Foss4g 2011: Starts Your Mapping Engine

While the FOSS4G 2011 just began Monday, it looks that the number of attendees for the overall conference would beat the best ever in Spain last year. The first two days of the Conference started with one of the moment always appreciated by the community: the workshops. This year in USA around half of the audience of the workshops were newbies in geospatial open source community (mainly from the Colorado area) and the other half were developers, users and experts of the FOSS world.

I have attend two workshops on Monday, the first one was: Introduction to the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team. This organisation has been involved manly since the Earthquake in Haiti by sharing mapping resources with the affected people when needed. I found particularly interesting at the workshop is the “Walking papers” application. This idea is a way to “round trip” map data through paper, to make it easier to perform the kinds of eyes-on-the-street edits that OSM needs now the most, as well as distributing the load by making it possible for legible, easy notes to be shared and turned into real geographical data.

Walking Papers is a website and a service designed to close this final loop by providing OpenStreetMap print maps that can be marked up with a pen, scanned back into the computer with a cellphone, georeferenced automatically by the service and traced using OSM’s regular web-based editor, such as Potlatch or JOSM.

The second workshop I went to on Monday was: FOSS4G routing with pgRouting tools, OpenStreetMap road data and GeoExt. This workshops has been given in previous edition, but this time in Denver new improvement have been made. One of the topics discussed in the workshops was that pgRouting functions is an effective way to trace in one or two seconds a shortest path based on more than 500000 features by using the wrapper with bounding box. Even if pgRouting was quite effective for the OpenStreetMap data of Denver during the workshop, it does not mean that all parts of the world are well covered with topological streetsline. The osm2pgrouting is a great tool to prepare OSM datasets to routing and show if the datasets needs be cleaned and snapped. At the same time, Daniel Kastl from Georepublic, as one of the trainer at the workshops, said that pgRouting was made first for geospatial analysis and will never be as effective as the one implement in Google Maps, because the Google routing engine is precalculated and can be effective for entire continent. This pgRouting has not published a new releases since 2010 and any developer involvement or corporate supports is welcome. The entire workshops can be found at this address: http://workshop.pgrouting.org/.

I have made a pause and I went to see the Monday Night football at the Mile High Stadium in Denver were fans were predominantly in orange jerseys to support their home Team! It was great game, in a very nice Stadium that has quite a lovely view of the City by night.

On Tuesday, An Introduction to Geospatial Open Source was the last workshops have been to before the formal presentation part of the conference starting on Wednesday. This workshops is given an overall tour of FOSS4G world and its business model and main open source projects.

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FOSS4G 2011: starts your mapping engine

Backlink: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/slashgeo/~3/Vt2SnN4DBXo/FOSS4G-2011-starts-your-mapping-engine

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Yandex Launches ‘yandex.appsearch’ Mobile Apps Search Engine

Yandex, Russian search engine has launched a new beta feature to search for mobile apps dubbed "Yandex.AppSearch".

Yandex Launches ‘Yandex.AppSearch’ Mobile Apps Search Engine

Backlink: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/DTWB/~3/btkYDPgqcnA/

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Topsy’s Real-Time Video Search Engine Launches

Topsy today launched a new video search engine that surfaces hot videos shared on Twitter, revealed the company's official tweet.

Topsy’s Real-Time Video Search Engine Launches

Backlink: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/DTWB/~3/NbS9Hp6Ur2s/

See How Foursquare's Recommendation Engine Works

Foursquare launched an update to its iPhone and Android apps last night that includes a new recommendation engine and easier way for venues to promote specials at their location.

The recommendation feature mines the check in history of you and your friends to find similar venues you may enjoy.

You'll also be able to see tips your friends left at that venue to help make your decision easier. It's very similar to the way Facebook has started making recommendations for websites: it finds places your friends enjoy instead of relying solely on an algorithm.

We tested out Foursquare's new features today. You can get the update for free on iPhone and Android.

Here's the Foursquare icon. Tap to open the app.

Tap "Sign Up" if you don't have a Foursquare account. Tap "Log In" if you do.

