We want to spend a little time reminiscing about last month’s Brighton BarCamp, one of our favourite events of the year and a time when we get to roll up our sleeves and muck in with the community.

BarCamp is a self-organised gathering of New Media enthusiasts and an important opportunity to share knowledge with peer businesses and enthusiasts. Naturally, we were keen to get involved, and we found no less than four different ways to do so:

1. Mingling

The best thing about BarCamp is the opportunity to hang out and discuss technology and business with a great bunch of like-minded people. As ever, there was an eclectic mix of developers, designers, thinkers and doers - mainly Brighton-based, but the event attracted people from all over. Andy Mitchell, from Leeds, had this to say:

Coming down from the North I find it a real different culture, so mild-mannered and alternative (sessions on “GeekYoga”? “Getting Things Done” and “Meditation”?!) I must admit I’m somewhat fascinated with it.

2. Organising

In the run up to BarCamp Brighton3, we played a part in getting sponsors on board, as well as being mini-sponsors ourselves. BarCamp is entirely free and inclusive, and without the many sponsors and volunteers, it just wouldn’t have been possible.

One minor feature that was unexpectedly well received was the hand-crafted, recycled newspaper goodie bag given to each attendee on arrival at the event. The bags were made by a local greengrocer in Suffolk, and they’re so special that they now have their own mini-cult following.

3. Speaking

I gave two talks: one for BarCampers interested in business development and one for those curious about new methods for social media.

The First Talk: “Can Your Business be Franchised? (And Should It)?”

A little while back, we were considering what would happen if Dharmafly was a franchise - or, rather, not if it was a franchise, but if it was capable of being a franchise.

This is loosely inspired by the ideas of Michael Gerber in his book ‘The E-Myth‘. He suggests that if all the procedures of a business are clarified, systematised and documented as if the business was to be replicated to a different location, then the business will benefit, even if it isn’t actually replicated.

Think of something as efficient and repeatable as the McDonald’s experience, but with a focus on people, purpose and quality (and none of that meat, despondency or environmental destruction).

We discussed:

• The development of business goals
• Establishing consciously intended outcomes
• Developing a system to achieve them

Jonathan Markwell from Inuda raised an interesting question:

How would it be possible to systematise and franchise Dharmafly, when your business values require those working for the company to feel it and mean it, and not just follow a list of procedures?

That got me thinking. An ethical approach to business must surely be genuinely felt and not just acted out by rote. On the other hand, it is said that if a person wants to cultivate a particular habit or value, then he or she could start acting as if they already possess it, and one day, they actually will possess it. For example, cultivate generosity by giving to those in need and cultivate honesty by being truthful.

Would a person following an ethical ’system’ for business be transformed by it?

The Second Talk: “What Planet are You On?”

Our enthusiasm for Planets hasn’t waned since the launch of Planet Crunchy, a site we built to demonstrate the virtuous role of Planets in social media campaigns. Apart from taking a look at how Planet Crunchy works, we looked at some examples of beneficial Planets around the web, including personal Lifestreams (e.g. David Cramer’s) and communities like Planet BNM and Planet Microformats.

4. Experimenting

The Planet Crunchy experiment was interesting. We had given everyone at the event a box of Dharmafly Crunchies and invited them to post their experiences online. Some people really liked it, while others really didn’t.

Twitter was the most popular social network that people used to report their stories, with Flickr close behind. Nobody ventured to post a video. Thank you everyone who took part.

How many hours of your life have you spent rifling through emails and looking for all the bits associated with projects? And how often have you been cc’d into an email that was only marginally relevant to your work?

If you’re into managing projects and keeping things together, then Basecamp is your friend. Basecamp is an online project-management system that keeps all of your project’s communications in one place. It comes with both paid and free packages, and while there are some excellent alternative tools out there, we find it one of the easiest to use.

