Tag: microformats

Put Yourself on the Map

EastHampshire.org Map

If you had a map and you could show it to anyone, what would you put on it?

These days, maps are playing a big part in the development of social media. Imagine you were to run an event, or make a journey around the world, how could you represent it online? How could you help people to find out where you are, to know what you’re doing, or even to see what you’re seeing?

As you can imagine, interactive web maps and location-based activities are not just useful for looking up addresses. We can now assign practically any piece of online content to a map, including videos, photos or location-based conversations. At last, the web doesn’t have to be so geographically anonymous anymore.

Everyone has different needs and interests, so their information might be organised in different ways: people such as film buffs, chess enthusiasts, or parents looking for baby groups might all want to find out about related activities in their local area, and web mapping can help. Read More »

Live! We’re Tracking a Big Bus with the BBC

BBC World Service: Talking America

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.

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Location-Based Publishing and Services

Little Red House on Pine Planet (by visulogik)

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.

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Goo Music

Goo Music

URL: goomusic.net

Goo Music are a vibrant, young band management company in London. They manage The Subways, a high-energy band who are currently putting together the final touches to their second album and are about to launch a world tour.

We’ve created a distinctive website for the business, in the style of a one-page fanzine that keeps itself up-to-date with feeds from the Twitter and MySpace profiles of both Goo Music and The Subways.

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YLiveGroups: Live Video at BarcampBrighton2

Barcamp Brighton 2

This weekend is BarcampBrighton2, a grassroots technology conference organised and run by the participants. Over the last couple of days, we’ve been piecing together a special Greasemonkey userscript for the conference, which enables Yahoo Live users to broadcast live video as a group. We call it YLiveGroups.

» Install the script

We first used Yahoo Live at last month’s SemanticCampLondon and there was a great buzz of conversation from people who were watching from other countries, discussing the topics of the talks, asking questions and learning about the subjects.

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SemanticCampLondon

Semantopoly

This weekend was SemanticCampLondon (alt) – a grassroots conference of semantic web developers.

Semantics is all about meaning – and the idea of the “semantic web” is to use techniques that add greater and greater meaning to web content. The intention is for computers – as well as humans – to “understand” something of the content, allowing them to make associations with related content and to present options to the web user based on those associations.

When web developers agree about standard ways to add semantic meaning to content, then some pretty amazing things become possible.

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Climate Change in Social Media

Hungry for food (by bangladeshboat)

I am afraid it is no exaggeration to say that what we saw was a hellish scene. [source]

It has been a sobering experience to see reports of the Bangladesh cyclone – and to watch them flow through the Bangladesh River Journey site we built for BBC World Service. The project’s original aim was to expose the very real presence of climate change in Bangladesh – a low-lying land of myriad rivers – and the cyclone’s arrival seemed shockingly symbolic.

While news of the cyclone competed for airtime in the general media, the World Service maintained a stream of often very personal and touching accounts from the Bangladeshi people. Their Flickr photos and Twitter texts acted as informal media channels, adding an extra dimension to the more formal reporting on the World Service website and radio.

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BBC Bangladesh River Journey

BBC World Service: Bangladesh River Journey (screenshot)

URL: www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/bangladeshboat

Phew! We’ve been busy these last three weeks! From commission to launch in just 12 working days (and nights), Dharmafly has built a site for the BBC that explores social media and cutting edge Web technologies…

The is a mashup of posts from a BBC World Service trip to track the effects of climate change in Bangladesh. The trip lasts a month, with photos being posted to Flickr, messages sent to Twitter and journal entries made on the site. The mashup puts all these posts on to a map, letting you navigate around and follow the trip.

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