Youtube is down for maintenance? Seems pretty unlikely that the world’s largest video platform, encompassing 20% of the world’s total Internet traffic, would just “go down for maintenance” in the middle of a Saturday.
Is this the next in Google’s IT uptime issues?
Astute readers may notice that the above Google Maps image is not actually Washington, D.C. but instead is Metro Shanghai in China. To me, it’s an ideal picture of the irony that surrounds the fact that the Chinese government has a reputation for being one of the most data-opaque in history, with mystery shrouding its every move, and the world’s most massive Internet filters placed at its every data egress point. However, in bizarre form, Shanghai’s new and state-of-the-art metro transit system (including an amazing 270mph mag-lev train to the airport) has been exposed in full to Google Transit, allowing anyone with an iPhone to easily navigate their way around the city.
In stark contrast, Washington D.C., supposedly the very beacon of data transparency and the source of the Gov 2.0 movement, is really resembling another sort of “movement” altogether with respect to Metro system data transparency. I first noted this a few months back in another blog post, when I tried to use my iPhone to show me how to get downtown from my new house. Though I’m right down the street from a DC Metro station, the lack of data exposed to Google Transit made Google Maps send me nearly halfway across the state, so as to use a small commuter transit system that was exposed.
I originally thought this was Google’s fault, claiming they had Google Transit in DC when in fact they didn’t. However, this turned out to be the result of a disagreement WMATA had with releasing their transit information to Google. Did they fear some sort of security concern? Actually, no. The problem was that they had just invested a bunch of money in their own wmata.com website, and didn’t want Google transit to draw attention away from their big investment. The alleged quote is,
“…forming a partnership with Google was not in our best interest from a business perspective.” (ref)
Apparently DC isn’t alone in this bizarre blindness to Gov 2.0 principles, as Los Angeles’ Metro system is likewise not on Google Transit for the same reason. And unfortunately, L.A. is a much more difficult city to get around than DC, if you don’t have a car – a place where an iPhone-friendly platform for public transit system navigation would be even more useful.
[also note that DC and LA are the two cities that constantly vie for the worst automobile traffic in North America.]
Now, I recently had the privilege of attending the Gov 2.0 Expo in Washington, D.C. as a representative of Webworld Technologies. This Expo was a fascinating showcase of applications from all different angles of Government/Citizen participation – from Open311 services that basically act as a “BugZilla” for potholes, to services that allow you to use your iPhone as a crime-reporting device, or the promise of augmented reality (AR) for tourism.
But pertinent to this discussion was the “Government as a Partner” section of the conference, where the architect of the bart.gov site in San Francisco showed how true data transparency and Gov 2.0 principles can be used to foster an immense amount of creativity and problem-solving that benefits both the people and the organization at large.
See, instead of pursuing a strategy like DC or LA, where you close up the data and keep it for yourself, and hope that everyone will love your website, they instead focused on making their data broadly available, and fostered a community where people could make their own applications that then use this data.
Coming out from this was a community-created BART iPhone app, which took no internal development time or public moneys, and which BART then promoted for others to use. Just look at the heading of that bart.gov page: “See what others are creating with BART’s public data”. That says it all, really.
One could argue that SF is the home of Silicon Valley, and that they are uniquely poised to take advantage of such transparent data. However, that gets shot down pretty fast when you look at the fact that DC Metro is the biggest center for IT employment in the world, and is second only to silicon valley in terms of concentration of programmers.
So, there’s no excuse!
Microsoft’s newly-branded Bing search seems to be getting faster at indexing & displaying relevant blog content.
Just a month ago, shortly after the Bing launch, I was doing some tests on how fast Bing was indexing content as compared to Yahoo and Google – especially with respect to blogs.
I put up a number of blog posts on Bing Maps and KML, and then 1-2 days later, began searching around on Google and Bing for more info on Bing Maps KML implementation. Within about an hour, Google had already indexed my KML blog posts, and had them available in the results, integrated in to the normal SERPs. Bing, however, had none of my blog posts indexed, and after a week still had none of my posts indexed. Now, these were posts I also went and threw links to on forums and all over the web, as I was trying to get a specific question answered – so both Google and Bing had spiders all over my site basically hourly. However, 2 weeks later, I was searching for more info on Bing Maps and KML, and in Google I almost couldn’t get anything but my blog posts – whereas Bing still was not indexing it. They’re showing now.
Well, now the situation appears to have changed. I made a post on one of my other blogs about a new Dianetics DVD that came out. I haven’t really linked this one from anywhere, so I thought it’d be interesting to see how they were showing up.
Oddly enough, in both Bing and Google, my posts are showing up on the first page of results when searching for “new dianetics dvd”. Bing was indexing & showing blog post results after only about 10 hours of having been posted.
In any case, I thought it an interesting observation – and one that’s probably going to get me to use Bing more – as when trying to solve programming problems, the answers are commonly on forums and blogs, something that was getting a poor hit rate on Bing but showing relevant results in Google.