Recently, Ben Sauer used it to manage our work with BBC World Service on the Talking America project. Here, he explains why he is a self-professed ‘Basecamp fanatic’…

- Premasagar

How it changed the way I work

While working at my former company as a producer/director, we found that Basecamp transformed our business as soon as we started using it. We loved it, and so did our clients.

Before that, in the dark days, most of the decision-making and knowledge was buried in emails several replies deep. Since then, I have lived by a philosophy of minimal email.

The magic of Basecamp lies in commitment

Over time, I’ve become a Basecamp fanatic. Having an online project management system enables a new way of working, providing a central hub for all action points, project milestones, decisions and communications. To make the system a success, anything discussed outside of Basecamp needs to be added back in. For example, points covered in phone conversations and meetings.

People do sometimes need reminding to use it, and anything outside of Basecamp needs to be put in - including action points, milestones and the points covered in telephone calls. If someone in a team sends a group email instead of using Basecamp, I will usually copy the email into a new thread in Basecamp. This might seem pedantic, but the truth is that the system is only useful if you stick to it. It devalues very quickly if communications fall outside of it.

Opting out and dipping in

Things are made easier by the way that Basecamp integrates email. You can choose to have email notifications of new messages and, if you reply via email, your message will simply be added to the Basecamp thread. Whenever someone feels that their attention is not required, they can opt out of notifications.

On the BBC project, I hardly ever included the top decision-maker in email notifications. Any time that he wanted to see how things were going, he could just log into the system.

Working with clients

I have seen a shift in the way that teams work together once they start using a system like Basecamp. For Talking America, the World Service jumped in head-first. They understand that it brings greater transparency, and more efficient issue management and knowledge transfer.

We use Basecamp with most of our clients. Even if there is a slight learning curve, it’s worth it because we get to spend more time on the projects and less on administration.

If you’re interested in learning more about Basecamp, if you’re a project manager and you’ve used it before, or if you have another system for project management that works well for you, then we’d love to hear your thoughts.

URL: bbc.co.uk/worldservice/talkingamerica

Excitingly, not long after we built the award-winning Bangladesh River Journey mini-site for the BBC World Service, we were asked for another helping of social media expertise.

What is it?

Talking America is a trail-blazing social media campaign that we’re proud to have worked on. This time, it’s a live site that tracks the World Service crew as they journey across America in a social media bus.

Their big aim? In the eloquent words of Ros Atkins:

“This bus trip is our attempt to paint a detailed picture of America ahead of the election in November. We also want to create conversations between Americans and everyone else…”

(Ros Atkins, BBC crew member on the Talking America bus).

What you can do with social media

Talking America uses maps, pictures, video, audio podcasts, blog posts and other user-generated snippets to bring a journey alive. In this case, we built a mini content-management system for the journalists, with a system to pull in the latest Flickr photos from the bus and a colourful map to display it all.

In charming technological terms, we call it a “geo-mashup.” Namely, a smooth way of automatically pulling together time and location-based information into one online multimedia bundle. The outcome of this is the ability to track the reporters over time and in different contexts.

A bit for the technically brained

The mapping application uses jQuery and Sumo, which is a JavaScript microformats parser written by Dan Webb, who also worked on the front-end of the site. If you look at the site without JavaScript, you’ll see that all the info is already present on the page, written up in microformats and ready to be plotted on the map.

And they’re off…

URL: dharmafly.com/crunchies

Planet what?

‘Planet‘ sites are a new and wonderful way to draw people with common interests together online… and today is the day we get to demonstrate how.

What’s all this green stuff?

This weekend, at Barcamp Brighton3, we’re giving Brighton’s best New Media pros some special treats, in the form of Dharmafly Crunchies; little boxes of spirulina (it’s like a tiny green seaweed), known for being a potent power-food.

Why?

We’re hoping that spirulina’s special powers will entice these social media buffs to go online and post tweets, blogs, photos and videos of themselves ‘doing stuff’ with their Dharmafly Crunchies.

What’s happening on Planet Crunchy right now? Take a look.

