Yahoo! Local & Maps Blog

The Upcoming, Flickr and Yahoo! Local teams have teamed up to launch a ton of new features related to Yahoo!’s events offering today.

• Events you find in Yahoo! Local are linked to Upcoming so you can share the event with friends, see who’s coming, discuss, share photos, and more.
• Yahoo! Local events are now integrated within Upcoming as “Undiscovered Events,” so that Upcoming users can benefit from the wide range of events we have in Yahoo! Local.
• Yahoo! Maps and Driving Directions are now on every Upcoming event page, making it even easier to get to your events.
• The Upcoming homepage has been redesigned to help signed-out users find things to do in their area more easily.

Read more about these features and see what else is new over on the Upcoming blog.

Vince Maniago
Product Manager, Yahoo! Local

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!

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

Starting today, we’re happy to announce Yahoo! Local fully supports the hCalendar, hCard, and hReview microformats on almost all business listings, search results, events, and reviews. There are a few reasons behind this change, which for now, will be transparent to almost everyone.

In less-techy terms, “microformats” are an open standard for structuring web page content in a meaningful and reusable way. At Yahoo, we’ve been big microformat fans — Yahoo! Tech uses the hReview microformat for all product reviews, Flickr supports XFN and hCard on all profile pages, and our own Upcoming.org was the first big hCalendar supporter.

We believe in giving you more control over your data and the user experience on Yahoo! Local. With our microformat support, we’ve opened up new data and new possibilities for the developer community to build upon, to make tools that will be genuinely useful to all our users.

For now, most of the tools are pretty geeky, but this will change as adoption grows. Some of our favorites:

• Tails Export for Firefox. This extension will detect and display microformats on any page and let you export them to Outlook, iCal, and more. hCalendar to Yahoo! Calendar.
• Yesterday, Gordon from Upcoming.org modified an open-source Greasemonkey user script to add any hCalendar event to Yahoo! Calendar. If you’re using Greasemonkey and Firefox, try it out.
• The Flocktails Extension for the Flock web browser detects microformats and shows how pretty they can be.
• Many, many more are available on the Microformats wiki.

If you find (or build) any other cool utilities or apps, let us know!

Vince Maniago, Andy Baio, Ronny Choie
and the Yahoo! Local Team