Google Talk: Google’s entry into the voice over IP world…

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Over at AssortedStuff, Tim Stahmer has a great post about the current state of most school, and school district web sites and the thinking, or lack of, behind them…

“…what our overly large school system calls “web curator”. It’s actually a very appropriate title since many school, and central office, sites are updated as often as most museums.”

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I have written about Greasemonkey, the Firefox browser extension that allows for the incorporation of user end scripts that modify or reformat web content. These scripts get installed on the user machine and can do everything from showing the availability at your local library of a book being browsed at Amazon, to striping out posts from specific authors at sites such as BoingBoing. The key thing to remember is that these scripts allow the end user to determine how content comes to them.

Over at Excellatronic Communication, they have made available several Greasemonkey scripts for geotagging images in Flickr. Once installed, these scripts add a geotag link to individual Flickr photo pages. Click on the Add Geo Tag link and a search field appears where you can type in the location where the picture was taken. Enter your search criteria and hit submit and you will be taken to a Google Map of that location where you can navigate to the exact spot where the image was taken. Double click on the spot and you can then take advantage of the tools that allow you to geotag the image in flickr or fly to the image using Google Earth.

Once you have found your location, the script also gives you the option of adding a Geotagged link to your photo discription that will send the user to a Google Map at Geobloggers with the image noted by a marker.

By adding this Greasemonkey script, you get a very easy interface for geotagging images…

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Smugmug is a site for geocoding your photostream with Google Maps. Lots of interesting features including an easy to use interface for coding images….

Pixagogo.com is a photo sharing website similar to Flickr. They have created a very slick interface to geotag images from your Pixagogo account or images you upload on your own, and lay them on a Google Map. When you are finished tagging the images. Pixagogo gives you the html code to paste into your web page to display your map. A very easy way to play with Google Maps.

If you click on an image in the map to the right, you will be taken to a Pixagogo page which displays the map in a larger window, and displays information about the image…

[Via...Google Maps Mania]

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NPR defining new Podcast strategy: According to Tristan Louis, it looks like NPR has let its contract with Audible expire and is exploring providing more content via Podcasting… I already listen to On The Media and some clips from The World. My local NPR station, is producing several of its programs in Podcast form, including QuickTake Northwest, a daily morning briefing that ties up local news and features into a Podcast. This kind of stuff makes doing yard work bearable…

By way of…O’Reilly Radar

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Lewis Elementary School Boundary Map

I started playing around a bit with the Google Maps API. The API allows you to include Google Maps content on your own web pages. For example I have wanted to create a boundary map for my school. With a little bit of work, I was able to create a rough outline of our boundary and include it with the map that displays on our page.

I found the process to be pretty straightforward. If you are comfortable playing around with html code, then utilizing Google Maps on your own site should not be hard to do. For my boundary map, I had to find the latitude and longitude information for specific addresses in order to create the boundary line. The site Portlandmaps.com contained all the information I needed to find specific locations and also the latitude and longitude coordinates for those locations. The Google Maps API documentation page provides easy to follow instructions for including this information to form the outline of your boundary.

Our school boundary gets a little confusing on the east side of our attendance area. I checked addresses I wasn’t sure of against an address database that our district maintains to help parents locate their neighborhood school. I plotted the coordinates to form a rough outline, entered them into the Google Maps code, saved the page, and was happy to see that it worked.

This is a first rough draft. Once school starts I hope to work with teachers and students to create maps that can be helpful to our local community. For example maps that include information such as bus stop locations, mailbox locations and crosswalks locations. We will also be involved with a project sponsored by the City of Portland’s Transportation Office called Safe Routes To School. I anticipate working with teachers and students to create maps of bike and walking routes based on traffic safety information provide by the city.

Technorati Tags: google maps, lewis elementary