So what’s a Planet for?

A ‘Planet‘ site can draw people together online under one coherent, enthusiastic umbrella. So they’re particularly effective tools for social media campaigns where you want to get people discussing a hot topic, and find out who’s talking about you.

Lifestreams are another great use for Planet technologies. They can be used to round up all your online and offline activities to keep and share them in one place.

A Planet site for you?

If you want to find out more about using Planets for campaigns, for you as an individual, or you want to be involved in building one, get in contact and we can give you lots of enthusiastic help.

What’s under the bonnet?

It looks like magic, but in fact it uses a whole host of web technologies. It takes in RSS feeds from Technorati, Google blog search and a load of social networking and news sites, passes them through Yahoo Pipes and SimplePie and finally into WordPress, along with a smattering of jQuery, combining them together into one seamless package.

We’re proud to be a mini-sponsor of Brighton’s upcoming BarCamp, a revolutionary indoor-conference-camping-type event that’s enjoying growing cult status around the world.

What’s Barcamp?

Essentially it’s a philanthropic grassroots event, run by the community for the community (in this case, Brighton’s New Media and technology community). It’s an opportunity to share expertise, make contacts and learn lots of things that you never knew you wanted to know.

Every participant has to give a short session on a subject they care about. That way, everyone who attends gets to share their skills, talk about what inspires them and has the opportunity to learn a whole host of new things.

What did we do at past BarCamps? See our posts tagged ‘BarCamp’.

Something Green for Everyone

It’s great to be a part of Brighton’s local web development community and we want to give something back, not just as mini-sponsors, but by giving everyone a bit of empowering green goodness to take home with them.

What’s green and goes to BarCamp? Any ideas?

There’s an area of web development that often gets overlooked. The design may be fantastic, the technology cutting edge and the subject very worthy - but it is also essential that the message is loud and clear, and simple to follow.

Before our designers and programmers get busy on a web project, we often work on the “copywriting” of the content, to help our client’s message shine through.

In this blog post, Leif Kendall talks about what he does as a professional copywriter and how copywriting can help your organisation or business to communicate, persuade and sell.

- Premasagar

Writers with marketing skills

Copywriting is quite different to normal writing. So while you might be a talented poet or letter writer, you might not understand the persuasion and marketing principles that copywriters can use to your advantage.

A good copywriter will write with many things in mind. Copywriters must consider how to address several personality types simultaneously, how to allay fears, mention features, highlight benefits, mix in social proof (testimonials) - all while being persuasive.

An outside view of the inside

One big bonus of employing a copywriter is that you get a fresh brain thinking about your business. This fresh brain might spot something you’ve missed or something you could make better. A good copywriter will put thought into their work, looking for ways to help you communicate more effectively to more people.

Speaking their language

A common failing in business communication occurs when the people writing the copy forget that the public (your audience) are not aware of your business and your industry jargon. A copywriter writes with your readers in mind – so your copy will address their needs, in their language.

Traffic-stopping web copy

Writing for websites requires even more specialist knowledge than offline copy. Web copy requires an understanding of Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), usability, internet conventions and conversion rates, as well as the marketing and advertising principles mentioned above.

Investing in your corporate voice

Remember that words do a lot of talking for your business, so it’s worth investing in the best copy you can afford. Unprofessional communications and marketing material can actively work against you, telling potential customers things you didn’t intend to say. The right copy can work in harmony with your operations and help you to be heard in a crowded market.

Blogs are powerful tools when it comes to getting your message out there and stirring up a conversation about your cause. Recently,  The National Deaf Children’s Society (NDCS) asked us to work with them to develop a social media initiative, and this included setting up a series of blogs.

What did they need a blog for?

One of their initiatives was aimed at empowering professionals who work with deaf children to blog about hot topics and contentious issues that NDCS are not able to comment on themselves, because they’re an impartial charity.

