geoLibro.org

capture from Dylan GEO

You would think I would be ecstatic to discover that bobdylan.com now has geographic access to a wealth of Dylan data. It’s called “Dylan GEO” and it provides interactive globe access to “over 40 years of Bob Dylan touring history.” It even uses a well-done retro film theme (wait, why, because he’s old?). And I guess I’m happy. I suppose. I mean…it’s nice, yeah.

But here’s my problem. There’s nothing geo* about it. It’s fake geography. They’ve essentially geocoded 40 years of Dylan touring data, integrated a nice social media module that allows people to comment about the shows, and made it all available online to the world, right? But they did it as a graphic. It’s a Flash app with no discernable geo component at all except that the graphic upon which the pins have been placed looks like earth (until you zoom in and it looks like overextended pixels — could be a LIFE photo of George Custer or Joey Buttafuoco, for all you know, since it’s not tiled geospatial imagery). Never mind that it makes my fan run like Miley Cyrus from a Roman Polanski photo shoot on Mulholland (Just kidding, Miley would stay. [Too much? Agreed.]), my problem is that Dylan GEO is a completely self-enclosed Flash app when it could have been a very, very welcome contributor to the geoweb.

Okay, let me disclose that I don’t know for a fact that they haven’t built this app around a truly geospatial heart. It’s possible that behind this little movie there is a heaving, fully gist-indexed PostGIS the_geom column that feeds this stuff into some format Flash can use on stage. And if that’s true, I expect any day that an API will be published so that mashers the world over can pipe these Dylan shows into their app or publish comments and incorporate a piece of Dylan GEO into blog posts and such. I mean, that’s the spirit and ultimate promise of the web these days, right? So obviously that will be possible, yes? I secretly hope the Dylan site people will respond and tell us all, but I’m sure they’re busy building the rest of what really is one of the better big-time musician sites out there.

My point is that the tools exist to do this correctly but they seem to have not been used. These points could pretty easily be made available via WFS (an open OGC standard, see), or geoRSS or geoJSON or Fire Eagle or…what the fuck, there must be a hundred ways to make this stuff useable by the community and therefore used anywhere. Can I think of something to do with them? Well…not really. Not right now, anyway, as Dylan’s Theme Time Bloody Mary recipe is too good for my own good, Plus, professionally I’m busy with other stuff. But that is decidedly not the point. I couldn’t think of what to do with a video of two chicks dropping their soft stuff into a cup, either, but somebody else did. Yeah, I stand by that example because my point is clear — if the Google thing has taught us anything it’s that you make tools available that do even just a couple of things pretty well and people will use them to do additionally cool shit. And then if that cool shit is done with a sense of community and — preferably — open standards, then still more people will do decently-awesome things with it. And you’d have to be a four-star nincomp. to not realize that Dylan data would be useful. Mash it with Dylanbase; mash it with bobsboots; mash it with dimeadozen; do a comparative mashup with Wallflowers tour dates, for all I care. Aren’t there billions of Deadheads out there? Do something with that! Listen: you shouldn’t have to even try to predict what people can do with a dataset. You developed it, so just let them try, for fuck’s sake. Not to mention that sweater-wearing nerds like me can use this kind of stuff when they teach geoinformatics courses or do guest lectures in media/communications courses about the burgeoning geospatial component to a hitherto flat, 2d www.

why not just do this within the app?

Even if I weren’t a tiresome, open source, open standards, hippy dippy librarian type, I would still be hotter than Ted Knight after Ed Asner argues in favor of gay marriage about this (No, you’re right: I’ll quit. I really don’t want to be a Dennis Miller wannabe). Why? It doesn’t even work that well. Unfortunately. Specifically, the navigation is a little jumpy. You’ll expect this to behave like WorldWind or Google Earth but it won’t. It will lurch and twist on you. It will spin “east to west” (I use those terms loosely) when you pull “down” (that’s more like it). So why didn’t they just use WorldWind or Google Earth?

Maybe the excuse is that they would have more control over how content is rendered? Then why does the “Show Details” throw a popup? Why not keep it inline? If it was a Google Earth app maybe I would understand, as there’s less control over how you can present data “on” the globe (less true now with the GEarth API). If it was a WorldWind app, I would understand because — although it’s open and technically the only thing preventing anything is the time you have available to write the code — it’s quite frankly more efficient to use something else (although that’s not stopping me, with my stable of 1 java[-ish] developer). But this is Flash, so why not stay within the Flash environment? Maybe I’m naive (you can be critical and naive at the same time, yes?).

I don’t know, man. I don’t get it. All the effort that went into Dylan GEO is just going to stay in Dylan GEO, I guess. Such a waste.

Oh, by the way: look at how many shows Dylan has played in Germany alone. “Neverending,” indeed. Get me a recording of “It’s great to be back in Schwbisch Gmnd!” for my birthday, please.