As I was busy handling my spam box in Gmail today, I thought that the choice of Google AdWords ads was particularly entertaining:
Not particularly relevant to what I was doing, but enough to get me to click on it – as out of the corner of my eye, I though it said “Spam Cache” or “Spam Catcher” and I thought, “what’s this?”
I had just been poking around to appreciate the new drag & drop capabilities that Google just launched with Gmail, so I figured the Spam Quiche might just be another feature they added to round out their Spam Handling features. 
I just noticed that Wordpress comments are marked as “rel=external nofollow”. I got curious as to what that meant for SEO, as a tactic for SEO’s (and for spammers) has commonly been to deluge blogs with comments, hoping to thereby increase link popularity.
The best explanation I’ve found for this is on the Microformats Wiki, which explains the subtle differences between “nofollow”, “external” and the other “rel=” attributes.
In terms of what actual value and/or impact this would then have on the SEO value of comments in blogs, this is another one that’s a bit up to speculation.
One can first-off point out that an “external nofollow” tag would thereby mean that a link is meant to be marked as an external link that should not be followed and cataloged by any search engine.
However, there’s been rumblings all over the net that Yahoo! and Bing don’t give a damn about nofollow links, and index them anyhow.
So, unless you’re in the know and actually work for one of these search giants, chances are you’re going to have to rely on making your decision the old-hat SEO way – by empirical observation – and then determine what the impact really is.
Okay – while not exactly where I wanted to be, I now see that I’m able to easily display a KML feed in Bing Maps (the artist formerly known as Microsoft Virtual Earth) by appending a “mapurl” parameter to maps.bing.com, and then feed it in the URL to your KML file. Like
For example, if you click through on the link above, you’ll see the KML file that I generated from my Flickr cross-country set, then superimposed on Bing Maps, with a nicely-formatted sidebar containing all of the other various metadata stored in the KML file.
I’ve still not been able to get their other sample to work, probably due to some sort of mime-type issue, but the above is a pretty nice feature.
I just read on the C|Net Download Blog that:
“…As with the online version, Google’s Transit works in 250 cities.”
The blog post is describing how the Android OS now supports voice as well as transit instructions. Now, fortunately or unfortunately, the editor of this blog was in San Francisco, where all features of Google’s Maps & Earth service are working at their best. However, as an owner of an iPhone, I am many times at the mercy of the massive holes that unfortunately still remain in this service. Now, if Google would specifically say that they don’t offer Google Transit in my area (the DC Metro area) then I would just be pleasantly surprised when data starts to populate in my phone regarding bus stops and metro stops.
But, when just looking up how to get from where I was in Arlington to Downtown DC, I ran into this:
The location where I was, was fairly close to a Metro rail station. So, I punched in directions on how to get to the Metro station, and thence to downtown.
Bogus Directions from Google Transit
The directions I got back clearly show that only the BUS is loaded into Google Transit’s coverage of the DC Metro area, and not the train. This is despte the fact that the train is marked perfectly in Google Earth, but somehow did not make it into the Google Maps / Google Transit data space.
So, from Arlington, it has me first walk to the Metro station. Then, it has me take a GWU Shuttle bus about an hour away from DC to Ashburn, VA, to the George Washington Ashburn campus, and then hop on another bus all the way back in to DC, and then to walk from George Washington University to my final destination in town (about 40 mins walking).
If the Metro was added, it would have simply told me to hop on the train and take it downtown, change to the Red Line, and then be 2 doors down from my destination.
Now, I can’t knock them too hard — as they do have a phenomenal service that has grown in leaps and bounds over the past year. But when you offer transit mapping to millions of handheld users, you have now exposed the data (or lack thereof) to people to really need it and could otherwise end up stranded when they start relying on their handheld device to tell them where to go.
Probably a good solution on this would be to simply not mark Google Transit service as being available, until such a time when all of the data is loaded & tested — as opposed to stat-pushing it so that it appears that “250 cities are covered” whereas the travel instructions in the 3rd-biggest metro area in the USA are not even remotely usable.
Now that my cross-country trip is drawing to a close (I should be pulling in to my destination in the DC area tomorrow) I’ve been trying to figure out a cool Web 2.0-style way of displaying where we went on this trip, with the route we took, geo-tagged photos, videos, and all of that sort of thing.
Unfortunately, I could not find any service that would let me mash up the geo-data I already have stored in Flickr (and I’ve painstakingly geo-tagged all my photos) and then add in some sort of way to draw the lines where we went on the trip.
Furthermore, Flickr maps – as cool as they are – will only display a page of your photos at a time. So, although I have representative photos that basically draw a line all of the way across the USA, you can’t see that if you look at the map. So, I’ve been trying to find something better.
Now, Google Maps lets me do something like the following, where I can at least easily load up a map with all manner of meta-data (points, lines that follow roads, HTML, etc) and slap it up on a publicly-available map:
View Cross-Country Road Trip in a larger map
This is a step in the right direction, though I still can’t integrate my Flickr geo-data with the map. So, that leaves me to painstakingly re-add all of my geo-data, or figure out another make-sense way of displaying the data. Still pretty nifty, but someone has GOT to have already worked out a solution to this. It’s not like I’m the first blogger/web 2.0 geek to go on a road trip!
