With pointers such as Greg Sadetsky's tidbits on how Google Map's Street View works in the browser (e.g., URLs of specific shots, a pointer to a Flare, an Actionscript decompiler), how long will we have to wait until we get mashups that give us a video tour of Berkeley using photos from Street View?
The online mapping arena is changing so quickly, and I obviously am not able to cover the details of all these changes. Nonetheless, it's helpful to speculate on what I believe to be the long-term trends in this area as a way of priming yourself for future changes.
KML has moved beyond its use in Google Earth alone. For instance, you can display KML files and export search results and one of your "my maps" from Google Maps in KML. Other applications are beginning to support KML: For instance, you can get KML coming out of Yahoo! Pipes. There is support for KML in Feed Validator KML is being shepherded through a standards process: Paul Ramsey: KML @ OGC. Google is advising people to use KML so that its geo–search can index KML — in KML 2.2, there is an attribution element. Google apparently will also index GeoRSS.
In Chapter 13, I cover how to use some of major mapping APIs: Google Maps, Yahoo, Mapquest, and Microsofts'. It would be convenient to be able to not worry about the differences among the maps and easily switch among the various maps. That's the promise of a mapping"abstraction" library such as Mapstraction (http://mapstraction.com). We'll have to see how and whether it is widely used to gauge the library's effectiveness.
Along a different vein is OpenLayers (http://www.openlayers.org/), which is:
You can try out OpenLayers in FlashEarth. Go to the site and select OpenLayers. You might have to zoom out sufficiently to see any tiles (e.g., http://www.flashearth.com/?lat=38.417308&lon=-122.271821&z=9.9&r=0&src=ol)
Two recent entries of note:
I have uploaded two more first drafts:
They are a bit rough but I'd definitely value feedback from any valiant readers out there!
I don't think that there is an official API for Google Reader although Niall Kennedy documened an unofficial Google Reader API a while back.
The online Barnes and Noble store (barnesandnoble.com) uses ISBN-13 in the links to books. (e.g., RESTful Web Services) Amazon.com uses ISBN-10. Something to keep in mind to et LibraryLookup to work for Barnes and Noble.
Even though I've been weblogging since March 2000, I have not worked systematically to cultivate a readership for my blogs. But now that I've left the comforts of my university staff position, I've become much more interested in developing an audience for my websites. Of course, one of the basic ways to develop a readership is to be a good reader of other people's work. We are involved in conversations on the web, after all.
One little technique to use to keep my blogs in the mix is to have my blogs ping technorati whenever I write a post on my wordpress blogs. Following http://technorati.com/developers/ping/wordpress.html, I figure that I should go to WP->Options->Writing->Update services to add http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping . Update Services « WordPress Codex provides a list of ping notification services in addition to technorati, including the one for Google Blog Search — which I've started to using in addition to technorati. I'd like to figure out which of the blog search engines are the best ones to use.
Even though my book focuses on the use of formal APIs for mashups, I'd like to provide guidance on screen-scraping and other forms of reverse engineering to my readers. There's plenty of mashup work that can be done even if you confine yourself to using only formal APIs. Sometimes, it's handy or even necessary to supplement your use of formal APIs with other ways to get at the data, functionality, or user-interface elements that you want to recombine or mashup.
Some inter-related areas to cover (or at least to make reference to):
Some issues I want to address:
Some references: