How often do you see a city planning project on Kickstarter? One of our projects, Solo Kota Kita, is, and needs your help! Donations go towards developing a social design field guide for areas where participation in urban design is new.

We’re more than halfway there, with just $3,680 to go. Have a rock named after you for $1, or pledge $1,000 and score a traditional Batik wax press.

View the Firm Foundation Social Design Field Guide on Kickstarter >>

Other things you can do:

• Share this link with friends and colleagues: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/solokotakita/firm-foundation-social-design-field-guide
• Like Solo Kota Kita on Facebook
• Visit Solo Kota Kita online

Today, we put an open source BART system map on GitHub for developers to use in apps.

Now, you can make the BART map of your dreams, whether that means changing the Bay Area base map to an 8-bit version (awesome), turning the station icons into gumdrops (yum!), or changing the font to Papyrus (tears of sorrow).

In addition to the AI file, you can download color and black and white .png maps.

If you use this map in your app or project, email trucy@blinktag.com and I’ll be sure to check it out.

We’re curious – is your local transit agency’s system map on GitHub?

Mid-December of last year, the Zappos API Team announced a gifting-themed Hackathon contest. Developers were challenged to build anything using the Zappos API to compete for Best Overall Application, Most Fun and Weird Application, and Best Mash-up Application (integrating other APIs or apps). Entries were judged and voted on by Zappos Employees – including Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh and the Customer Loyalty Team.

One winter weekend, BlinkTaggers Brendan Nee and Trucy Phan joined Storifier Conner Petzold, shunned social obligations, and spent their weekend hours hacking. The result? Ziftbot, a question-based gift guide built with Node.js. After answering a few questions, Ziftbot proposes unique gift ideas for friends or foes. For each gift, you can immediately purchase, share via email, or politely decline.

Ziftbot helps you find quirky gifts. We scoured the Zappos catalog for the strange and amazing, such as this camel shaped teapot:

Last week, winners were announced, and we were thrilled to discover we’d won Best Overall Application. Now… how will we split that $100? If only there were an app to help us find quirky things to buy on Zappos.

For the last month, we’ve been holding MIT undergrad Michelle Wang hostage as part of MIT’s 2012 Student/Alumni Externship Program. Now that she’s safe at home in Boston and free to speak, we thought we’d publish her thoughts on what it’s like to be an MIT extern at BlinkTag’s office in San Francisco. Thanks for putting up with us, Michelle!

Here are her answers, unedited. (Photos and captions by Trucy Phan and Brendan Nee).

Externing with BlinkTag = Michelle in a food/work coma.

What was your first impression of our office space?

Arriving at the warehouse was like stepping into one of those I Spy books. An eclectic miscellany of things decorated every surface while the murals and programmable LED table were fondly reminiscent of MIT’s east campus culture of creative hacking and building. The nets strung across the walkways just begged to be climbed on. My first thought was that there’s no way I could ever get bored in this space. And yeah, I was pretty excited to be here.

BlinkTag visits Google

What’s your favorite thing about working at BlinkTag?

The BlinkTag team (Brendan, Trucy, Brendan’s moustache, and Jed) and the flexibility to both work and play with multiple project options to work on and hundreds of little things to do in the city.

Michelle in a ball pit on a Google visit

What’s the coolest project you’ve worked on so far and why?*

Visualizing accessibility data for the EJToolkit. It was cool mostly because I’ve never worked with data visualization before and graphs are always pretty. It was also a chance to work with the d3 library and finally do some PHP. Woo.

*not including top secret BlinkTag projects

Part of Michelle's work with d3

What is the most creepy/interesting thing you’ve seen in the Mission?

I’m not sure what this counts as or if it’s even relevant and I don’t know why I’m bringing it up but I think I walked past a man who appeared to be defecating on the pavement kind of close to the warehouse. Although he could have just been chilling there.

As for actual things, Paxton Gate was interesting and only slightly creepy. A store with ridiculous displays of nature and taxidermy. It was carefully curated and an impressive collection of natural history. Not to mention the pirate store right next door.

How many burritos have been consumed?

Too many.

Would you recommend working at BlinkTag to other MIT students?

Yeah, wholeheartedly. It’s an awesome way to see the SF tech scene and Brendan and Trucy are more than enthusiastic about taking you around, introducing you to people, making you eat, and providing just enough guidance for you to learn a bunch of useful web stuff along the way. And you get away from the cold harsh winter that’s happening in Boston.

Outside Yamo, one of many places we took Michelle to eat in the Mission

Other thoughts

I have eaten so much great food in the past month. I will probably won’t be hungry until May.

Solo Kota Kita continues to get attention – this time on the Polis Blog. BlinkTag built the website and online maps for the Sola Kota Kita project.

Solo Kota Kita on Polis Blog – February, 6 2012

Solo Kota Kita, a website BlinkTag built and launched earlier this year, was recently mentioned in the November 2011 issue of Metropolis Magazine, a monthly architecture and design publication with a circulation of about 60,000. In an article called Collaborations Welcome, Michael Haggerty, one of Solo Kota Kita’s project directors, is mentioned alongside SKK. Check it out!

Solo Kota Kita in Metropolis Magazine – November 2011, Page 69

More about Solo Kota Kita:

• Website
• Flickr
• Facebook

Over the weekend of June 24th, Trucy, Jed and I all attended Startup Weekend Las Vegas. Startup Weekend takes place in cities around the world; it’s a 54-hour event that brings together “developers, designers, marketers, product managers and startup enthusiasts” to share startup ideas, form teams and create startups.

Some of our favorite companies were created during Startup Weekends past - FoodSpotting (San Francisco 2009), Zaarly (Los Angeles May 2011) and LaunchRock (Philadelphia 2011) – so we figured we’d give it a go.

Normally we work on projects together, but during SWLV we took the opportunity to work with new people and joined three separate teams.

Jed worked on Terradrop, an open API that allows anyone to search through data tagged with a location.

The Terradrop team included Carly Gloge (design) and Isaac Squires (front end development) from the Boulder, CO-based Warb, and their colleague Craig McDonald (back end development), also from Colorado.    Terradrop is already in private beta, and the team is offering $1,000 to the best app using their API.

Trucy and her team created Pop A Song (@popasong), a web-based mobile interface that enables any smart phone user the ability to add songs to any karaoke DJ’s queue. Users of Pop A Song can also use the app to tip karaoke DJs and influence their turn in line, as well as search through any DJ’s catalogue by artist or song.

Team members were Brian Egan (frontend), Crystal Chan (backend), San Shyne (business), Jason Rios (business), and Trucy Phan (design).

Brendan worked on ClippPR, a PR clipping website that tracks news article’s comments, tweets, facebook likes and other buzz and shows which articles are trending. Their slogan is “Getting press is hard. Tracking it shouldn’t be”. The site was built on node.js by Jimmy Jacobson (backend), Thomas Knoll (business, project management), Wynn Wu (design), Jameson Detweiler (business, hustle), and Brendan Nee (frontend).

After an incredibly quick two days of coding and development, each of the sixteen teams gave a five-minute pitch to an all-star panel of judges composed of:

• Tony Hsieh of Zappos
• Kevin Rose of Digg/Revision3/Milk
• Tom Anderson from Myspace [i.e. everyone's friend]
• Josh Reich from BankSimple
• Ryan Carson of Carsonified

ClippPR’s 5-minute pitch:

The results

Startups AutoPlay and IamOTW tied for second, and ClippPR ended up taking first place! As Startup Weekend Las Vegas winners, ClippPR receives office space, IP consulting, and $2,000 cold cash.  ClippPR also picked up a prize for “Best integration of Paypal” (thanks Sidney!). Both Pop A Song and ClippPR were mentioned in Developers Blog for their team members’ business savvy. Read more in Lessons Learned from Startup Weekend Las Vegas.

Never thought BlinkTag would have an office in Vegas!

This is a followup to a post we did a while back that showed how to add the Google Transit and Google Bike layer to a google map using the Google Maps API. We’ve updated this with code based on Google Maps Javascript API version 3.

Google Maps API v3 now allows you to add the Bike route layer and traffic layer via the API, but there still isn’t an easy way to get at the transit layer.

To add the Bike layer:

To add the Traffic layer:

However, you can use the code below to add the Google Transit layer it as a custom tile layer. This will load the image tiles directly from Google’s servers:

This loads the full image types, so any other styles you’ve applied to the basemap will get covered up. Unlike Google Transit, the stations won’t be clickable and transit info won’t pop up unless you add your own markers to the map, but this should work ok for just showing transit routes.

You can see this technique live in our Realtime Transit Map project (also on github).

Congratulations to Storify, who officially launched today! As of this morning, the Storify public beta became open to the public, allowing anyone to create an account.

