Telegraph developer weekend: Showing off the possibilites of Google Earth

Posted by Martin Stabe on 26 April 2008 at 12:15
Tags: Google, Google Maps, Online, Telegraph.co.uk, telegraph

Google’s Chewy Trewhella been presenting the sort of things are possible with the search giant’s various APIs, particularly the geographic mashups in Google Earth.

he acknowledges that despite the vast data available on Google Earth, the company has been having difficulty keeping people interested in using the tool beyond a few initial experiments.

He shows off some projects that use Google Earth to display the sort of information that might be interesting to a news site:

• Property website Nestoria used the Google mapping API to build its site and plot different layers of information in various neighbourhoods.
• A tool that explains the tomb of Tutankhamun in three dimensions.
• A layer that shows global oil consumption as a bar graph where each country’s height reflects its consumption.
• A layer that shows the effects of rising sea levels. He demonstrates that if the sea level ere to rise by 20m, the Google and Telegraph offices in Victoria would be one tiny island of dry land in London.
• Fboweb.com plots aircraft flight data in real time, plotting airplanes’ locations and flightpaths with planes at the correct altitude.

Manchester Evening News joins murder map trend

Posted by Martin Stabe on 7 January 2008 at 13:24
Tags: Google Maps, Manchester Evening News, mapping

The Manchester Evening News has produced an interactive online map showing the location of every fatal shooting in Manchester since 1999.

The Google Map was published alongside the MEN’s coverage of a shooting death on New Year’s Eve.

Mapping the locations where crimes have occurred are one of the most popular uses of interactive online maps among news organisations, particularly in the United States.

Since the launch of the pioneering mashup ChicagoCrime.org, many news organisaitons have made interactive maps showing the distribution of various crimes on their patches. Among the most impressive examples of the genre is the homicide map produced by the Los Angeles Times.

It has been far less common in the UK, largely because of the lack of easily-accessible crime data.

Evening Star polls users in interactive Christmas lights competition and map mashup

Posted by Martin Stabe on 4 January 2008 at 10:51
Tags: Archant, Google Maps

Before Christmas, the print edition of Fleet Street 2.0 noted some festive Christmas lights map mashups, like those which have been produced for several years now by the Bakersfield Californian in the United States.

Here’s a good example of an online holiday lights feature from a British newspaper site: the Evening Star in Ipswich used a Google Maps mashup as part of it Suffolk Christmas contest for the best local lights display. The paper’s marketing manager, Sue Gipps, arranged a prize of £500 of Focus DIY vouchers.

Using the site’s poll functionality, 1,065 users of the site voted to determine the winners, Archant Suffolk web editor James Goffin said.

Fiore and Val Masullo of Felixstowe Road in Ipswich, pictured above, won after getting more than half the votes.

(Photo: Owen Hines / Archant)

Radio 4 programme maps its listeners’ locations

Posted by Martin Stabe on 2 January 2008 at 16:38
Tags: BBC, Google Maps

BBC Radio 4’s iPM has published its Google Map showing the locations of its listeners.

More than 22,000 listeners e-mailed their postcodes to the programme, and a backlog soon developed, forcing presenter Eddie Mair to publish a blog post explaining why individual listeners’ locations had not yet appeared on the map.

As BBC blogging expert Robin Hamman points out on his personal blog, Cybersoc.com, the resulting map highlights the problem of what he calls the “’send it to us’ approach to audience engagement” — it’s not very scalable. The enormous volume of emails were overwhelming.

But Hamman also points out that the the map — with its pushpins spread across Europe and other parts of the world — also shows how the Internet is expanding the BBC radio station’s reach globally.

Shropshire Star crowdsourcing fuel prices

Posted by Martin Stabe on 16 November 2007 at 12:06
Tags: Google Maps, Shropshire Star, Wordpress, crowdsourcing

The Shrophsire Star is the latest UK regional newspaper to experiment with ‘crowdsourcing’ on its web site.

Last week, the Midlands News Association title asked online readers to report the price of petrol in their area. The Star has been plotting the results on a Google Map embedded on its site.

The experiment is similar to the efforts of New York public radio’s “are you being gouged” feature, which reported on price variations in the metropolis by asking New Yorkers to report the price of milk, lettuce and beer in their area.

