I need to write a white paper one of these days about the mixture of data and real-world locations and their social implications. In the meantime I'll offer one anecdote so you understand where I'm coming from when you reference vendor lock-in - or the loose sharing of data.
A situation occurred a few years ago when Magellan created a promotion around geocaching. They placed caches around the US that contained prizes from hats to GPS units, and posted coordinates on their own web site. Unfortunately in one situation they posted the wrong coordinates that were sitting smack dab in the middle of a retired family's back yard. The result? Geocachers from all around hit GoTo on their GPS unit and ended up parked out front and standing on the patio, in the driveway, and out in the street. The family, obviously clueless, called the police and mayhem ensued. This is a more extreme example but caches are archived, moved, adjusted and changed every day. Some caches have the wrong coordinates while others were just inappropriately placed. At 289,000 geocaches and counting you can imagine that one or two of them were causing trouble one way or another. And you definitely want to limit the number of people hitting GoTo with stale data. So imagine if you took this data and made it downloadable for anyone to share and use on the 'net. Once that data is out there... it's out there. The original owner of the cache and the listing has no further control over the cache. At any time the cache changes and data becomes invalidated. In many cases park managers allow geocaching because they work closely with Groundspeak to ensure that they are able to manage the geocaches in their parks. We decided to be open - in our actions - and therefore have to create policies to work well with others. When a park manager removes a cache or lets us know it is inappropriate, we move the listing off the web site. And they are confident that it is removed off the net' - therefore restricting impact or dangerous decisions for others. Now when it comes to our new site, Waymarking.com, I feel that this kind of data should be easier to access and use by third parties. We're not there yet but we do intend to provide APIs to allow access to Waymarking data, since things like historical markers, whispering giant sculptures, factory tours, and science museums won't cause a waymarker to end up in someone's back yard. ... most of the time. Jeremy -----Original Message----- From: Tyler Mitchell [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Friday, July 14, 2006 6:59 PM To: [email protected] Cc: Jeremy Irish Subject: Re: [Geowanking] Geocaching Google Mashup Hi Jeremy, I'm glad to see some geocache maps opened up! Some of us would be thrilled to help you serve these up using open standards if you were at all interested. This would protect you from, what should we call it.. vendor lock-in - and conceivably boost interest in geocaching in general. Once you've made that leap, I think you'll find us wrapping up geocaching maps using several technologies that you could also copy/ re-use, etc. Any thoughts? Tyler On 14-Jul-06, at 6:47 PM, Jeremy Irish wrote: > For those new to the mailing list, I posted in the past my concerns > about taking something like Google Maps and mashing them with > existing applications - and therefore relying completely on an > external company with no formal relationship. Well, it didn't take > long for us to realize that we might and well hang out with the > cool kids and smoke some Google Maps. > > Here’s a link to our approach with Google Maps + Geocaches: > http://www.geocaching.com/seek/gmnearest.aspx > > It centers on an area close to Groundspeak headquarters, but you > can use the Yahoo web geocoding service to zoom in on whatever > region you like. > > Our approach in the page design was to have a basic application > where you could seek out all the caches, and a premium version that > would allow you to use additional features like bookmarking > different caches you want to seek out. Our hope was to increase > Premium Memberships which are ultimately the lifeblood of the > company, while still providing useful tools for the casual > geocacher. As you can see I think we created a happy medium. > > Our approach at this point is we can still provide the basic, > previous method of doing searches from a distance and showing those > results while experimenting with alternate mapping methods like > Google Maps and Earth. Like this: > > http://www.geocaching.com/seek/nearest.aspx?zip=98121 > > We also played with Ka-map but decided it is still a bit too early > in its infancy to rely on for a production mapping tool, but are > happy to know there is an alternative in case the mapping switch is > turned off or mangled with advertising. > _______________________________________________ > Geowanking mailing list > [email protected] > http://lists.burri.to/mailman/listinfo/geowanking _______________________________________________ Geowanking mailing list [email protected] http://lists.burri.to/mailman/listinfo/geowanking