We worked with NDCS to develop a number of blogs on the community blogging site, wordpress.com.  Then we created a marketing campaign to attract professionals to come and use it.

How do you promote the power of blogs?

For the campaign, we needed to come up with a short and sweet definition of what a blog is. It went like this:

Short for “Web log”, a blog is a specialised website that allows an individual or a group to share a running log of news, personal insights, experiences and opinion with a wide audience.

With over 70 million in existence and 120,000 new blogs created every day, the reach and influence of blogging is growing rapidly. With their built-in system for readers to comment on articles, blogs are vibrant communal spaces for instant, global conversation.

(Inspiration taken from this definition and these statistics).

So you can see that blogging can be of huge benefit to organisations such as NDCS, not just as a marketing tool but also as means of sharing knowledge and building networks.

If you’re interested in the power of blogs as a tool for organisations, keep a look out for our other posts on the power of blogging.

After a thorough search, we are now working with a new web hosting provider for the websites that we manage. Web hosting is where a website lives on the Web. It needs to be fast, reliable and supported by a dedicated technical team. And… it needs to be powered by 100% renewable energy.

Web hosting computers are active 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Keeping the World Wide Web online takes a lot of energy, and we at Dharmafly want to be as responsible and ethical as possible with our piece of it.

100% Renewable Energy Web Hosting

Renewable energy web hosting is fairly common in the US, where companies such as AISO use solar energy for power. However, there are fewer options available for UK-based hosting. Many of the UK-based companies that offer renewable energy web hosting are actually re-selling US-based hosting. This can be a problem for UK-based businesses who want their websites to rank well in Google and other search engines.

Search Engine Optimisation for UK Websites

When people in the UK search Google, they receive a set of results that favours UK-based websites. Google determines whether a website is UK-based in two ways. It will first see if the web address ends with .co.uk, .org.uk or another UK-based name. If, however, the web address ends with .com, .org, .net or another non-UK name, then Google will work out the country where the website’s hosting is based. Clearly, it is important that we can offer our clients UK-based hosting.

In a Bunker

We found a solution. Housed in what used to be a NATO military bunker, Smartbunker is the UK’s first web hosting centre to use 100% renewable energy. It runs purely from wind power, supplied by a wind turbine from Ecotricity.

The energy is actually renewable, rather than it being a “carbon-offsetting” project, where trees are planted to offset the carbon burned by non-renewable energy, such as coal.

(Techie details: We use high-specification, low-energy IBM Blade servers, with Intel Dual-Core Xeon 5148 LV 2.33 Ghz, 2GB Server Memory, 2 x IBM 73GB 10k SAS Hard Drive RAID 1250.00 43.75 and a Plesk control panel for domain management).

Co-operative

We work with Ecohost to manage our web hosting computers at Smartbunker. They are a worker’s co-operative, based at Manchester’s new co-operative offices, OpenSpace. They’re friendly, über-ethical and they really know their stuff.

Together, we’re happy to offer ethically hosted websites for the UK and beyond. If you’d like to get your website hosted with us, please get in touch.

The Bangladesh River Journey, a BBC World Service project to track climate change, for which we built the interactive mini-site, has recently received two prestigious awards. These awards recognise the innovative way that the project brought social media reporting on important global issues into an engaging user-experience.

Webby Honoree

The Webby Awards are like the Oscars for the Web. From nearly 10,000 entries, the Bangladesh River Journey was declared a Webby Honoree, “in recognition of outstanding work”.

Sony Radio Academy Awards

At the Sony Radio Academy Awards (”the Oscars for Radio”), the Bangladesh Boat Project won the Multiplatform Radio Award. That’s a photo of the award at the top of this post.

The awards body said:

This is a project that from the very outset was designed to make the most of the multiplatform landscape. It embraced everything from podcasts to GPS and Googlemaps to add value to the listener/user experience and met those listeners where they really lived using third party sites such as Flickr.

