to identify the date and put it into an appropriate form:

If you have a go using the pipe, and come across any problems, please let me know.

I'm sure there must be some other geoblogging tools out there, but this one is essentially 'for free', being built as it is from components that already exist.

Okay, so the MyMaps marker annotation editor is maybe not the best in the world, but there is a rich text editor and HTML view if you want to add a little style:

Now, what was next on the list...? ;-)

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Tags: gmaps, mymaps, geoblog, geoblogging, geoblogger, yahoo pipes

Posted by ajh59 at February 8, 2008 09:38 PM