Another regional newspaper crowdsourcing experiment, at the Liverpool Daily Post, recently led to a front-page story about the aviation industry.

The Star’s web site, which uses WordPress as its content management system, recently gained praise from the creator of the widely-used blogging platform.

@Society of Editors - ‘Google is hugely dangerous’

Posted by Martin Stabe on 6 November 2007 at 12:09
Tags: Google, Google Maps, Google News, Telegraph Media Group, Telegraph.co.uk, Times Online, telegraph, video

An organisation that produces no news at all is the third most trusted brand for delivering news, Phil Harding, notes from the floor, and asks the panel to respond. The answers suggest that the debates about the role of the seach engine have moved on about the relatively simple concerns about driving traffic versus the question of whether copyright law demands aggregators should seek permission before indexing sites.

“We’ve only recently woken up to the problem with Google,” says Peter Wright of the Mail on Sunday says. “Things move quickly, and what seems like a big threat To get traffic on a web site you have to publish free and encourage as many people as possible to read it. We encourage people like Drudge to aggregate our content because it means more people are going to come to the site.”

He says: “Things move quickly, and what seems like a big threat To get traffic on a web site you have to publish free and encourage as many people as possible to read it. We encourage people like Drudge to aggregate our content because it means more people are going to come to the site.”

Mark Dodson of GMG regional and Telegraph editor-in-chief and Will Lewis agreed that it is important to driving traffic.

But Anne Spackman gave the most forceful answer: “I think Google is hugely dangerous“, noting the search giant’s moves into collecting ever more personal information. “It’s the number one topic of conversation in News Corp.”

Speaking to Press Gazette afterward, Spackman said Google was now having a significant effect on the way Times Online does business. It’s dominance of the search market means the slightest changes to its search algorithm has major impact on traffic, she said, pointing to last moth’s change that had a major impact on the Washington Post.com’s PageRank. Google’s ownership of Doubleclick means it now controls an enormous part of advertising inventory. Google Maps, Spackman predicted, will transform local newspapers as Google enters the geographically-defined advertising market.

Online Video

Responding to another question, about online video, Spackman sas one of the most successful pieces of video on the web site was created when they handed Baghdad correspondent Stephen Farrell a camera and said “point it at interesting stuff”. This resulted in some amazing detail about everyday life in Baghdad, such as private military company vehicles with signs warning anyone approaching within 20 feet will be shot.

Will Lewis, meanwhile, says the advantage newspaper video has over television is that it is non-linear, allowing people to jump around in the running order. Telegraph TV recorded 2 million downloads this month, he says.

San Diego station shows how to cover a major disaster online

Posted by Martin Stabe on 24 October 2007 at 13:00
Tags: Google Maps, Journalism, Television, YouTube, twitter

San Diego TV station News 8, whose reporter Larry Himmel who filed a report from outside his burning house yesterday, is doing some very impressive online reporting of the devastating wildfires on its patch

The station has responded to the crisis on its patch by taking down its entire regular web site and replacing it with a rolling news blog, linking to YouTube videos of its key reports (including Himmel’s), plus Google Maps showing the location of the fire.

There are links to practical information that their viewers will need at this time, inclduing how to contact insurance companies, how to volunteer or donate to the relief efforts, evacuation information and shelter locations.

It’s an exemplary case study in how a local news operation can respond to a major rolling disaster story by using all the reporting tools available on the Internet.

Update: Mark Potts has a great blog post looking at the online coverage of the fires. What’s missing from local media’s coverage, he says, is user-generated content. Not so at the San Diego NBC station, though.

Both the Los Angles Times and San Diego’s public broadcasting station KPBS are using Twitter to provide rapid, rolling updates of the fires. A piece on a Wired blog explains how to do it. Both are also among those tracking their fire coverage on Google Maps.

Tech blog GigaOm, though figures that thinks “traditional media have been hopelessly outdated in their coverage.” Eh?

The Wikipedia entry for the fires is also becoming an impressive resource. As is becoming common in major news events, Wikipedians are pulling together the news reports from many different primary sources to produce a continuously-updated account.

