Michael Young [81nassau]

A simple geocode tool that I wrote 3 years back just won the “Mashup of the Day Award” by the site mashupawards.com!

The tool is very basic – it allows you to look up the latitude and longitude of any address (well, any address that is supported by the Yahoo Geocode API). It came in handy when I needed to find some lat/lng pairs for another app I was building…and so I put it the tool out there for people to use. This was back in the day when Google had just released their mapping API, but didn’t have a public geocode API. Ahh…the good ole days.

I’m not sure how/why it won the award, but the good folks at outside.in just linked to it from their new API page…so I’m guessing that’s where the interest came from. I had forgotten about it!

I added a few more news categories to the AP News mashup. It now plots the following AP feeds on the Google map:

• National News
• Sports
• Business
• Technology
• Strange

You can also toggle the news categories on the map so that you can show/hide the various pins. Hopefully it’s a little more useful now…

The AP News Mashup I put together last weekend was mentioned in the Where in the World… Wall Street Journal article (sub. required) yesterday.

81Nassau.com/apnews
This map plots the locations of recent U.S. news stories from the Associated Press. Users can click on each location to view the first few sentences of the story or link to the full article.

Thanks to the author Jessica Vascellaro for the mention!

I just finished a simple app that plots the current AP National news stories on top of Google Maps.

http://81nassau.com/apnews/

The app is a mix of the AP’s National News RSS Feed + Yahoo! Geocoding API + Google Maps.

I have a process running on my server that grabs and parses the AP RSS feed. I parse the location from each story — AP puts a location at the beginning of each story, for example “NEW YORK (AP) — Millions of New Yorkers…“, which is typically city, state or just a city (e.g. “Washington” as in DC). I then convert the location to a latitude/longitude point using the Yahoo! Geocode API. Once that’s done for each of the stories, I write a simple XML file back out to the server — the XML file is basically the RSS file with additional fields for the latitude and longitude of each story. When you load the mashup site in your browser, I use some JavaScript AJAX calls to load, parse and display the stories from the new XML file on the Google Map.

There are typically ten stories in the AP feed and it’s usually updated every 30 minutes to an hour.

It’s a pretty simple app, but I figure it might be useful to some. It was more of a proof of concept than anything. Hopefully my mom can use it in her classroom to help teach the elementary kids about geography + current events…

My TODO/Things-To-Fix list:

• Automatically refresh the stories in the browser window. Check for new stories on the server every x minutes.
• Stories in the same city are plotted on top of each other on the map.
• Pan out a level and center the map if any stories are in Hawaii or Alaska.