maps and mashups

We have only a couple of sentences in the book to use as our reference point for today. A warm and comfortable hillside named Uam Var is mentioned as our destination, but we cannot find anything of that name on the map.

Luckily Andy spent quite a lot of last night in a whisky bar in Strathyre and was advised by the locals that Var could also be spelt Mhor in Gaelic (indeed we had lunch in the Mhor Fish shop in Callander today).

A close look at the OS map reveals that the south-west spur of the local hill Uamh Bheag is named Uamh Mhor, a possible approximation to Uam Var.

If any more proof that maps are wonderful and that geolocation can lead to magical things, let me point you no further than Jo Flintham's mashup of my Kidnapped Trail media. Because I have bothered to geolocate all my Youtube video. all my Flickr pics, all my Audioboos etc., it's possible for Jo to map all of this stuff out.

I'll let Jo explain what he's up to, except to say: isn't it amazing what can happen if we all allow each other to play around in this way?

Jo: "For anyone interested in technical stuff: php periodically talks to the APIs of YouTube, Flickr and AudioBoo to aggregate any geo-tagged content kidmapper creates; the webpage loads up a Gmap, and retrieves a RSS-like feed of all the content, and some Javascript classes add each item to the map, and display the media in their respective place-holders."

Comments

[joe]

Hey Tim, glad you like the mashup! I'm sure you've already twigged this, but its just a few more steps from this mashup to an augmented reality app on your iPhone... :-)

[kidmapper]

Absolutely Jo. And I think this is an app that could be adapted for other books. One might almost think there was a publishing busines here...