7 comments

Covering a General Election, Google style

Posted by Martin Stabe on 17 September 2007 at 12:17
Tags: Australia, BBC, Google, Google Maps, Google News, Wikis

Google Australia has launched a site to cover that country’s 2007 federal election using many of its existing tools.

As TechCrunch reported, the site combines links party-political YouTube videos, a Google Maps mashup containing information on candidates by constituency, “election gadgets” to let users of Google personalised homepage track statements from MPs and Senators, plus feeds from Google News.

Just a minute. This sounds an awful lot like the sort of election site a clever newspaper might produce. Some certainly think this is another creeping encroachment into content by the search giant.

The launch of the site “signals a significant strategic shift on the part of Google to become a primary web destination, as opposed to restricting itself to its historic role as a supplemental, though highly valuable, research tool,” newspaper editor-turned Silicon Valley insider Alan Mutter wrote on his blog, Reflections of a Newsosaur.

Mutter argues that project Down Under is almost inevitably a trial run for next year’s presidential election in United States — an unwelcome development for US news sites just as the latest online metrics show that their traffic growth appears to be slowing.

Google could, of course, also apply all the same technologies could be applied just as well to the next UK general election. So Mutter is quite right that news organisations — the kind that do all the expensive bits of producing content — need to get smart about their election coverage to compete with the mashup artists from California.

A good start might be happening at BBC News, which is planning to use wikis to populate its constituency profiles pages at the next election.

Meanwhile, Google’s other recent eyebrow-raising innovation — its experiment with hosting comments about news stories on Google News — has hardly had the most auspicious start.

In its first month, the Google service appears to have posted just over 100 comments, noted PR blogger Steve Rubel. Could Google be struggling to keep up with the labour-intensive process of manually checking e-mailed comments?

Grantham Journal uses Google Maps to track rogue heron

Posted by Dave Lee on 29 August 2007 at 16:02
Tags: Google Maps, Johnston Press, Journalism

Johnston Press’s Lincolnshire weekly the Grantham Journal is the latest newspaper to use Google Maps to tell a story online. But rather than tracking floods or criminals, this time it’s a quirky local story.

The ‘garden gobbler’ - a wild heron - is terrorising the people of Grantham as it works its way around the area, dining on the pond life in Grantham residents’ back gardens.

The Journal has called upon its readers to track the progress of the gobbler’s “deadly rampage” around the area, and is plotting the results on its Google Maps mashup. So far, 11 sightings have been logged.

Each sighting on the map is comes complete with a comment sent in by a reader. “Three times we’ve seen the heron wading around in the water and feeding on something - probably worms,” says one.

The Journal’s local mapping idea follows suit from other mapping projects. Earlier this month, the Telegraph.co.uk used Google Maps to chart A-Level results as they came in. As part of its flood coverage, BBC Berkshire used the free mapping tool to great effect to collate and display images of the floods sent in by readers and viewers. It was, said the readers, a resounding success. Sky News has also been using Google Maps mashups.

At the time of writing, the garden gobbler remains very much at large.

Guest blogger Dave Lee is a journalism student at the University of Lincoln. He usually blogs at dave-lee.org.

3 comments

Sky News mapping breaking flood stories

Posted by Martin Stabe on 26 June 2007 at 15:53
Tags: Google Maps, Journalism, Mashups, Puffbox, mapping, skynews, video

NewsMap, the newsroom Google Maps mashup-maker that web consultancy Puffbox produced for Sky News, is getting a chance to prove its utility for presenting stories and user-submitted material under the breaking news conditions that it was designed for.

As Puffbox boss Simon Dickson highlights over on his blog, Sky News had today using the tool to plot its stories about the flooding in Yorkshire onto a map.

The Sky map includes text stories and user-submitted photographs, each plotted to the location they describe in the area around Sheffield, and triggers pop-up windows of Sky’s television coverage from the scene.

There will be more on how NewsMap works in the Explainer section of week’s Press Gazette magazine.

Update: The Star in Sheffield has been working hard to cover the biggest story in the city for years. Editor Alan Powell and many of his staff have worked a 24-hour shift, Holdthefrontpage.co.uk reported. The paper’s web site was being updated as late as 3am last night, and included a dozen stories about the flood that has so far claimed two lives in the area.