10 items tagged “wildlifenearyou”
2018
Owls Near Me. Back in 2010 Natalie and I shipped owlsnearyou.com—a website for finding your nearest owls, using data from the sadly deceased WildlifeNearYou (RIP). To celebrate #SuperbOwl Sunday we rebuilt the same concept on top of the excellent iNaturalist API. Search for a place to see which owls have been spotted there, or click the magic button to geolocate your device and see which owls have been spotted in your nearby area! # 4th February 2018, 10:26 pm
2010
WildlifeNearYou talk at £5 app, and being Wired (not Tired)
Two quick updates about WildlifeNearYou. First up, I gave a talk about the site at £5 app, my favourite Brighton evening event which celebrates side projects and the joy of Making Stuff. I talked about the site’s genesis on a fort, crowdsourcing photo ratings, how we use Freebase and DBpedia and how integrating with Flickr’s machine tags gave us a powerful location API for free. Here’s the video of the talk, courtesy of Ian Oszvald:
[... 171 words]5 Questions for Simon Willison. I got interviewed about WildlifeNearYou for the Flickr code blog, in particular the way the site uses machine tags. # 10th February 2010, 2:31 pm
WildlifeNearYou can now tag your Flickr photos for you. I’m really excited about this feature: if you opt-in, WildlifeNearYou will now write name and latin name tags to your Flickr photos after you’ve marked the species in the photo. This is even more interesting when you combine it with our suggest-a-species feature (the photo won’t get tagged until you’ve approved the suggestion). We also set the location on photos which don’t yet have one, but the real fun is the machine tags we’ve added, which allow developers to use the Flickr API to find photos by their WildlifeNearYou metadata (trip, species and place IDs). As a neat extra touch, the identifiers we use in the machine tags are the same as the ones used by our custom wlny.eu URL shortener, so it’s trivial to turn a machine tag in to the URL for that page on the main site. # 4th February 2010, 5:01 pm
Applications: the real stars of the data.gov.uk launch. A write-up of the data.gov.uk launch event at the Guardian. I demonstrated the Guardian’s World Government Data search engine and a small data.gov.uk inspired feature on WildlifeNearYou. # 27th January 2010, 12:23 pm
Help pick the best photos, but watch out, it’s addictive! My favourite WildlifeNearYou feature yet—our new tool asks you to pick the best from two photos, then uses the results to rank all of the photos for each species. It’s surprisingly addictive—we had over 5,000 votes in the first two hours, peaking at 4 or 5 votes a second. The feature seems to be staying nice and speedy thanks to Redis under the hood. Photos in the top three for any given species display a medal on their photo page. # 25th January 2010, 12:36 am
Owls, Otters, Monkeys and Lions Near You.com. It’s not just Owls—we also registered ottersnearyou.com, monkeysnearyou.com and lionsnearyou.com. We’ll probably stop there though, or this could turn in to a very expensive marketing gimmick. # 19th January 2010, 2:54 pm
owlsnearyou.com. Nat and I built this over the weekend. It asks for your location, then tells you where your nearest Owl is (using sightings data people have entered on WildlifeNearYou.com). If you’re using Firefox 3.6 or an iPhone it grabs your location using the W3C geolocation API so you don’t have to type anything at all. # 19th January 2010, 2:45 pm
WildlifeNearYou: Help identify animals in other people’s photos. The first of a number of crowdsourcing-style features we have planned for WildlifeNearYou—users can now help identify the animals in each other’s photos, and photo owners get a simple queue interface to approve or reject the suggestions. # 15th January 2010, 1:35 am
WildlifeNearYou: It began on a fort...
Back in October 2008, myself and 11 others set out on the first /dev/fort expedition. The idea was simple: gather a dozen geeks, rent a fort, take food and laptops and see what we could build in a week.
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