This is [...] about creativity and using the plethora of multimedia options now available to generate something unique and uniquely valuable. This is absolutely the paradigm for an interactive radio project in the current landscape and is by far the deserved winner.

These awards are testament to the bold, creative approach of the World Service and the well-knit collaboration within their team. It was a really exciting project to be involved with.

I have recently had a technical article about Location-Based Publishing and Services published at Dev.Opera. It’s all about the rising use of geographical coordinates in association with media on the Web, and how to get involved.

For the benefit of the Dharmafly archives, I’ve copied the article below.

Introduction

Geocoded content is transforming our Web. By adding geographical coordinates (latitude and longitude) to our media, we can help others find it through location-based search engines and web maps.

The tools for publishing geocoded media are more accessible and widespread than they’ve ever been, and we are finding all sorts of ways to put our content on the Map. Figure 1 shows a typical example.

Figure 1: A web map (Google Earth), displaying user-generated content.

There’s no limit to the variety of geo content. It could be anything: a listing of houses for sale in a neighbourhood, photos taken while travelling or a stream of local news stories.

A wave of geo innovation is under way and it has the potential to connect local populations and to communicate news and ideas from every corner of the planet. If the World Wide Web has lured people away from their own neighbourhoods, then geo is the technology that will bring it back.

In this article, we’ll look at ways that you can geocode your content, using data formats such as the location nanoformat, GPX and combinations of geocoded microformats in HTML.

Where Am I?

Ever since the first cave paintings of stellar constellations, and the first attempt to condense the geographical knowledge of an entire empire on to a had a thirst to plot the location of just about everything that we know exists.

Figure 2: Ptolemy’s world map.

We’ve used the Map to find ourselves and to see where we’re going. It is both a mirror and a lens, giving feedback on the world and helping us plan our next move. It has been a catalyst for our pursuits, as we’ve hunted trade routes and treasures, and followed pathways into mind-expanding new vistas and cultures…

A Place For Everything

On the Web, we tend to navigate by subject, using keywords and tags (e.g. “world music”). The rise of blogging gave us new possibilities for navigating via time (e.g. “most recent” posts and comments), and social networking now lets us explore the context of social relationship (e.g. posts and recommendations by “contacts”, “friends” and “followers”). But into the melting pot comes another axis of meaning: location.

“Where is it?”, “where will it be?”, “where are you now?”, “what is nearby?” Given the option, you’ll find that searching for content by location can be every bit as useful as the subject, timing or person who published it.

Let’s say you get fired up by astronomy… You could explore other astronomers’ photos on a world map, showing the places where the photos were taken, as seen in Figure 3:

Figure 3: The astronomy world map on Flickr.

You could even stay up to date with new photos by subscribing to the geocoded feed, to be read in a feed reader or plotted inside a mapping application (e.g. Google Earth, Yahoo Maps, GPS unit - either a standalone handset like the one in Figure 4, or a GPS phone, camera or other integrated device.

Figure 4: A GPS handset.

You can use these devices to record a log of your movements over time and to note any places of interest (’waypoints‘). These locations can be transmitted live to another device via Bluetooth, streamed directly into the Web or transferred to a personal computer.

An increasing number of grassroots projects, such as Open Street Map and Free The Postcode, harness the global community of GPS users and challenge the traditionally top-down approach of compiling map data.

Instead of GPS, you might use a mobile application or service such as Zone Tag to determine your position from the mobile phone masts nearby. Or you might use a web map to find a place, search by postal address, or use a number of other methods.

Most often, you will need these coordinates in decimal form. This can be converted from the traditional degrees, minutes and seconds representation of coordinates.

Let us now look at some of the developing geo web standards, which allow us to weave location into our content. Imagine that you’re at The West Pier of Brighton, UK:

Figure 5: The West Pier of Brighton.

The latitude is 50.818967 and the longitude is -0.151934 (map).

HTML Meta Tags: The Old School Way

In the days before the World Wide Web, Usenet users could broadcast their location by including their “ICBM address” in the signature of their messages. This allowed the network of users to be geographically mapped.

