The Street View to the Youth Club

With news of the launch of Google Street View in the UK, Tim prompted me to take a look at Places to Go:

I chose Ardwick Youth Centre, knowing it was an active and popular place:

The approach to Ardwick YC

Getting close!

The Youth Centre sign

The front door!

Certainly worth taking a look at.  

Plus, this puts into perspective our use of Flickr to collect images of Places to Go… we have more scope with this.

On the other hand, the final image isnt that inviting!  

Anyone out there also thinking of ways to link Street View to positive activity data?

Russian Dolls…

OK, so I watch Lost! Yes, I know – it has more plot holes than swiss cheese, but the really interesting thing is Lostpedia. Lostpedia is an encyclopedia of Lost. Simple as that. It is like the Wikipedia we all know about and maybe use, but it is JUST about the television series. What to know who did what, said that, or how unconnected pieces of plot might be related ?- then just head over to Lostpedia. As with Wikipedia, anyone can create, edit and discuss an article on Lostpedia. In fact, there are so many stories, theories and diversions on Lostpedia, that it is very eacy to literally get lost there…

The other day I also heard about Wookieepedia - the Star Wars community-generated encyclopdia! I took a quick look, but know that hours would zoom by should I stay!

The point I am trying to make is that if a group of disparate people can get together virtually ( I assume) to create huge knowledge bases about tv and film series’, then imagine how this could be applied to our communities of geography, such as Places to Go…. This is one of our intentions with the Plings Places – for people to add, edit and check the data that is coming through – a bit like the Knowhere Guide…

In a short while, we could start to see Wikipedia a just a portal (!) page to a whole host of pedias on the subject matter. The tools are there to do this, and get easier to use everyday

When is a 00 not a 00??

We have been trying to fathom out the coding system for the Counties and Metropoliatan districts recently – riveting stuff indeed!

As you will no doubt have spotted our listings on the Places channel situates Manchester in Lancashire, and parts of London in Middlesex, etc – which is not how our land is organised and administered!

The problem lies in the coding system we have for the metro areas. All of them begin with a 00 – which means it is difficult to automatically piece places together. Anyway, with some luck, and clever spreadsheets, we are near a solution – to put our geography back in 2007 rather than 1974!

PLINGS Places channel live

We have the the PLINGS Places channel live now.  Lots of records of potential Places to Go – and plenty more functions and data to come, but check it out and let us know what you think!

PLINGS Flickr group open..

We have created a new PLINGS group on Flickr – the photo sharing website. It is easy to upload photos to Flickr, and then join the PLINGS Places group to then pool our photos together. With this group we want to collate pictures of Places to Go – namely of buildings, parks, and such (no pictures of people please). Additionally, you can add the special “machine tag” for PLINGS that will auto link the Place with the photo..

We will benefit soon from a moderator for the PLINGS Places Flickr group – who will get more contributors to join and add. If you want to add photos, then just let us know!

www.flickr.com More photos in PLINGS Places

Photos and lat/long co-ords

We were in Stockport this morning, taking photos of various Places to Go, and also logging the latitude and longitude with a handheld GPS device!

We managed to cover quite a few of the youth service places, with a few more left. The next step is to now put the photos on the PLINGS Flickr group, and then tag them with the appropriate PLINGS place “machine tag”. In addition, we want to update the lat/long co-ords so that we can be sure we have the righ place on the map.

This all sounds wildly complicated and over the top! It isn’t really, we just want to make sure that people know where a Place to Go is, and what it looks like. As soon as we get the photos, data and listings together, we will post a link!

PLINGS Channels

As you might see from the top of this page, we have started to put the various PLINGS channels up for people to access. Life started off with this blog, but we now have much more going on and so we thought it best to try and illustrate this in various ways. So – the channels for the PLINGS project are, at the moment:

• Home – this is the project homepage where we will try to publish related information
• Blogs – this site!
• Pligg – the news site – this has been up a few weeks now
• Places – it is here that we will start to release the Places to Go data, and invite people to contribute
• Things – this will be the area for people to log in and add activities – it will be “beta” and invite only for a while
• Labs – we will put here some things we are testing, hopefully in a way that people can take part

Over the next few weeks, we will build up the content and services at these channels, so keep checking back!

Multiple places

Today we took a look at the thousands of Places to Go that we have a record for, and worked on a way to manage this data, specifically when we have a duplicate record. Al built a great tool to do this – which now just needs some time spent going through the records.

Al found that it was not enough to search around postcode or street name – so we have quite a few searches and tools to find similar records, and then decide whether to merge them together. Importantly, any organisations and activities associated are also kept.

So – expect to see the number of Places to Go we have so far start to reduce – but we have a big dataset of more places to import soon – so it will once again grow!