OpenEcoMaps – Free Eco-living Maps and Data

OpenEcoMaps provides free eco-living maps and data from OpenStreetMap


OpenEcoMaps

OpenEcoMaps Exeter,UK
But why?

There are lots of community groups, councils and companies out there mapping allotments, renewable energy generators, cycle routes and more. But they all suffer from two shortcomings:

1. Duplication – by putting their work into different places, different maps, we’re duplicating effort and not benefiting from each other’s work. For example, it’s common to find several different people all trying to map food growing spaces in the same part of town. Why not share?
2. Tools – not everybody has the tools to map these things, to put the results onto their web site or provide it to their council in the correct format.

OpenEcoMaps encourages people to share all their data in the same place – OpenStreetMap – and makes it easier for you to make use of the results.
How does it work?

OpenEcoMaps takes the data from OpenStreetMap (published under the Creative Commons Attribution-Sharealike 2.0 license), a community that is mapping the whole world and providing all of the information as open data. It takes a fresh data extract every hour and turns it into reusable KML Files, which can easily be displayed on a map.

Map of Exeter includes:

  • Cycling Map
  • Public Transport
  • Aerial Photography
  • Food growing
  • Zero Waste
  • Sustainable Transport
  • Low Carbon Power

http://www.openecomaps.co.uk/map.php?pack=TTE&zoom=1&lon=-3.51&lat=50.72

Source:
http://tom.acrewoods.net/2011/03/09/growing-pains-getting-data-out-of-openstreetmap/

More information:
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/OpenEcoMaps
http://www.openecomaps.co.uk/about.php

King on Confidence and Purpose

“Almost always the creative, dedicated minority has made
the world better.”

–Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929–1968)
American civil rights leader
Nobel Peace Prize winner

Sales inspiration…

Martin Luther King lived for just over 39 years.

He traveled over six million miles, spoke on over 2500 occasions, became an icon for civil rights, was Time magazine’s Man of the Year at age 35, and won the 1964 Nobel Peace Prize.

When you have some time (outside the money hours or on a well-earned break), enjoy his “I Have a Dream” speech (he was 34 when he delivered it at the Lincoln Memorial… unreal), read his Nobel Prize acceptance, or listen to this quick audio clip (love this) from his Drum Major Instinct sermon for a little inspiration (full text of the speech).

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Richer photo support in the Google Buzz API

You’ve already been able to simply include a photo in a Google Buzz post using the Buzz API. Today we’re making it much easier to add photos to Buzz posts. Additionally, using Picasa as the photo repository, you’ll now be able to wield the Buzz API to take all sorts of other actions on behalf of the user:

  • Create a new album
  • Get an album
  • Update an album’s metadata
  • Delete an album
  • List a user’s albums
  • Upload a new photo
  • Get a photo
  • Update a photo’s metadata
  • Delete a photo
  • List a user’s photos

Accessing a photo entry through the Buzz API is just as easy as getting an activity. The form for retrieving an activity is:

https://www.googleapis.com/buzz/v1/activities/{userId}/@self/{activityId}

With just a few alterations, we get the form for retrieving a photo:

https://www.googleapis.com/buzz/v1/photos/{userId}/@self/{albumId}/@photos/{photoId}

With live data, it would look like the following URL:

https://www.googleapis.com/buzz/v1/photos/farago/@self/5251364904403459921/@photos/5251366163678993586?alt=json&prettyprint=true

Browse to that address and you’ll get data that will point to this Picasa photo:

(Photo by Julie Farago, used under the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share-Alike license)

The read-only endpoints will return public data without authentication. For authenticated access to the photos endpoints, you must be granted an OAuth token for the user with both the Buzz and Photos API scopes. For existing users, you will need to discard the OAuth tokens scoped to the Buzz API and request authorization to both scopes. More details can be found on the Google Buzz API documentation site.

Photos are an essential part of social applications. We expect these new capabilities will allow you to enrich your user’s experience with a minimum of fuss. As always, please swing by the Developer Forum to let us know what you think. And if you haven’t already, start using the APIs console to track your API usage and other coolness.