Category Archives: Maps and Mapping

by Brian Fitzgerald | April 7, 2009

One thing Google Maps still can’t do

I bike. Therefore, I am… not a user of google maps to navigate my native city of Amsterdam. Sure, it will plot directions just fine. But will it plot that route via the the street with the best bikepaths or know to take a shortcut through the park? No. Google Maps is for cars.

For biking Amsterdam, there’s no substitute for this handy Bike Route Planner from Routecraft. Comes as an iPhone App as well.

Dear Google, hear my prayer. One way you can help stop global warming is to build support into your maps for low-CO2 emission, carbohydrate-fuelled, single human engine two wheeled transport. I’m sure the good folks at Routecraft would consider an offer.

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Filed under Amsterdam, Bicycles, Maps and Mapping

Tagged as Amsterdam, bikes, maps

by Brian Fitzgerald | June 19, 2008

David Tryse’s Google Earth Layers

Tyse Google Earth Juliette, our superactivist turned forum moderator turned intern at the Greenpeace secret mountain laboratory, found these absolutely astounding Google Earth layers by David Tryse.

I’ve seen a lot of data visualization in Google Earth, but these maps of forest destruction, oil spills, biodiversity hotspots, and more are simply some of the best stuff I’ve seen.

If you have Google Earth installed, click on this link to upload David’s entire suite of layers. WARNING: Do NOT click unless you’ve got time to go down a rabbit hole: highly addictive, gloriously wander-worthy.

Google Earth Outreach

I’m in Hamburg for the launch of a new Greenpeace information layer as part of the Google Earth Outreach program.

Rebecca Moore is presenting — she was among the folks who started the program last year in the US as a means to get non-profits, charities, and environmental groups using the Google Earth platform to promote their work — and the program has been successful enough that it now is expanding to Europe.

Rebecca says: “Most people know Google Earth as a fun recreational tour. They fly over their house, they look at potential vacation spots, and that’s where it ends, for many of them. When Keyhole created the platform, it was actually only intended to be the ultimate backdrop for game platforms. But Google Earth came into its own as a really useful tool during the Katrina hurricane in the US, where Google was able to provide near-time flood maps which some have said saved up to 4,000 lives, and that’s when the possibility of really using this tool to help the planet took root for some of us.”

Rebecca’s presentation is on some of the ways that Google Earth and Google Outreach have done more than provide all of us with an Apollo 11 perspective for planetary voyeurism.

First, there’s discovery: she tells the story of a guy the press is calling a “Desktop Darwin” who discovered a fringing coral reef in Australia when browsing Google Earth — an oceanic discovery made possible by just having a really good virtual representation of the planet.

There was science: an amazing time-based animation of outbreaks of bird flu around the world, created by a reporter from Nature from a mashup of medical data on individual cases.

And then my favourite, activism: the Appalachian Mountaintop Removal project, which brings the blasting away of entire moutaintops to mine coal to life, through a shocking series of before and after images and video and stories of how the destruction of these mountains have destroyed the lives of local people. The group started with 2 signatures on their petition. The day after they launched their Google Earth layer, they had 13,000 signatures. Probaby helped quite a bit that Robert F. Kennedy blogged it in the Huffington Post, saying “every American ought to take a few seconds to visit an ingenious new website created by Appalachian Voices, that allows one to tour the obliterated landscapes of Appalachia.”

The Greenpeace Layer is launching in German and English with data points about Climate and Forests — here in Hamburg it has been introduced by our biodiversity campaigner Ollie, just back from the Congo, where he witnessed first hand some of the destruction which, well, you too can now witness first hand by jumping into the Greenpeace Google Earth layer. We’ve built only a starter set of data so far, with plans to expand over the coming months to information about all our campaigns, Greenpeace’s history, and our national offices.

David de Rothschild appeared by video from London, talking about how he became an activist, something he calls Nature Deficiency Syndrome, Greenpeace’s report on plastics in the ocean, and how Google Earth can get the word out about ocean pollution its 3.5 million users by tracking his Kon Tiki-like expedition later this year — in a raft made of used plastic bottles called Plas-Tiki — across the Pacific.

But the star of the show for me was Rebecca, who describes herself as a raging environmentalist, and started Google Outreach as her “20% project” — that magic policy that allows Google engineers to work on a crazy idea one day a week. Good for her — she’s done a great thing.

One of the greatest results of this project is a set of tutorials designed specifically for NGOs on the basis of their feedback about using the tool and building maps. If you’ve ever hand-coded a Google Earth KML file, as I did a few years back when we created a layer called “Squiddy’s 100 Amazing Ocean facts,” you know that it’s not a pretty process. Google have now turned Google Spreadsheets into an effective content management system for Google Maps and Google Earth, and laid out a great set of tips for what to do, and what not to do, in creating content for Maps & Earth. Wish I’d had this three years ago!

I blogged further on this topic at the Greenpeace weblog.

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Filed under Activism, Environmental Issues, Greenpeace, Maps and Mapping

by Brian Fitzgerald | June 3, 2007

Google My Maps into your own page

I’ve been doing a bit of sleuthing into my Irish Grandfather’s past of late. I had a collection of addresses in New York City where he lived, and I put them on a Google “My Map.” Here’s a step by step guide to using this great little tool for taking that map and embedding it into a page.

