onfocus

• RRW: How to Hack Nike+ for Automatic Foursquare Check-ins
  The terrifying future is here with off-the-shelf parts! I wonder about accuracy though. Foursquare always thinks I'm three doors down.
• A Modern Eden: Apps
  Nicely designed alphabet and animal sounds iPhone apps for kids. [via Hey Stuff]

• Google Geocoder V3
  ColdFusion code to geocode locations with Google Maps.
• Replay it: Google search across the Twitter archive
  And Google gets in on the Twitter Archive goodness. I'm glad Tweets are becoming less ephemeral.
• LOC Acquires Entire Twitter Archive
  The Library of Congress is going to archive every tweet. It'll be interesting to see how they make the archives available.
• SlateV: How I Ran an Ad on Fox News
  "Slate ad critic Seth Stevenson tries out a Google service that allows you to run your own commercial on national TV for as little as $100." (Neat. But Slate 5? Did I miss 2-4? har har.)

• California Coastal Records Project
  Aerial Photographs of the California Coastline

• Shadowmaker
  A little web app for creating a shadow image for custom Google Maps icons.
• MarkerIconOptions Wizard
  Handy little wizard for generating custom Google Maps icons.

• mezzoblue: Chalkwork
  Nice royalty-free icons, including the new free Payments set.
• Tipster: Address Longitude and Latitude in Google Maps
  Handy bit of JavaScript to get the longitude and latitude of the center point on a Google Map. This works great as a bookmarklet.

• XE - World Currency Symbols
  Handy list of world currency symbols.
• MT: Mid-Century Theme
  This is a nice theme for Movable Type that doesn't ship with MT4.
• MeetWays: Find a point of interest between two given addresses
  Neat idea for finding a meeting spot. [via kottke]

• BibliOdyssey: Alchemy Laboratories
  Is there anything better than engravings of alchemists' laboratories?
• Mozilla Labs: Introducing Geode
  "...future versions of Firefox plan on supporting the new W3C Geolocation Specification, which adds the native ability for Web sites to request, and you to optionally grant access to, your location." [via veen]

• On The Media: Transcript of "The Listening Life" (June 27, 2008)
  Fantastic, fantastic story about the life of field recorder Tony Schwartz. Listen to this right now!
• Zillow Labs: Neighborhood Boundaries
  Neighborhood data for geo-aware applications under a CC license. [via joshua]
• Boing Boing: That Violet Blue thing
  "A blogger named Violet Blue noticed that we unpublished some posts related to her." BoingBoing comments on posts missing from their archive. Glad they explained, but unpublished has an unfortunate Orwellian ring to it.

• implementing a proximity search in sql server
  nice instructions for calculating proximity with SQL Server.
  filed under: geo, sql
• cecil vortex: An Interview with Ze Frank
  Ze Frank on creativity, etc. [via MeFi]
  filed under: life, hacks, design, creativity
• RedBalloon Labs: Using Google Maps as a form input field
  filed under: programming, geo

• outside.in
  a hyperlocal blog/news aggregator headed by Steven Johnson [via kottke], with some thoughts about the project from SBJ: Introducing outside.in.
  filed under: community, weblogs, startup, geo

As you know I'm a huge fan of hyperlocal info, and I'll be watching this closely. They have some interesting ideas (tying geography to posts rather than blogs), and I wonder how that will work practically. And how will this scale without an army of editors? How is a blog chosen for inclusion? How do they plan to deal with spam? How do you weed out posts that have nothing to do with the locality (is it solely keyword/category sifting)? Do they plan to ask weblog authors to include metadata with each post? I have dozens of questions for them about hurdles I've run into running a local community aggregator.

• ZoneTag Photos
  Mobile photography software from Yahoo. The auto-tagging is clumsy, but the tag-suggestion based on location looks nice.
  filed under: flickr, geo, software, tagging, webservices, yahoo
• Richard A. Bartle: Players Who Suit MUDs
  Types of players in old-school MUDs--translates well to web application users.
  filed under: games, internet, design, marketing
• The Worst Journey in the World by Apsley Cherry-Garrard
  Project Gutenberg: "This volume is a narrative of Scott's Last Expedition from its departure from England in 1910 to its return to New Zealand in 1913."
  filed under: books