What’s Storify? Using a drag and drop method, journalists and writers can quickly collect and filter social media streams to create a story. Storify allows users to curate and publish breaking news that often appears first in social media, but it can also be used to simply curate and organize online content.

Once logged in, you can select a number of different online feeds

We’ve been using it for 511 Contra Costa (511CC) since February, while the service was still in private beta. Compiling content from Twitter, 511CC’s blog, Flickr and other news sources, we wrote weekly blog posts covering Contra Costa County, East Bay and Bay Area news and events in transportation, transit, biking, and air quality.

If you regularly aggregate news or curate online content, consider using Storify to quickly filter and publish the news that matters to you.

Check out our posts every Friday on the 511CC blog, or get your own Stofiy account and join in on the fun.

As part of the Google IO Last Call contest I created Walksy.com. Its a mobile app that will create an on-the-fly walking tour of San Francisco with up to 8 stops based on points of interest that I specified. It ended up working pretty well and won me a ticket to Google IO.

I think its actually a useful app, its quick and uses geolocation to grab your location making it one click (after you load the page) to generate a walking tour. It has links to google streetview and offers an elevation profile of the walk and optimizes the route to hit as many points of interest in as little distance as possible. It uses google maps walking directions for the base layer, and it seems to do pretty well with knowing pedestrian paths throughout the city.

I plan to add a few more features in the near future – I didn’t have time to add everything I imagined during the overnight coding challenge:

• Some way to specify what types of points of interest you’d like to walk by
• A way to specify roughly how long of a tour you’d like
• More crazy points of interest based on my experience in SF
• Extend it to work in other cities where I can get enough points of interest, perhaps using SimpleGeo Places API
• A way to save your walk so you can come back to it later
• Descriptions of the points of interest

The code is on github – its currently all client-side using jquery mobile and google maps API, google Fusion tables and other google APIs. Please fork it and add your own ideas or connect it to a different fusion table with your own set of points of interest.

This weekend, BlinkTag attended Transportation Camp West 2011, held at Public Works in San Francisco, CA. Here are summaries of what each of us presented:

• Brendan Nee (Car sharing and P2P parking services)
• Jed Horne (Extending GTFS)
• Trucy Phan (How public agencies can use social media)
• Ruth Miller (BRT, transportation advocacy)

Saturday night, BlinkTag co-founder Brendan gave an Ignite talk titled “How to ask your neighbor for a cup of car” at the Automattic Lounge on Pier 38 in San Francisco. WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg was even in the house (although we didn’t notice him there until after the talks).

Click here for Brendan’s summary of different car sharing services, smarter parking, and taxi and car services that all enable people to forego the traditional model of car ownership.

BlinkTag co-founder Jed ran a session on Sunday on extending GTFS (Google Transit Feed Specification).  Three representatives from Google were at the meeting and they were very supportive and able to field a number of questions from developers and representatives of AC Transit and BART.

A few interesting takeaways:

• Google’s process for officially extending the GTFS spec (http://code.google.com/transit/spec/transit_feed_specification.html) is fairly straightforward.  In short, a developer must propose an idea to an agency and implement it, demonstrating proof of concept, before Google will consider extending their schema.  More information can be found at http://groups.google.com/group/gtfs-changes/
• GTFS cannot be everything to every agency – one of its chief selling points is its simplicity and the limited number of attributes necessary to support a credible routing algorithm.  While individual agencies are obviously free to use the base spec for their own purposes (run-cutting or printing time tables, for example), Google has an interest in keeping the feed single-purpose and uncluttered.
• One important new concept that was discussed was the idea of adding a pathways.txt file, which will describe pedestrian routing within a station.  Other possible extensions to the feed included additional attribution for routes (ridership, additional mode types) and other ways to describe fare and payment systems.

On Saturday, Melissa Jordan of BART and Trucy led a session on how public agencies could use social media to more effectively engage their customers. The presentation centered on what social media tool to use and when, as well as what kinds of content to post and how it should be delivered. Additional discussions touched upon legal and liability issues with interactions that occur via Twitter and Facebook between a public agency and a customer. And Subway Crush SubMate.

Trucy Phan of BlinkTag and Melissa Jordan of BART head a discussion on public engagement with social media at Transportation Camp West on March 19, 2011

Takeaway points:

• Research what social media outlets might be most effective for your organization; make sure your message is reaching the right audience.
• Know your audience. What you think is cool may surprisingly differ from what your audience thinks.
• Once you start using social media, be careful of how you build and manage your brand.
• Have fun, and interact with your customers. Information that goes two ways is better than you just pushing information one way.