This practice was carried over to the Web, where a web page could be geocoded by adding “ICBM” and/or “geo.position” meta tags to the document head (a geo tag generator helps to simplify the process):

<head>
   <meta name="DC.title" content="The West Pier" />
   <meta name="ICBM" content="50.818967, -0.151934" />
   <meta name="geo.position" content="50.818967;-0.151934" />
</head>

Services such as GeoUrl can be used to find such a geocoded site. For example, websites near the West Pier (or see the feed visualised in Google Maps):

Figure 6: The GeoURL service allows you to find the location of URLs.

Photos and their EXIF Data

As a geo-photographer, you can use a tool such as GPicSync, RoboGeo or GPSTagr to synchronise your photos with your GPS handset’s log. Alternatively, you might use a GPS camera, or a specialist GPS unit (see Figure 7) that can directly geocode the image files on your camera’s memory card:

Figure 7: A GPS unit for geocoding image files on a memory card.

This geo information is added to the photos’ EXIF data, which stores such details as the time each photo was taken, shutter speed, etc. Alternatively, you could upload photos to a photo-sharing website and drag each photo on to a map (e.g. on Flickr, Panoramio or Locr).

GPX

GPS devices store data in a number of different formats. However, when they communicate with other devices and applications, they often use an XML language called GPX:

<gpx>
   <wpt lat="50.818967" lon="-0.151934">
      <name>The West Pier</name>
      <time>2008-03-20T13:57Z</time>
   </wpt>
</gpx>

In this simplified example, the <wpt> element describes a ‘waypoint’ - a manually logged point of interest. The language can describe a number of other useful features and can be interchanged with other formats using tools like GPSVisualizer and GPSBabel.

Geotagging

Whenever a post can be “tagged” (such as on a blog, or a media-sharing website), it can also be “geotagged” with the location coordinates:

geo:lat50.818967
geo:lon-0.151934
geotagged

The first tag gives the latitude, the second the longitude and we’ve added a third tag, “geotagged”, so that the post can be easily found in a search for geotagged media (see Figure 8):

Figure 8: A search for blog posts with a “geotagged” tag on Technorati.

Some video-sharing sites, such as Viddler and Motionbox, allow tagging of the video timeline. This enables individual segments of video to be geotagged.

Microblogging with the Location Nanoformat

Surely the simplest of all publications is the humble txt msg

You can geocode your status updates (on, say, Twitter or Jaiku) by simply adding L: (upper-case) or l: (lower-case), along with your coordinates to the end of the message:

This place is beautiful. l:50.818967, -0.151934

‘Nanoformats‘ are a growing collection of highly simplified, standardised ways to add semantic meaning to short bursts of content, such as text messages. Some early applications that use the location nanoformat are Twittervision (Figure 9) and Twitterwhere, which let you track Twitter users and their messages on a world map:

Figure 9: Twittervision.

The BBC World Service’s Bangladesh River Journey (see Figure 10) used geocoded Twitter messages to synchronise the location of a stream of different media publications:

Figure 10: The BBC Bangladesh River Journey mashup.

Some applications also recognise place names:

This place is beautiful. l:The West Pier, Brighton, UK

They achieve this by looking up the place name and retrieving coordinates from a database such as the Geonames web service, another community mapping project.

geo Microformat for HTML

We can mark up locations in HTML with the geo microformat:

This place is beautiful.

<span class="geo">
   <span class="latitude">50.818967</span>
   <span class="longitude">-0.151934</span>
</span>

Note that, in this example, we could have used any HTML element instead of <span>, if that would have made better sense in context. In most cases, microformats do not require specific element types - rather, it is the class attributes of the elements that matter.

Just like any other HTML content, you can then go on to use a CSS stylesheet to highlight or embellish these geo elements, or perhaps hide them from view, and JavaScript on the page could be used to interact with the geo elements. In addition, browser extensions such as Operator or Minimap offer a number of actions for each location:

Figure 11: The Minimap Firefox extension.

