API

Google seems to be opening up more and more of late. They've been offering APIs for their search and maps for a while, but they've mostly allowed information to be pulled from Google to be used elsewhere. Until relatively recently, that is.

I'm thinking through a number of possibilities for the Subscribed Links API that lets you feed your own information into the Google search results of people who have subscribed to your information.

The thing I'd really like to implement with this would be an OpenStreetMap searchlet that gives you a link into the relevant place in OpenStreetMap whenever somebody searches for 'Maps of [Place]' or '[Place] maps'. It would only work for people who have actively chosen to include the links in their Google search results, but I still think it would be a useful thing to do for those that wanted it.

Google even provide a database of cities for people to plug into wihtout having to supply the data themselves, but unfortunately it only works with US cities and only returns a zipcode. It'd be nice if it worked worldwide and returned geographic coordinates as well, then it would be really simple to link into a map from OpenStreetMap.

Despite the fact that somebody seems to have hacked into my server this evening and deleted all of my photos, I have been working on a way of mapping all of the photos I've uploaded to the website over the past few years.

I had the idea of mapping them a while back but didn't progress further than showing roughly in the world a place is located. Recently, however, online mapping services have improved in leaps and bounds. As part of this, Google has just opened up their system for anyone to add their own data to as well. Tonight, this is what I have begun to do.

Each of the towns and cities in my gallery has been 'geocoded' to a specific location and is now pinpointed on a map of the globe which you can click, drag and zoom to your hearts content.

I am still experimenting with the opportunities here, but features you can expect from the site soon will hopefully include photos in the popup bubbles and maps on each town and city page to show nearest neighbours. Mapping travels would be something I'm interested in trying out as well.

The BBC launched a website today called BBC Backstage which encourages people to find novel ways of reusing the content and services that are paid for using the licence fee that we all have to pay (although I don't because I don't have a television with me this year).

Among the latest prototypes which have been submitted by developers are better integration of the BBC News site with Wikipedia, tagging of stories using del.icio.us and an improved search for archived recordings of the Today programme. The data to do these things with is all provided in XML format, though some of the applications simply 'scrape' the site and make their own alterations where they want to. Something which would have been frowned upon until lately is now actively being encouraged in order to nurture creativity and innovation.

One of the most intriguing parts of this scheme is the plan to create a Postcoder API - a programming interface to postcode data held by the BBC. They haven't published the exact details of it but I suspect it will allow people to enter a postcode and have all relevant stories returned to the user. I doubt they will be able to return the actual co-ordinates of postcodes as that would undercut commercial services already in place and would almost certainly break any contract they have with the Royal Mail to supply the data.

A quick Google search on posctcode APIs from the BBC has just brought up a suggestion of this postcoding ability from October last year. Place name data from the BBC gazeteer data would be nice.

(via Boing Boing)