geocoding

The Los Angeles Police Department is battling a virtual crime wave in downtown L.A. caused by an Internet map coding error.

If the department's online crime map is to be believed, one might think that a downtown location just a block from the LAPD's new headquarters is the most crime-ridden place in the city. In the past six months, that location experienced 1,380 crimes--4 percent of all crimes mapped--or roughly eight a day.

The crimes were real, but the locations were off. A coding error within the system's geocoding--the process of converting addresses into map … Read more

Cool alert: If you feed your blog to Outside.in's new GeoToolkit, it will monitor it for location-specific content, and give you a map you can embed in your site. It also gives you analytics, so you can tell later what locations you've been covering.

Previous coverage: Outside.in Radar: Super-mega-hyper-local content.

The map widget gets more interesting when it brings in the geo-tagged data from other sources as well. If you're writing about a happening at a particular location, you could, theoretically, ask your map widget to show related content from other sites or from advertisers. … Read more

At the launch of Yahoo's Fire Eagle on Tuesday, local news aggregator Outside.in launched its latest product, the "hyper-local" service called Radar. Here's the pitch: you tell it where you are (or have Fire Eagle do so on your behalf), and then it will tell you what's going on within 1,000 feet of you.

Or you could just look out the window.

But seriously, this is a good pitch. While I don't buy the literal 1,000-foot story, since the main drag of my neighborhood is 1,400 feet from my front … Read more

On Friday, photo host Flickr introduced a slight tweak to the way users are able to geotag their photos.

Clicking on the "add to your map" option on the right side of any photo now pops up a mini Yahoo Map with an address finder. Previously, users were required to go into Flickr's somewhat complicated Organizr tool and add geotags en masse. If it's your first time using the Flickr map to geotag your photos, you'll still need to hit the Organizr, but only to change the initial privacy settings.

I've already used the … Read more

BURLINGAME, Calif.--Think of it as crowdsourced cartography.

In about three weeks, Yahoo plans to launch a project called Corrections in which users of the Flickr photo-sharing site can help with a thorny computing problem: providing the name of the place where a photo was taken.

Flickr has 68 million photos that have been "geotagged" with latitude and longitude coordinates, said Dan Catt, who works on geographic work at Flickr, in a speech at the Where 2.0 conference here. Coordinates are fine for computers, but human beings looking at a Web site generally prefer place names to … Read more

Where are you right now? It's a simple question for humans to ask and answer, but for Web services, location is a complex and sometimes fuzzy concept. Right now, I'm in San Francisco, and I don't care who knows it. Where in San Francisco? That's not so public. I started writing this at home, with a specific address that I don't want to print here but that I'm OK with my friends knowing. Where's my house? It's in the Noe Valley neighborhood. Although, a real estate agent might be able to get … Read more

The presidential crawl back and forth across the country is less of a race and more of a marathon. At this point, there are a lot of candidates on both sides, and likewise an onslaught of news coverage. To help keep track of it all, there's a new site, aptly named Map the Candidates, which does just that. It's a Google maps mashup of where candidates are, and what they're doing in the form of news feeds and video clips.

Each candidate gets an icon to match their campaign branding, and various map markers around the country … Read more