Last week I was lucky enough to have two days at Where 2.0 in San Jose. Spent the whole plane ride up with “Do You Know the Way to San Jose” stuck in my head.
Highlights of the conference for me:
Cartifacts So far this is only for LA and NYC, but they’ll be doing more. Best part of it (apart from the nice cartography) is the small lens tool itself (the small icon in upper left of screen). That allows you to change the zoom level within the circle itself and click on different images (i.e., historic maps and other layers).
Wild Style City – Kind of wonky to use it, but when you get it to work, you can walk down the street, find a clean piece of wall, and make your own graffiti.
Flickr “neighborhoods” – Flickr is doing some cool work with its millions of geotagged images to generate new versions of “regions” and “neighborhoods.” For those of us who like to play with shapefiles, they’ve made these available too.
Andrew Turner was there to promote GeoCommons. I’ve been using GeoCommons in short mapping workshops at Redlands as it’s one of the easiest tools for quick and customizable web-based choropleths. I remember saying a couple of years ago that it was just a matter of time for someone to make an application like this.
One of the best community mapping sites I’ve ever come across, these folks from New Orleans were there to talk about how they built their maps and did their analyses – http://www.gnocdc.org/repopulation/
These panoramic images are phenomenal – http://www.360cities.net/. The two brothers who started the company gave the presentation and talked about the technology involved and how they now have 400+ photographers around the world contributing imagery. It’s not just cities…
Most phenomenal 3D imagery you can imagine – this Swedish guy from C3 Technologies gave an ad hoc demo of their product. The small video won’t do it justice, but it’s absolutely amazing in “real life” – http://en.oreilly.com/where2009/public/schedule/detail/9423. Just a few minutes long.
diana maps 