I’ve always loved WorldWind, and was actually a little sad when Google bought up that keyhole thing and made a huge hit of it. I felt a little like Little Richard probably felt when he looked up from his bowl of grass soup and saw Elvis on T.V. Anyway, in anticipation of a USDA-funded project to start toward the end of summer, we’ve been messing with ways to cache map content for delivery in multiple geospatial environments (Google Earth in the browser? Great. With a plugin? Well, I expected that. Only in WIndows? Fuuuuuuuuck you.) I really want this to include WorldWind, and with tilecache I think we can make it happen. Plus it’s fast.

Most of our content will be static, so we’ll precache it and leave it, then the only barrier is getting WorldWind set up in Window…oh, it’s going Java? Nevermind. Maybe I’ll use it in the GIS for Atmostpheric Scientists class next spring or Geoinformatics in the fall.

I guess it’s no coincidence that just as ArcDex was ruminating on the gross and saddening similarities between Microsoft and ESRI the AGX Team gleefully released a preliminary look at a future ArcGIS Explorer interface that looked, well…like a Microsoft Office product. Which is really fortunate, because if anything is going to move AGX out of the realm of a pathetic joke of an afterthought of a farcical not-a-competitor-to-Google-Earth competitor to Google Earth, it’s a rotund, ornately-menued, visually complicated Office clone. Jesus Christ. Bravo, ESRI.

Congratulations to the members of the team that submitted a winning Purdue entry into Google’s “Build Your Campus in 3D Competition.” Those of us working on wikifying 3D geocontent in Rome have had an eye out for just this kind of news, as there is now a very stimulating, appealing, local testbed for some things we intend to do. Well done.

I was reading a particularly obtuse Digg exchange when I came across this (particulars changed):

For anyone interested, Google Earth Coords for Hubbard Park:

41° 39′ 42" N

091° 32′ 18" W

…suggesting to me that even the coordinate system is now being credited to Google. But it also suggests another way to leverage Google’s infiltration for good: if the U.S. government is serious about us learning and using the National Grid (USNG), they need to have Google use it for U.S. locations. That would take care of it shortly, I suppose.

It looks like the hint Senator David Ford let out at IU’s GIS Day keynote is true: Google Earth has been updated with very high-resolution imagery that looks to be courtesy of the Indiana State government. And all of those rural areas whose states haven’t provided Google Earth with high-res coverage are just going to have to groove on that.

Not 12 hours after I first heard that ArcGIS Explorer has been released comes the first (of many, no doubt) instance wherein somebody chooses Google Earth over Explorer because of GE’s name recognition. They even chose to limit functionality in favor of the easy factor GE provides. And I don’t blame them. ESRI and ArcGIS Explorer have a big hill to climb, I’m afraid.

…Because the Movie Recorder and Shapefile Import tools have been made operable even for those who didn’t pay for it. OgleEarth’s RSS feed just announced it, and sure enough it’s true. You can even see a cap of a movie I just made below. And the shapefile import works, but so does importing a previously-rectified .tif (not rectified within Google Earth, but in ArcMap. See that one below, too.

Nobody needs me to monitor news about geotagging, but I have to mention that it’s finally gotten very easy to tag photos with spatial attributes on a Mac. Like it should be. Ogle Earth reports that iPhotoToGoogleEarth’s Craig Stanton has recently and quickly taken advantage of AppleScript support in Google Earth. The result is a small .app called Geotagger that takes a dragged image and ascribes coordinates to its exif fields based on where your also-running Google Earth is centered. Very easy, and a great, great way to tag photos (if you don’t already have a GPS track available to sync to).

And it works, too. Below this is a screencap of four shows’ worth of album art from Tom Waits’ tour through the midwest/east. It proves Geotagger works, yes, but it also reinforces my disappointment at not being able to attend any of these shows (I was busy starting a new job, see, and traveling across the country). I’m almost the centroid of the polygon these four corners would create.

Beginning with The Earth is Square’s post about Geody, a different kind of search engine (that just so happens to be geographic, with results available as WorldWind, Google Earth, Celestia, and Stellarium, I’m collecting a couple of like items into this one post. Next up is a new[?] (WW2D beta 0.99.88). I’m ashamed to say I lost track of this one, thought it was dead. Apparently it’s not, however, and if you’re willing to install your own JOGL libraries you’ll have a new, improved WorldWind-ish GES on your hands. Even if you have a Mac.

And I guess the only other thing was Celestia, another project I hadn’t kept up with. (Wanna know why? Because anything without an RSS feed is dead to me.) Anyway, it’s also available on Macs (not sure about the Intel issue), if you’re interested.

P.S. If anybody want to subscribe to Purdue’s academic calendar as an .ics file, you can do so here, as announced here.