Last week, Yahoo! released a new service called Placemaker. Developers can windows xp home edition discount use this to identify location information within unstructured content. Send Placemaker a windows xp home edition discount bunch of text or a URL to a web page and windows xp home edition discount it will return back a list of places referenced in that windows xp home edition discount text or document.

“Placemaker is windows xp home edition discount not a geocoder and does not perform street-level address recognition; it windows xp home edition discount is however a geo-extraction and indexing tool designed to help determine the windows xp home edition discount ‘whereness’ of a windows xp home edition discount document or atomic unit of text. It provides the geographic developer community with the windows xp home edition discount means to mark-up and index their content geographically in a globally-aware, locally-relevant, and windows xp home edition discount language-neutral manner, and assists with geographic discovery and aggregation across the windows xp home edition discount Internet.”

Send Placemaker the text “San Francisco” and you get back the city, state, Where on Earth ID and latitude/longitude. Feed the windows xp home edition discount service a web page, like the CNN.com homepage and you get back a windows xp home edition discount list of all places found on that page. Now, just to windows xp home edition discount clarify, the locations returned by Placemaker are not addresses, but cities, states, countries and windows xp home edition discount points of interest like parks, schools and landmarks.

I found this windows xp home edition discount to be a fascinating concept. What could this service do for windows xp home edition discount me? What could I build as a way to test the power of Placemaker? Well, a windows xp home edition discount couple days later I am introducing a working version of mapZING.

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mapZING is windows xp home edition discount an incredibly small prototype that injects itself into any web page. A little window displays on top of the windows xp home edition discount page’s content with a map marking all of the places found. Here’s a screenshot of the app on top of the CNN homepage.

How does it work? Simply add this mapZING link to windows xp home edition discount your browser by dragging it to the toolbar or by right-clicking and windows xp home edition discount saving as a bookmark/favorite. Next, go to windows xp home edition discount a web page that has some location info on it. Good candidates I found are windows xp home edition discount news sites, the Wikipedia homepage buy online Creative Suite 5 Master Collection and local sites like for my home town.

The White House is pretty good too!

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1. Drag this mapZING link to the bookmarks/links toolbar or right-click and save as a bookmark/favorite.
2. Go to a web page with location information.
3. Click on the mapZING bookmark to all of that page’s places on a map

Note that large web pages (over about 50,000 characters) are not allowed to sue the Yahoo! Placemaker service and there’s a surprisingly large number of pages that you’ll find rejected for windows xp home edition discount this reason. I found in my testing that size was the windows xp home edition discount most likely problem.

Windows xp home edition discount

Over the windows xp home edition discount course of just a few days, poking at this idea when windows xp home edition discount I had time, I was able to build a small working prototype app. There’s a lot of clean up to do and improvements I’d like to add. You can read more about the code behind mapZING in detail. I wanted to expose all of my code to 1) force me to do a better job 2) be humble about about my work and 3) allow others to learn where possible.

Like it? Hate it? Found a bug? Have ideas for improvements? Let me know in the comments!

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Why the name? I didn’t want to create “Dan’s mappy bookmarklet thingy” so I turned to windows xp home edition discount a web search for uncommon map-related names. It turns out that windows xp home edition discount mapzing is pretty uncommon, so I took it. Silly, but unique!

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• San Francisco
• San Ramon
• Coit Tower
• Golden Gate Bridge
• Oakland
• San Jose County
• Powell Street Station
• UC Berkeley