Alan Gutierrez

What is spatial annotation? It’s when you leave a marker in the real world that associates a place or thing with a resource on the Internet. The projects that pop to mind are Yellow Arrow and Grafedia. (The latter is icky because it involves grafiti.)

Through a blog called Elastic Space, I found this comprehensive list of existing spatial annotation projects. Far to many to survey at once, though the two that seem most applicable to the French Quarter appear to be the Blue Plaque Project and Talking Street. The former uses historical the historical markers that already adorn London, the latter includes spiffy content with celebrity voice talent.

This idea was hatched by John Gregory of the Quarter Crawl, by the way. He’s got a database of places and events that he built when he published his printed “What’s Open?” business directory. Now that everything is pretty much open, he’s thinking about new applications. We’ve been talking about how New Orleanians use technology, and the cell phone is the client of choice.

What would a person hear through their cell phone? How would they interact?

• Immediate recommendations on which venues to visit, where to eat, etc.
• Posting photographs of events or venues, creating a group photo blog for each venue.
• Tour material, information describing an annotated building or landmark.

As I’ve noted in the past. New Orleans really has no need for social networking software. They already have excellent social networking hardware. The meetings, restauraunts, cafes, bars, and corkboards do for New Orleans what blogging, Google and Craig’s List do for ex-urbia.

Effective social networking software for New Orleans would recognize the value that this hardware provides, and find a way to greate a digital parallel.

Any links or insights into using mobile technology for social networking are greatly appreciated.

Update: Phone Connected

It works. I’m going out to Cosomo’s to meet with John. He just gave me a number to call, and there was the Quarter Crawl, for the evening, in telephony. I’d share the number with you, but it doubles as John’s fax line. He’ll have a new line in the coming week.

We’re going to brainstorm on the menu design, and I’m hoping that I’ll get to hack out the gecoding and directions, a routing solution for walking. It appears as through some clever Postgres hacks can produce a routing solution, but I’m out the door now.

Update: Lat/Long Lookup

Now I need to figure out how to find a latitude and longitude using a telephone. The trick is to ask the person for one of four things. A business name, an intersection, or a street name and number. The remaining option is to ask if they’ve proceeded to the last place recommended, if they are following some sort of tour.

I’m going to try to knock this out with Postgres, as a REST based web service.

Update: Telephonizer

Here’s a Java class that turns an American English string into a string of digits that matches the pattern one would key into a US telephone to represent that string. Wha? It takes a word and matches it as best it can to a telephone keypad.

• Telephonizer.java
• TelephonizerTestCase.java

This links to source control, so you’ll always have the latest.