geobloggers

You can normally tell when I’m up to something when it all goes quiet on the blog. This time an initial test rollout of more geoRSS support for Flickr. Presenting …

http://api.flickr.com/services/feeds/geo/
http://api.flickr.com/services/feeds/geo/?id=35468159852@N01
http://api.flickr.com/services/feeds/geo/?tags=cheese

Those are geoRSS feeds for Everyone’s photos, photos by user id and by tag.

This is different from the current geoRSS implementation in that you get back just the photos with geo information, while the old way gave you all photos with extra geo information for those that have them.

Ok, so why’s this part I? Well there’s still a couple more things to roll out that aren’t there yet.

geoRSS for Groups, groups by tag and group by user

This’ll probably be added next week.

geoRSS by Location

Boy is it cool getting a geoRSS feed for San Francisco or London or wherever. But we’re still looking at slight URL tweaks. This is for caching purposed, we want to keep the URLs as friendly as possible, while stopping there being several valid URLs for a single place. If people used SF, or San Francisco, or SF, CA, US or SF, US or San Francisco, US and so on we’d be caching a number of URLs where just one would do. We all have slightly differing opinions on this (but one of them will be the one we use) and as half of us are at xtech this week I think it’s going to have to wait until everyone is back :)

geoRSS links on the main site

This is a ‘beta’ push of geoRSS feeds, once we’ve had a few people getting down and dirty with the feeds the plan is to start putting a geoRSS feed link on the Flickr site wherever you see a normal feed. So if you see a feed for photos now, there should be a geoRSS feed for them soon. Except for contacts, which is, well, a bit weird like that.

KML feeds

Ok, that last ones a joke (sortof, kinda)

Considering there seems to be a slightly higher than normal flurry of activity around putting Flickr photos on maps at the moment I figured some people out there would rather have these now than wait a little while longer for us to work out what a geoRSS icon will look like. Ladies and Gentlemen start your Pipes now.

Flickr thread for bug reports over here.