geobloggers

It was just under 2 years ago that I first got my hands on Google Earth, which at the time was called Keyhole. I’d been running geobloggers.com as a site to add geotags to Flickr photos and then plotting them on Google Maps for a few months. It was tricky back in those days, there were no map APIs and everything was done by reverse engineering the javascript.

Then I noticed something interesting and fired off this email to Michael T. Jones, aka “Seer” …

Date: Wed, 22 Jun 2005 09:12:03 +0100
From: Rev Dan Catt <revdancatt@gmail.com>
To: seer@xxxxxxxx.xxx
Subject: Google Maps and Keyhole Authentication

Hi Seer,

Hope you can help and point me to the right person or forum to ask
this in. I noticed in the latest Google Maps update that there
seems to be a keyhole authentication key.

Do you know who/where is the right person/place is to ask about
this? I run geobloggers and want to see if I can use the latest updates
while not breaking too many rules :)

What I'm really looking for is a closely alligned to Google
discussion group, that talks about the maps side of the site,
so I can keep an eye out for where and when to ask such questions.
But I have no idea where to start (apart from here) as I see no
obvious discussion place.

I understand that you may not be able to help at all, but I thought
I'd give it a go.

Thanks in advance
Dan.

While the emails bounced back and forth I hacked around with Keyhole for a bit. The KML documentation was finally released, but nothing mentioned about the Network Link. That evening I played around with the network link pointing it at my server to see what happened. What happened was a bbox=x1,y1,x2,y2 was being added to the URL, which allowed me to do this …

… generate a KML file of Flickr photos based on the current view. That was pretty hot, viewing Flickr photos on a 3D Globe. Better still when I got my hands on the Google Earth Beta, thanks Michael!

I think there was probably around 40,000 photos in the geobloggers database at that point. I’m sure that it was pretty much the first public NetworkLink KML feed published, the evening before the NetworkLink docs went out.

Of course I kept tweaking the code, unfortunately just at the wrong moment I pushed the code with an incorrect nested loop. Instead of getting 50 records, it was getting 50 records, 50 times. Ooops …

---

Date: Sat, 2 Jul 2005 07:40:29 -0700
From: mtj
To: Rev Dan Catt <revdancatt@gmail.com>

Note that the KML spec and tutorial examples are up for the public
on code.google.com <http://code.google.com> and in the KML
discussion group.

Your Flickr network link & server is a big hit here. It was going
to be John Hanke's Where 2.0 closing presentation but your server went
down just before he went on stage... ;-)

Next time.

--
Michael T. Jones
Keyhole CTO, Google, 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway, Mountain View,
CA 94043

---

Next time indeed, that was two years ago.

Where 2.0 2007 was yesterday.

Then a funny thing happened, I went to work for Flickr. I wound geobloggers down as a geotagging site, not because it used Google Maps and I was working indirectly for Yahoo! But because I didn’t want to be developing a “Put your Flickr photos on a map” web application in my spare time, while also developing a “Put your Flickr photos on a map” web application as my job. Of course I couldn’t say that at the time. But in turn that meant that the Flickr KML network link also went away.

So I’m quite pleased to say that it’s back, kinda.

Same location, 2 years and 18 million public geotagged photos later …

What they are.

They are, “beta” feeds. In that I’m about to tell you where they are and how to use them. But they are not linked to, from the site in any way yet. My plan is to have “kml feed” links down where you see “rss feed” links, this may or may not happen, so no promises on that one (more happening than not though). This is early adopter testing, for load, kml markup issues and so on. If you’re reading this, you’re an early adopter. We may adjust, tweak and so-forth the feeds for a while.

They are designed to be used like rss feeds and Google Earth like a geo rss reader (not a georss reader). In that we’re generating Network Links that update every 60 minutes or so. Allowing you to subscribe to a user, tag, group or location. I’m thinking SnowCrash here.

What they are not.

They’re not a Network Link that loads photos for the current view, yet. I want to see how this goes first, what the performance and load issues are like. As fast and funky as we are on the backend, the advantage of the above way of doing things, a feed for a tag, user, group or location is that we can cache the feeds if needed. Your KML feed for kittens is the same as mine. If we start doing queries based on bounding box, then every request is different. And spatial searches are expensive.