The geo data on the page could also be parsed and converted by an external parser and visualised on another website.

geo Microformat Shortcut

A simple way to add machine-readable coordinates to HTML, without cluttering up the page for human readers, is to use a proposed shortcut for the geo microformat that utilises the <abbr> element design pattern:

<abbr class="geo" title="50.818967;-0.151934">
   The West Pier, Brighton, UK
</abbr>

A software program could read this snippet and determine that the text “The West Pier, Brighton, UK” more specifically refers to the location at latitude 50.818967, longitude -0.151934.

geo + adr Microformat

One of the most useful properties of microformats is that they can be grouped and nested within each other, to form compound microformats.

We could, for example, have placed the geo microformat inside an adr (address) microformat, to indicate that these are coordinates for a particular postal address or place name:

This place is beautiful.

<span class="adr">
   <span class="extended-address">The West Pier</span>,
   <span class="locality">Brighton</span>,
   <abbr class="country-name" title="United Kingdom">UK</abbr>

   (<span class="geo">
      <span class="latitude">50.818967</span>,
      <span class="longitude">-0.151934</span>
   </span>)
</span>

This produces the following output:

This place is beautiful. The West Pier, Brighton, UK (50.818967, -0.151934)

The commas and brackets in this example are for human readability (most important!) and have no effect on the machine-readable microformat.

Using the <abbr> design pattern, our geo + adr microformat might instead look like this:

This place is beautiful.

<abbr class="geo" title="50.818967;-0.151934">
   <span class="adr">
      <span class="extended-address">The West Pier</span>,
      <span class="locality">Brighton</span>,
      <abbr class="country-name" title="United Kingdom">UK</abbr>
   </span>
</abbr>

geo + hCard

Geo can also be used (with or without the postal address) within an hCard microformat, to mark up contact details for a person or organisation:

<div class="vcard">
   <span class="fn">John Smith</span>

   <span class="adr">
      <span class="extended-address">The West Pier</span>,
      <span class="locality">Brighton</span>,
      <abbr class="country-name" title="United Kingdom">UK</abbr>

      (<span class="geo">
         <span class="latitude">50.818967</span>,
         <span class="longitude">-0.151934</span>
      </span>)
   </span>
</div>

geo + hAtom Microformat

Another proposed, but as yet not finalised, use of the geo microformat is within the hAtom microformat.

hAtom is a way to build HTML with the same semantic structure as an Atom or RSS feed. An hAtom entry includes descriptive information about the post, such as its title, author and time of publication. This transforms a website into something akin to a massive Atom or RSS feed. New content can be picked up by feed readers directly from the HTML and, assuming the website keeps a logical URL structure, its entire archive of posts becomes automatically available as a web service API, with no back-end scripting required.

When you add geo to hAtom, it is analogous to moulding standard RSS into GeoRSS - that is, a geo-coded RSS or Atom feed:

<div class="hentry">
   <h3 class="entry-title">The West Pier</h3>
   <p class="entry-content">This place is beautiful.</p>

   <address class="vcard author">
      <span class="fn">Premasagar</span>
   </address>

   <a rel="bookmark" href="http://twitter.com/statuses/33333/">
      <abbr class="updated" title="2008-03-20T13:57Z">3 hours ago</abbr>
   </a>

   (<span class="geo">
      <span class="latitude">50.818967</span>,
      <span class="longitude">-0.151934</span>
   </span>)
</div>

GeoRSS is used as the standard mechanism for exchanging geocoded publications on the Web (and KML is fast becoming the most common way to visualise it). By marking up your websites in geo + hAtom, you align your content with that transport mechanism, giving it the potential for more widespread distribution.

hCalendar + geo Microformat

Geo can be used within the hCalendar microformat to provide the location of an event - both historical and upcoming events. Even fleeting, passing thoughts (or ‘tweets’) can be represented, like so:

