Mainly being a geoRSS update and more location information goodness for you in the flickr.photo.getInfo call.
1. Location stuff in flickr.photo.getInfo
An API call like this …
http://api.flickr.com/services/rest/?method=flickr.photos.getInfo
&api_key=6eb260f1a6e2ceb357fc2e3bdc5432f7
&photo_id=456949415
… will get you some XML that includes new location goodness …
… we now let you know the locality, region and country if we can figure them out. If the photo has been dropped onto the map from a fairly high level you may only get region or country.
We’re still recording the neighborhood but for various reasons we’re not showing it at the moment. Mainly because sometimes it’s wrong and people seem to be more upset about a photo being put into the “wrong” neighborhood than it not saying it at all. Which is pretty understandable. We have a couple of plans of attack for this, so I’m pretty sure neighborhoods will be back in at some point.
Anyway, useful extra info for developers to play with.
2. geoRSS and geo in RSS.
It’s been said in a couple [Dan Karran] of places [Sam Ruby] that the geoRSS we were using was incorrect. Those reports are clearly wrong as whatever we do it totally right ;-) however just incase we’ve made it righter. I hope.
If we take Simon Willison’s (Stinky) Cheese feed, with a georss=1 on the end.
We get his rss feed with geo information, al la …
Where we now support both the wsg84_pos and georss format thingy. Take your pick.
That is all.
The example in #1. Location stuff in flickr.photo.getInfo isn’t working right now with the URL you gave. Was it turned off?
Not sure if this is really relevant here, but it seems that Google at least doesn’t cope correctly with having two GeoRSS flavours in a feed:
http://groups.google.com/group/Google-Maps-API/browse_thread/thread/f22fe120bd1bbc83
IMHO it should only be outputting GeoRSS simple - but I understand in reality need to cope with the widest possible number of readers.
Dave: We turned them off over the weekend to test a couple of things. We had unusual load on the servers and was wondering if someone was trying to scrape location data from flickr. Which would seem odd as we have geonames.org. Anyway, it wasn’t that so that are back on now.
Barry: I think it’s probably better for Google to fix that at their end, I’m sure a quick prod will get that sorted. If we were going to drop down to one standard it’s probably be the W3C version rather than the GeoRSS one.