Will we have a KML feed that loads photos based on the viewport? Probably. It’s no coincidence that our flickr.photos.search API takes a bbox parameter for searches while Google Earth automatically added a bbox parameter to urls it loads with a NetworkLink. The intention (well mine anyway) from the start has always been that you should be able to point Google Earth directly at Flickr’s API and just let them get on with it.

But small steps first.

Show me the feeds.

20 most recently geotagged photos …
http://api.flickr.com/services/feeds/geo/?format=kml_nl

Note: see how the format is “kml_nl”, that’s giving you the network link wrapper that’ll update the info once every 60 minutes. If you want you can just use “kml” which will give you a snapshot of the information, but no automatic updates. The links we’ll add to the site will link to the “kml_nl” feeds.

KML feeds for a place, just start hacking around with the URL after the “/geo/”, i.e. london, paris, tokyo.
http://api.flickr.com/services/feeds/geo/uk/london/?format=kml_nl
http://api.flickr.com/services/feeds/geo/FR/%C3%8Ele-de-France/Paris?format=kml_nl
http://api.flickr.com/services/feeds/geo/JP/Tokyo+Prefecture/Tokyo?format=kml_nl
… I’ll comment more on this in another post.

A users photos, in this case Heather’s photos…
http://api.flickr.com/services/feeds/geo/?id=32373682187@N01&format=kml_nl

To get a users (or your own) KML feed, go to their photo page, scroll down to the bottom and select their rss feed.
http://api.flickr.com/services/feeds/photos_public.gne?id=32373682187@N01&format=rss_200
…then replace “photos_public.gne” with “/geo” (and where-ever else you want to add) and the format from “rss_200″ to “kml_nl”. See how much better this will be when we add the links in :)
KML feeds for a tag; thunderstorms and lightening …
http://api.flickr.com/services/feeds/geo/&tags=thunderstorm&format=kml_nl
http://api.flickr.com/services/feeds/geo/&tags=lightening&format=kml_nl

You can combine user, location and tags, example: Thomas Hawk’s photos taken in San Francisco tagged with Neon. Every-time he posts a new one it’ll pop-up when the feed refreshes.
http://api.flickr.com/services/feeds/geo/us/ca/sf/
?id=51035555243@N01
&tags=neon
&format=kml_nl

Want to follow geotagged photos from a group? Try the FlickrCentral pool, geocaching pool and geocaching in Australia.
http://api.flickr.com/services/feeds/geo/?g=34427469792@N01&format=kml_nl
http://api.flickr.com/services/feeds/geo/?g=52241213703@N01&format=kml_nl
http://api.flickr.com/services/feeds/geo/australia/?g=52241213703@N01&format=kml_nl

To get to a group feed URL, go to the photo pool for that group, scroll down to the rss feed at the bottom and load the feed…
http://api.flickr.com/services/feeds/groups_pool.gne?id=34427469792@N01&format=rss_200
…then change “groups_pool.gne?id=” to “/geo/?g=” and the format to “kml_nl” (note the conversion of “id=” to “g=”)

Feeds we don’t have yet.

Users photos from a group pool, sets, collections, daily explorer or Your Contacts, all for various dull reasons. They’ll come online at some point.

Bonus Bits.

If you want Google Earth to spin round and show you where the latest photos are when a KML feed updates open up the Info/Properties for the Network Link and turn on “Fly to location on Refresh”. Originally I had this served as on by default, but then it got too annoying when you’re trying to look at something and suddenly the globe spins 180 to show you the latest photos. Cook to taste.

When you open up a photo window thingy …

… you can drill down to more photos by clicking on the username or tag. So if you find a great photo you can grab the feed for that photographer. One of the tags takes your fancy? Well you can subscribe to that too.

I wrote this post last night and set the date/time to publish now as I’m probably sitting down at the conference paying attention. Therefor I’m not able to set up or link to threads in the geotagging group. When I get a chance I’ll add links to any threads that are relevant.

In the mean time, Flickr [heart] KML.