<div class="vevent">
   <h3 class="summary">The West Pier</h3>

   <p class="description">This place is beautiful.</p>

   <a class="url" href="http://twitter.com/statuses/33333/">
      <abbr class="dtstart" title="2008-03-20T13:57Z">3 hours ago</abbr>
   </a>

   <p class="location">
      <span class="adr">
         <span class="extended-address">The West Pier</span>,
         <span class="locality">Brighton</span>,
         <abbr class="country-name" title="United Kingdom">UK</abbr>

         (<span class="geo">
            <span class="latitude">50.818967</span>,
            <span class="longitude">-0.151934</span>
         </span>)
      </span>
   </p>
</div>

The dtstart class in hCalendar is for the date-time of the start of the event. This is written according to the ‘datetime design pattern‘, which is common to all microformats that describe time.

hCalendar + geo + hAtom Microformat

For some uses, geocoded hAtom and hCalendar microformats can be combined within the same block of HTML. For example, an event (hCalendar) might be posted as a feed entry (hAtom). Or a feed entry (hAtom) might describe a passing moment (hCalendar):

<div class="vevent hentry">
   <h2 class="summary entry-title">The West Pier</h2>
   <p class="description entry-content">This place is beautiful.</p>

   <address class="vcard author">
      <span class="fn">Premasagar</span>
   </address>

   <a class="url" rel="bookmark" href="http://twitter.com/statuses/33333/">
      <abbr class="dtstart updated" title="2008-03-20T13:57Z">3 hours ago</abbr>
   </a>

   <p class="location">
      <span class="adr">
         <span class="extended-address">The West Pier</span>,
         <span class="locality">Brighton</span>,
         <abbr class="country-name" title="United Kingdom">UK</abbr>
      </span>

      (<span class="geo">
         <span class="latitude">50.818967</span>,
         <span class="longitude">-0.151934</span>
      </span>)
   </p>
</div>

Where Next for Geo HTML?

As you’ve seen, there are a number of different types of content that can be enhanced with the geo microformat. However, at present, the microformat can only describe solitary, one-dimensional points. Formats such as GeoRSS, KML and GML, on the other hand, can also handle altitude, lines, areas and volumes. This is useful for describing streets, paths, boundaries, city and country territories, 3D buildings and natural features.

It remains to be seen whether such sophistication will make it into an HTML standard, or whether we will use HTML to embed external geo objects. These objects could be coded in a more specialised language, just as we currently embed JavaScript files and CSS stylesheets. Such discussions are well under way.

The Future of Geo

In this article, we’ve explored some of the newest developments in geocoded content. Whilst mapping itself is an ancient pursuit, we are beginning to see the promise of a new kind of cartography. When we reach a critical mass of geo content and a wider distribution of geo applications and hardware, we can expect to see a very different Web than the one we know today.

Figure 12: Google Earth, showing a 3D Empire State Building with Wikipedia content.

We are starting to see geo-awareness being built into everyday devices - including phones, computers and cameras. In the same way that clocks are now used to time-stamp the messages we send and the pictures we take, we may in future take it for granted that they geo-stamp our data too.

It may also become common practice to update a web service, such as Fire Eagle (Figure 13), with one’s current location - a practice that we might call “geoscrobbling”:

Figure 13: Yahoo Fire Eagle.

The record of a person’s position over time could be used to place anything that they publish onto a Map, or could be streamed to their friends, or to web services that have permission to access it. And yes, you can also expect a flurry of discussions on geo privacy and security.

Perhaps future camcorders will track their position as they record - quite literally, filming on location. Could something like Yahoo Live + Fire Eagle be the future of mobile video?

Summary

Geo is the most physical of all web technologies. It offers us a chance to reconnect with our local communities and to discover those around us. And as the world grows closer, we will start to see ourselves on each other’s maps. So, watch this space… (and that space… and that one)…