Engineering a New World

China is more Gov 2.0 than we are?

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.]

Gov 2.0 – How to Do it Right

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!  

I just posted on the quality & feature differences between Flickr video and YouTube, saying also that their mobile feature sets were quite similar, though video quality was about the same. 

How wrong I just was, with respect to mobile video quality.

Have a look at these two samples, taken on an iPhone 3G, of the same video mentioned in my last post:

Flickr Video: [original video]

YouTube Video: [original video]

For some reason, the H.264 video that YouTube is encoding for the iPhone is of just the absolute worst quality – throughout the video, one can barely even tell what’s happening.  Whereas, in contrast, the Flickr video is totally sharp and looks fantastic.

Odd – that was a comparison I didn’t expect.   I’d be interested to see if that’s an iPhone-only difference, or if that’s the case on Windows Mobile and Android devices as well.

Flickr has a little known, and not oft-used ability for users to upload videos, as well as photos.  As Flickr is primarily a photo site for photo enthusiasts, the purpose of Flickr videos was not to host the latest Shakira music video or Baby Bloopers w/Gangsta Rap soundtrack – but rather to augment one’s photographic exploits with moving pictures as well.  Thus the reasoning behind Yahoo! putting a 90-second limit on Flickr video.

But, as photo display quality is such a hallmark of Flickr photos, I decided to do a little comparison on video quality, and compare it to the 900lb Gorilla, YouTube.

Following is a video I took of the first mountain bike ride on my new mountain bike, taken yesterday.  It’s got a lot of full-screen motion, a worst-case scenario for the Flash Video encoders both at Flickr and YouTube.  Here’s how they look:

FLICKR:

YOUTUBE:

Interestingly enough, it appears to me that the YouTube video is a bit crisper and has better motion details than the Flickr video.   YouTube used to have positively the worst video quality, but it looks like they’ve definitely made some improvements of late.

But then, in terms of a features comparison, let’s take a look at the way these two services display video, to get an idea of which would be the better context to display such video clips in:

Video Tools:

YouTube is obviously the hands-down winner here.  They offer annotations, audio change-outs (so you can swap out my grunting and “whoa nelly” with Crystal Method or whatever), the ability to change out the displayed thumbnail, closed-captioning, etc.   Flickr offers no such tools – just the ability to upload, and then edit the caption, title & tags just like any Flickr Photo.

Display Context:

Probably the best reason why one would want to display your videos on Flickr is the display context of your video.  If you’re in the middle of a camping trip, and you take 10 photos and 2 videos with your digital camera, it makes the most sense to be able to display all of those items in the same place.  Displaying just the photos on Flickr or Photobucket or Facebook, and then putting the videos on YouTube doesn’t allow you to simply send someone to one page, and have them be able to see your trip.

To wit, see this set of my recent cross-country trip, which has a number of videos interspersed with the photo content – but the photo content all kept in order and in context.

Also, Flickr gives you the ability to display all your photos on a map, which gives yet another option for display context. 

Mobile Capabilities:

Now this is an area where I would have expected YouTube to be in the lead completely, but Yahoo! has been putting quite a bit of work lately into their mobile sites.  If you browse to this video on Flickr using an iPhone browser, you’ll see the page reformatted for the iPhone, complete with working video links.  Clicking on the video then pulls up an H.264 version of the video that is playable on the iPhone.  Slick!

SpeedTest result from Tethering with iPhone 3G

Ironic that the day I finally get my home Internet installed (Verizon FiOS) I also find out that my iPhone 3G does indeed support tethering on AT&T’s 3G GPRS network, and that it works surprisingly well and easily.

Here at my home, it’s not particularly fast — about half of the rated throughput I should be getting, but it beats the pants off of the slow wifi I’ve been using at coffee shops and such.  Now, at least, I can go wherever I want to and work — not just the places that have Wi-Fi.

How does one do this?  Just use your iPhone Safari browser, and browse to this address.   You’ll want to check your contract to make sure that if you use data, it will indeed be free.  For me, I’m already paying for unlimited data, so no worries there.

But you just install the configs for your provider, and blam — you’ve got tethering.

Now, all of the sudden, the money I’m shelling out for this AT&T service is seeming a lot more worth it!

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.

Don't try to use big photos as your contact pictures

Well, I’ve just found a sure-fire, always-works way to crash an iPhone 3G:  use a picture for a contact that’s taken at a higher resolution than the iPhone 3G’s internal 2-megapixel camera.

Seemed like innocent entertainment for me when I used a picture of my 7-month-pregnant wife which I had taken on a recent cross-country trip as the contact image for her in my iPhone 3G.   The image was a 4-megapixel image taken with my Minolta DiMage Z2, and I selected it as her contact photo in Windows Contacts, which are synchronized to my iPhone.

Then, the next time my wife called me, my phone refused to pick up, and locked up when trying to answer.  I rebooted it.

Then, she called again, and my phone immediately locked up.  I rebooted it.

Then, after leaving me voicemail, she called again, and the phone sloowwwwwly allowed me to slide and unlock it, but wouldn’t answer.  I had to reboot it again.

I finally realized it was the fact that it was trying to pull up a 4-megapixel image as the contact photo when answering it, and that was what was crashing the phone.  Switching to a small image handled the problem.

So, if any of you run into the same thing, there’s your lame answer.  :)  Sounds like my little iPhone needs some more RAM!

As we make our way across Utah and into Colorado, I’m letting Kat drive for a bit so I can take advantage of the fact that we’ve had Edge data service across most of eastern Utah. Lack of ANY service in Western Utah cost us our hotel reservation when we couldn’t call or message them that we were running late, and then a slimy fellow at the Budget in gave away our room. Anyhow, the scenery in the area overcame that slimebucket, thankfully.

After loading up my little Subaru with another thousand pounds of stuff in LA, Kat and I headed up today towards Vegas. We wanted to get further, but due to awful traffic, we only made it this far. And, as hotel wifi is an extra $14/night here at the Sahara, it’s yet another post from the iphone.

Took a nice walk around though, for a little late nite photo tour. Our hotel has a casino in it, and a monorail station out back. All of the pretty lights have me wishing again for a tripod for my Minolta!

Had a wonderful morning in San Francisco, pulling in to town at about 5am, just in time to get some rocking pics with my wide angle Minolta of the Bay Bridge at sunrise. Soon as I can, I will get them on flickr (I.e. When I’m back on my laptop on wifi, as I still haven’t found a real good flickr upload client I like for iphone.)

But, here’s a couple of iPhone can pics:

Well, the plus is that I’m out of the Eugene-to-Weed 3g deadzone, but then I ran low on batteries. So, didn’t get a chance to do an update until now, while I charge my iPhone and figure out how to make the wifi at this Starbucks work.

We decided to abandon the boring I-5 last night, and do the 58 between Eugene, OR and Klamath Falls. Well worth it! Here’s one photo of a snowy outhouse we stopped at along the way, as well as some nice shots of Diamond Peaks.