Yahoo! Local & Maps Blog

Have you ever thought how cool it would be to instantly tag cell phone photos, based on your location? The folks at Yahoo! Research Berkeley have been finding out with ZoneTag, a free mobile phone application they created to do just that.

With ZoneTag, you can snap a camera phone shot and upload it to Flickr in two clicks. More interestingly, the application captures the location information from the your phone and tags the photo with that data (if you choose to share it). For example, if you are snapping photos at your favorite restaurant, ZoneTag will automatically tag each photo with the location of that restaurant. So far, 13,000 public ZoneTag photos have been taken and by browsing the collection you get to see a specific place through “the eyes of the world.”

With PhotoSphere, Yahoo! Research Berkeley’s photo browser page, you can find photos by time, location, zip code, country, photographer, and of course by tag. It’s a great way to add a Flickr feed to a mashup. For example, you might want to accompany your map of lovely San Francisco with photos that were taken there in the past week, citywide or in a specific zip code. These examples and all PhotoSphere tags are available as RSS feeds, with GeoRSS coming soon.

It’s not hard to think of other ways to remix this data: animate a day of photography around the world, or focus on especially photogenic events happening in one region. When you put time and location tagging together, there’s no end to the stories your pictures can tell.

Andrea Moed
Design Research Intern, Yahoo!

There have been quite a few interesting map mashups popping-up lately.  We at Yahoo! Maps would like to take a moment and highlight a few of our favorites:

• Monon Trail from Indystar.com uses our AS-Flash API highlight a historical railroad path turned walking trail. It’s a beautiful integration of video and maps.
• The MS 150 Bike Tour uses our AJAX API to plot routes and rest stops for their fundraising cycling tours. Check out the map navigator that gives users an alternate view of this mashup.
• Randy Troppmann’s Running Map is a stunning and useful implementation of our AS-Flash API that allows you to plot your running, walking, or cycling route to determine how far you’ll be going. We’re especially proud of the way Randy has integrated his controls around our map to give this mashup a unique feel.
• Finally, we take our hats off to the Yahoo! Real Estate team who uses our AJAX API to integrate with Zillow.com providing users with free instant home value estimates and comparable home valuations for millions of homes in the U.S. Visit the Home Values feature on Yahoo! Real Estate.

Seen any mashups you like lately? Let us know about them.  If you are interested in making your own mashup, it’s easy to get started. The Yahoo! Developer Network has all the information you need and we encourage you to join our Yahoo! Maps Group for help and inspiration.

Vince Maniago & The Yahoo! Maps Team

Taz is the first of many Yahoo! Local featured reviewers we’ll be featuring here. An aspiring writer, Taz has written 47 local reviews and counting.

She started writing reviews on Yahoo! Local after becoming a member of 360. Taz loves to write so she thought she would review her favorite restaurants (and also keep wine tasting notes from her favorite local wineries). When reviewing restaurants, if she really likes a place, she will write a couple of paragraphs; if not, she will just highlight the restaurant’s features. She loves the fact that she can edit her reviews because she can go back to Yahoo! Local and write more when she has time, or change her reviews if the experience has changed. Of course, sometimes she writes negative reviews. 
 
“I like writing restaurant reviews to share my experiences with my friends and to help my community make decisions on where to eat,” says Taz, a Bay Area resident. Restaurant reviews appeal to her as universally valuable “because we all have to eat.” And although we can all read the New York Times for editorial reviews, she sees the value for the local community to write reviews: reading the opinions of 10 to 20 people about a business to get a feel for what the experience will be like from different standpoints is far more beneficial than the opinion of one person.

Taz gave a 5 star rating to the legendary Bouchon in Yountville, CA, outlining that she reserves the 5 star rating for a no fault, perfect type of restaurant. Other ‘exceptionally good’ restaurants that got her 4-star ratings include Auberge du Soleil and John Ash & Company in the Napa area, as well as San Francisco based trendy French seafood bistro Plouf and tacos joint Nick’s Crisp Tacos. You can also have a look at all the places she’s reviewed on Taz’s Review Map.

Perhaps you’ve found a great Local business you’d like other folks to know about? It could be a lawyer, dentist, restaurant, dry cleaner or mechanic. Either way, you can Rate & Review it on Yahoo! Local and let everyone know what you think.

Frederique Dame
Product Manager, Yahoo! Local

Trip Planner from Yahoo! Travel is now ready for prime time.  Today marks the general availability of the new service, along with cool new uses of the Yahoo! Maps AJAX API.

A little background for those of you who haven’t yet used Trip Planner: it’s a tool that simplifies the research, planning and sharing of trips online so that you can create a customized, printable take-along travel guide.  It allows you to tag information found on Yahoo! Travel and the rest of the Web and bring it into one slick AJAX interface. 

Our favorite new maps feature is the Trip Planner “explore” option where the top trip plans from thousands of destinations, as chosen by other Yahoo! users, are plotted on an interactive map using the Yahoo! Maps AJAX API.  You can pan and zoom to find the trip wherever in the world that’s right for you.  You can see this at:  http://travel.yahoo.com/trip?action=explore.

Another neat use of the Maps AJAX API in Trip Planner is the ability to view trip items in variety of formats including plotted on Satellite, Hybrid and Street Level maps.  You can also add recommendations from Yahoo! Travel Guides for nearby hotels, things to do, restaurants and other great stuff.

We hope you like what you see!  Check it out and let us know what you think!  You can post either here on the Trip Planner forum.

Vivek Hariharan & Mirek Grymuza
Yahoo! Travel & Yahoo! Maps