Enter your email address and Foursquare password and tap "Log In"

View more at Business Insider

See How Foursquare's Recommendation Engine Works

Backlink: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider/~3/48hNUVixAww/how-to-use-foursquare-on-iphone-2011-3

Search Engine + Human Touch and Slashtags = Better Search Results

How often have users complained and cribbed about the failure of best of the business Search Engine sites like Google, Bing, Yahoo!, etc’s failure of not producing perfectly relevant search results has left many users annoyed. The new search engine – BLEKKO comes with new and improved promises of bringing out relevant search results; results that completely depend on human input more than the mundane and conventional search engines like Google and Bing.

Comcast’s Social Video Discovery Engine Tunerfish Gets A UI Makeover, Releases New Version Of iPhone App (TechCrunch)

... check-in to shows on both its web-based app and iPhone app, much like you would in Foursquare or Gowalla.

Source : TechCrunch

Explore : Internet, Social Network, TechCrunch, Technology, Web 2

Post originale: http://wik.io/info/US/228112881

Blekko Launches a Search Engine With Bias

Pickens writes "Previous specialized search engines including Cuil, Hakia, Powerset, Clusty, and RedZ--each had a special trick, but they've all faded from memory, some after crashing in flames, some after making their founders rich. Now Rafe Needleman reports in Cnet that along comes Blekko whose claim to fame is that you can tilt your search results in the direction you like by using a category of bias, like "liberal" or "conservative." Categorization lists are applied by appending a "slashtag." The query, "climate change /conservative" will give you politically slanted results, for example. "Climate change /science" will restrict your results to hits from scientific Web sites. Blekko won't have a real, Web-wide impact unless its concept--that bias is good and more aggressive search filtering is needed --gets some traction writes Needleman but "Blekko is a solid alternative to Google and Bing for anyone, and more importantly it's got great potential for researchers, librarians, journalists, or anyone who's willing to put some work into how their search engine functions in order to get better results.""

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Post originale: http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/Zk0VzPJGlmA/story01.htm

One Reason To Take New Search Engine Blekko Seriously (GOOG, MSFT)

Starting a new search engine is a rough business. Even the most promising attempts to challenge Google (and now Bing) always end up as punchlines: think Cuil or Wolfram Alpha.

Still, we think Blekko, which just launched publicly this morning, is worth paying attention to. Yes, it will probably fail -- all startups are long shots, and competing with Google and Microsoft from day one is an extreme long shot. But, Blekko doesn't need to beat either of them, but it just has to come in third place to be big enough to matter.

That said, Blekko has one big advantage over a lot of would-be Google competitors: Google couldn't copy its core selling point even if it wanted to.

The main differentiator of Blekko is the 'slashtag'. Slashtags are essentially filters for search results. Core slashtags are maintained by the community, a la Wikipedia, and consist of a list of domains that are considered authoritative on issues in those categories. So if a user types, say, '/health' after a search term, only results from sites considered sources of quality health content will be displayed.

The important new feature that is being announced with today's public launch is the 'autofiring' of slashtags. Starting with seven key search categories -- health, finance, lyrics, etc. -- Blekko algorithmically detects when a search query would normally return a lot of 'spammy' results from within a certain category, generally from SEO farms. It then automatically applies the relevant slashtag, so that users never see spammy content to begin with.

This does seem to improve the quality -- and in some cases safety -- of search results in the covered areas. And, unlike most innovations in search, this isn't something Google can simply replicate. Because the search leader is under constant regulatory scrutiny, it is constantly trying to prove that it takes no editorial stand whatsoever. Every tweak Google makes to its algorithm is met with howls of protest. If it started overtly excluding huge swathes of domains on subjective grounds, it would be swimming in lawsuits over night.

It seems clear that Blekko's slashtags can be useful for some categories of search. Whether they can be useful more broadly, and whether the company can build up a large, active community to help it make them useful, remains to be seen. But if there's really something here, Google may have trouble finding a way to replicate Blekko's upside without getting itself in trouble.

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See Also:

• New Search Tool Qwiki Won't Land You A Date With An Actress But It Will Help Plan Your Vacation
• Meet Google's New Search Boss: Udi Manber
• Google: No, We Don't Deliberately Sabotage Search Query Results

Post originale: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider/~3/bGisnjuVuDQ/blekko-2010-11