premasagar
BBC World Service: site launch
Site Address: www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/bangladeshboat/
This post is blogged at: dharmafly.com/blog/bangladeshboat
Phew! Dharmafly has been busy these last three weeks! From commission to launch in just 12 working days (and nights)...
The Bangladesh River Journey is a mashup of posts from a BBC World Service trip to track the effects of climate change in Bangladesh. The trip lasts a month, with photos being posted to Flickr, messages sent to Twitter and journal entries made on the World Service site. The mashup puts all these posts on to a map, letting you navigate around and follow the trip.
The journalists are equipped with a GPS navigation device. Each time they visit a new location, they post their co-ordinates to the Twitter stream (e.g. this post). Our system then logs the coordinates and applies them to every photo, tweet and diary entry until the next location.
In addition to what you see in the browser, there are a number of gems hidden under the hood... (Non-techie folk may happily skip this :)
Microformats
Microformats are new, developing standards for adding extra meaning to the HTML of a web page. They create all sorts of possibilities for software (from search engines to browsers) to interact with the content in new and useful ways.
The HTML for each Twitter, Flickr and diary post in the Bangladesh River Journey is written using the hAtom microformat. This means, for example, that an RSS feed can be generated directly from the HTML on the page.
If you use the Firefox browser, you can explore other microformats on the Bangladesh Boat site, with the excellent Operator extension. You'll find xFolk bookmarks, geo locations, hCard contacts and tagged links.
GeoRSS
The site's RSS feed allows users to stay up-to-date with new posts, without needing to re-visit the site (we talked about using RSS in a previous post).
The feed is encoded with the geo coordinates of each post (this is called GeoRSS). Some interesting things can then be done with the feed, such as plotting it straight on to Google Maps.
API
Part of the task was to build an API - a way for web developers to access the data in the system, to create their own mashup applications. This will be promoted through BBC Backstage - the BBC's hub for exploring new media technology.
More info: dharmafly.com/blog/bangladeshboat
BBC World Service: site launch
Site Address: www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/bangladeshboat/
This post is blogged at: dharmafly.com/blog/bangladeshboat
Phew! Dharmafly has been busy these last three weeks! From commission to launch in just 12 working days (and nights)...
The Bangladesh River Journey is a mashup of posts from a BBC World Service trip to track the effects of climate change in Bangladesh. The trip lasts a month, with photos being posted to Flickr, messages sent to Twitter and journal entries made on the World Service site. The mashup puts all these posts on to a map, letting you navigate around and follow the trip.
The journalists are equipped with a GPS navigation device. Each time they visit a new location, they post their co-ordinates to the Twitter stream (e.g. this post). Our system then logs the coordinates and applies them to every photo, tweet and diary entry until the next location.
In addition to what you see in the browser, there are a number of gems hidden under the hood... (Non-techie folk may happily skip this :)
Microformats
Microformats are new, developing standards for adding extra meaning to the HTML of a web page. They create all sorts of possibilities for software (from search engines to browsers) to interact with the content in new and useful ways.
The HTML for each Twitter, Flickr and diary post in the Bangladesh River Journey is written using the hAtom microformat. This means, for example, that an RSS feed can be generated directly from the HTML on the page.
If you use the Firefox browser, you can explore other microformats on the Bangladesh Boat site, with the excellent Operator extension. You'll find xFolk bookmarks, geo locations, hCard contacts and tagged links.
GeoRSS
The site's RSS feed allows users to stay up-to-date with new posts, without needing to re-visit the site (we talked about using RSS in a previous post).
The feed is encoded with the geo coordinates of each post (this is called GeoRSS). Some interesting things can then be done with the feed, such as plotting it straight on to Google Maps.
API
Part of the task was to build an API - a way for web developers to access the data in the system, to create their own mashup applications. This will be promoted through BBC Backstage - the BBC's hub for exploring new media technology.
More info: dharmafly.com/blog/bangladeshboat