Deep obeisance

Sometimes you just gotta give it up. So here it is--massive props to NCPR's code developer Bill Haenel, so great a geek that I am not worthy to lick his mousepad. His pioneering work in the wonky world of geodata has made North Country Public Radio the very first station or network in public broadcasting (or anywhere else in media that I am aware of) to be able to render all of its library of content onto maps.

Before you yawn, consider. One of the great defects of the internet has been that it serves communities of affinity at the expense of communities of residence, sucking huge amounts of attention and energy out of the places where people live, and transferring it into the no particular place of cyberspace. Reattaching "whereness" to the content of the internet can go a long way toward redressing that imbalance.

If, that is, others decide to follow the trail blazed by Bill for NCPR. Most work on internet mapping has focused on one-off efforts to map a particular sequence of events or group of related content. These efforts age out of relevance quickly, and apply only to a tiny fraction of content produced. Bill's approach is holistic instead, incorporating place into the DNA of everything NCPR releases into the wild. If other media follow suit, for the first time there will be "places" in cyberspace that actually correspond to the places where we live. To see some baby steps at exploiting these new capabilities, check out the map links on the home page at ncpr.org.

Peekaboo

If you're the type of person who won't get the discount grocery card because you think the shadow government will use it to track you via Predator drones, you should probably just skip past this. I've been deep in the world of Google Maps this week, trying and not quite succeeding at building automated tools to generate a grand North Country map to deliver NCPR news, events, photos, etc., by geographical location. Mapping tools have been getter better and easier to use over the last few years, and I think it is long overdue that the amorphous space of the Internet should become reattached to the communities people actually live in. So-called geofeeds are still fairly deep geek, but they have the potential to really change the relationship between the real and the virtual world.

Google Maps got its first boost from satellite imaging combined with global positioning technology. But over the last few years, they have been dispatching fleets of 360-degree camera cars down the roads and streets of the world to catalog street views and to synch them up with addresses. It's kind of creepy, and the practice is getting Google into hot-water with the privacy-sensitive German government. Here's NCPR as seen by Google Maps, at 80 E. Main Street, Canton NY. Top floor, right wing, three windows in--that's me waving at you from my office. You can not only find us, get driving directions to us, and find the nearest place that sells pizza--you can rotate the view and get a good look all around the neighborhood.

You really should get rid of that junker under the tarp. You know who you are. And now we know where you live.

Where we breathe

Before there was the Worldwide Web, there was the WELL, the Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link, an online community that served the technophiles of the Bay Area through a network of text bulletin boards and other services delivered over slow phone modems. It was a little slow, a little clunky, and highly geeky, but it had one advantage that has been lost in the online explosion since--it "mapped" onto a terrestrial community--it created an analog of where its participants lived, and was deeply involved with its issues and objectives.

I was an early fan of the WELL, reading about it in CoEvolution Quarterly. Ever since I first became involved in creating websites, I wanted to work in countertrend to the fragmentation and placelessness that characterized the new online world. In particular, I wanted to build a place within the web that corresponded to where I actually lived. I saw the traditional infrastructure that maintained my community falling apart, the informal network of churches and social clubs, local news in print and broadcast in decline, the increased busy-ness of workers and the corresponding decrease of community volunteers. If my work online served only to further distract people from the places where they made their lives, I would be part of the problem.

In the decade or more since, that fragmentation has only grown, and communities-- particularly small ones--struggle ever harder to keep together civic life. While the new online social tools dubbed "Web 2.0" have done amazing things in creating communities of affinity, I still look forward to a "Web 3.0" to serve our communities of residence. That's the place where we breathe the air.

Rain of soup: the NPR API

For a longtime advocate of emphasizing the "public" in public broadcasting, this is an exciting moment. My online colleagues at National Public Radio have made it the first major media company to hand what amounts to the "keys to the kingdom" over to the public. They have done this via the introduction of an open API, or application programming interface--a mouthful of buzzwords describing a feature that allows the public to access the entire archive of 250,000 NPR stories, and to use them as they see fit within their own sites, pages, and blogs. Included are tools to organize collections of stories by topic, program, series, reporter, and/or search term, and to receive those stories in a wide variety of formats and at varying levels of detail.

Within a few months, NPR stations such as North Country Public Radio will also be able to make their own stories available to the public using NPR's API. So, for example, if you had a blog dealing with environmental issues in the Northeast, you would be able to create a collection of stories on the environment from NPR mixed with local stories from NPR stations in the Northeast. Or a bluegrass fan might collect all the performances by and interviews with bluegrass artists at NPR and mix in performers from the UpNorth Music project. Or you could just grab every story since 1995 about James Brown, the hardest working man in show business. Sweet.



Even better, outside developers are already building new tools to use the API in novel ways. John Tynan at KJZZ has worked out a widget that takes NPR stories by topic and drops them onto a timeline, so you can see how coverage of a given issue develops. Here is a sample of the work in progress. Geoff Gaudreault of Reverbiage has built a widget that combines a 3D globe mapping out the latest NPR stories with an embedded player to listen to the stories. See it work and get the code. At NCPR, we are in the process of switching to the API for all the NPR features syndicated within the site. You can play with the API yourself, and should. Use the "Query Generator" to select and view different slices of the NPR pie. Register to use the NPR API.

Here there be transmitters

With the little time left me this week in racing on to page 759 of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, I have been playing with the niftiest thing since sliced bread, a free web application that allows you to make up and mark up your own interactive maps and drop them onto your website. Geo-cachers and other cartographic weenies take note--you'll love QuikMaps. Whether you just want to chart and annotate your latest pub-crawl on some pseudonymous blog, or plot out all the locations for a county-wide arts tour, it's easy--not "as long as you're a webmaster easy"--but actually easy.

I registered with the site at noon yesterday, and by four pm had created several maps, including a new NCPR coverage map, with all our transmitters and facilities plotted to within a couple of feet. You can zoom down on our studio icon, switch to satellite view a find yourself looking at the roof over the control room. I can tell which car in the parking lot is mine. Look for news and event maps in the future. My geeky heart is going pitterpat.