And here’s something a bit odd. According to the manifest of the Teutonic, the sister ship of the Titanic that my Grandfather sailed aboard, his destination was East 75th street on the Upper East Side of Manhattan.
As of 1990, acccording to this Digital Atlas of New York the Upper East Side around that address retains the highest concentration of people with primary Irish ancestry in New York. Given my Grandfather’s penchant for moving around, I would have expected that concentration to dissipate over the 100 years or so since he arrived.

Thanks to Google’s new Street View, I can actually get a look at some of the buildings which once were home to clan Fitzgerald.

How to geotag and map the work of the prophetic lyricist poet graffiti artist of Amsterdam

I went hunting on my bicycle the other day. Armed with only my Sony P900 cellphone and its rather silly built in camera, I was on the trail of Laser 3.14.

Anyone who lives in Amsterdam has seen his work.

“Nimrod Built Babel“
“A woman should bloom“
“Naked and pure is the spirit that transcends the existence mediocre“
“They want you dead, or in their lie.”

Each of his pseudo-biblicalisms scrawled above that inimitable tag that may have something to do with Pi. Or vision. Or infinity. Or Halos. Or a pun on the Dutch “Lezer” –reader — Or something…

He appears to live by certain rules. I’ve never seen one of his tags on a shopwall or private property. He prefers the plywood whitespace of construction sites, the occasional bridge, a construction container or trailer, garbage receptacles, recycling bins.

He speaks to my mystical appreciation of good graffiti: it is, after all, The Word in some form, isn’t it?. That may be my latent Catholicism (all those cathedrals leave a brand effect even after you stop using the product) or it could be born of Paul Simon’s assurance in my formative years that “The words of the prophets are written on the subway walls.” Whatever its source, I confess, I have looked for wisdom in the marginalia of urban spaces, and if not quite a Writer in this sense, I’ve put my own mark on a few public objects. But when it comes to mystical utterance, Laser makes the competition look like punks.

When I read Don DeLillo’s “Underworld” I tracked the appearance of Moonman157’s graffiti across the walls of the novel and caught the winking sum of his tag to the number 13, as persistent in Underworld as the 0 in Gravity’s Rainbow, (stop me if you’ve heard this/I’m babbling/…) I loved the DeLillo sketch of a city sending messages to itself, the echo-chamber/house of mirrors riff on omniscience and authorship in this:

Once a man stood on the platform and took a picture of one of Moonman’s top-to-bottoms, a foreigner by the look of him, and Ismael sidled to the open door so he could be in the picture too, unknown to the man. The man was photographing the piece and the writer both, completely unknown to himself, from someplace like Sweden he looked.

(And what other work is featuring its “Call me Ismael” author in the frame at this point, and is that a subtle wink to the Nobel prize committee?)
Public messages in a free medium.
History written upon the most durable of materials, yet ephemeral as a coat of paint.
Art Crime.
Dissent.
Subversion of public spaces to private message boards.

There’s an activist element in hijacking communication channels, in seeking to change the landscape of the world (physical, social, psychological, philosophical) with a spray can and a slogan.

I started collecting images of his writings. Lisa posted a challenge on one of my Flickr images: track down Laser 3.14 and have coffee with him.

So I had an idea. Geotag images of Laser 3.14’s work. Map in Googlespace his presence in Meatspace Amsterdam. Find his sphere of influence, determine if he truly IS everywhere, find out where he lives.

The key, of course, is Flickr. Many, many Amsterhamsters have uploaded images of Laser’s work. These are available on a Flickr search on “Laser 3.14″

I geotagged my own images using the insanely handy Flickr Geotagging bookmarklet which opens up a google map in your Flickr image page and lets you point and click geotags right into the shot.

Then I simply fed the Flickr search on “Laser 3.14″ into Flyr, which will chug through the search results looking for geotags and display the results in their proper place.

Voila, the “Not much in it yet, but beta proof of concept Laser 3.14 Walking Tour of Amsterdam Map.”

(Bad news: Flyr now appears to be defunct. Good news: Flickr does this all by itself now:

The Map is Here

Of course, now I have to convince my fellow Laser fans to geotag their finds or go out and photograph the entire scribbled city myself. So yo, if you live in Amsterdam, help me find and make digital a geographic outline of the collected works of Laser 3.14. Let’s create a visual concordance of his writings upon the page of the city.

But let’s ensure we use this map for good, not evil. And remember, we aren’t the only ones who are looking:

–b

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Filed under Activism, Maps and Mapping, Photography, Uncategorized

by Brian Fitzgerald | June 7, 2006

How to Geotag any webpage in three steps

There’s a new little gizmo in my sidebar today:

Which gives you a glimpse of websites and blogs which are physically located near the worldwide headquarters of Brian-Fitzgerald.net here in Amsterdam. (Gillo’s blog is right around the corner). Here’s how to roll your own:

1) Get your latitude and longitude coördinate by clicking on your location with Geotagr.

2) Insert the values into a meta tag:

(If you live south of the equator, x, your latitude, should be a negative value. If you live ~~east~~ west of the Greenwich line, y, your longitude, should be a negative value.)

3) Go to the GEOURL database and ping it with your website address. Your page’s location will be recorded and you can download button code to let others see who your meatspace/cyberspace neighbors might be.

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Filed under Maps and Mapping, Uncategorized, Webdesign