Also on Saturday, Ruth Miller led a discussion on Bay Area Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) projects. Participants discussed common misconceptions about the Van Ness, Geary, and East Bay proposals, and generated a diverse list of implementable strategies to build supportive coalitions and more effectively represent existing supporters.

In a followup session on Sunday, Ruth and her Walk Oakland Bike Oakland colleague Danny Snyder joined Ben Kaufman and Rob Boden of the San Francisco Transit Riders Union to bring the transportation advocacy discussion to the regional level.

Photos via transportationcamp on Flickr

I gave a 5 minute talk at Ignite #transpo for Transportation Camp on Saturday night at the awesome Automattic Lounge on Pier 38 (Thanks WordPress!). It was titled “How to Ask your Neighbor for a cup of car” and it covered Peer-to-peer carsharing, peer-to-peer parking sharing and “smart taxis”. I mentioned a lot of new services in my talk and lot of people asked me about them afterwards – so here is a list of companies I mentioned with links and a few notes on each:

Carsharing

City Carshare

• San Francisco Bay Area Only
• Compared to Zipcar: Cheaper per hour, more per mile – good for shorter distance trips within SF, Berkeley and Oakland
• 179 locations, 313 cars
• $5.50/hr $.35/mile (depending on plan)
• http://citycarshare.com

Zipcar

• Many Location Nationwide
• Compared to City Carshare: Better for longer distance, shorter duration trips (running to San Jose and back)
• 231 locations, 810 cars in the Bay Area
• $7.50 – $12/hr (depending on plan)
• http://zipcar.com

RelayRides

• Started in Cambridge, MA in 2009
• Launched in San Francisco, Dec 2010
• Currently free to join
• Smart-card based
• 21 cars in the Bay Area (and growing)
• $5-$11/hr on average
• $5M Series A 3/7/2011 by Google Ventures
• http://relayrides.com

GetAround

• Launched in San Francisco, Jan 2011
• Currently free to Join, nearly instant approval via Facebook Connect
• Supports in person key exchange and iPhone unlock
• 96 cars (and growing)
• Diverse array of cars including a Tesla and a Porche 911 Carrara
• $5-$15/hr on average
• http://getaround.com

Smarter Parking

Park Circa

• Launched in Jan 2011
• Find and reserve a spot via iphone app
• $1-$3/hr
• http://parkcirca.com

Primo Spot

• Launched in 2008
• Supports New York, Boston and Seattle
• Shows legal on street parking based on side of street and current time.
• http://primospot.com

Taxis and Car Service

Cabulous

• Works worldwide – most cars in San Francisco and San Diego
• No prepayment required
• Shows real time taxi locations, hail one and watch it come to you
• Website and iPhone app
• Bottom-up approach – any driver can use, doesn’t need fleet approval
• http://cabulous.com

Taxi Magic

• Supports many major US cities including SF
• Trip is paid via app
• iPhone, Android, Blackberry app only
• Top-down approach – only certain taxi companies are available
• http://taximagic.com

Uber

• Car Service (fancy cars)
• San Francisco and Palo Alto
• Trip is paid via app
• iPhone and Android only
• 1.5 X the cost of a cab
• Very fast, professional and reliable service
• http://uber.com

Trucy wrote a great post about BlinkTag’s work with social media and transportation for the Open Transportation blog titled “Putting the “Public” Back in Public Transportation: Social Networks for the Car-free“.

In the post she goes over examples of what has worked and what hasn’t including examples of blog posts, tweets and facebook strategies. It turns out that tweets with more specific questions or a call to action get a lot more responses and Retweets than more generic tweets on the exact same topic:

Fr example:
a) Tax benefit for commuters who ride mass transit extended through 2011: http://511cc.org/h45lkg

1b) Do you set aside tax-deductible money for transit? By law, you’re allowed $230/month: http://511cc.org/h45lkg

Read more about this and other strategies in the full post over at the Open Transportation Blog.

Bikesy.com is now available in the Chrome Web Store. Bikesy is the open source bike mapper that BlinkTag developed using graphserver and openstreetmap data.

For those of you who haven’t tried bikesy, it lets you choose both a hill tolerance (how much you’d like to reroute to avoid San Francisco’s steep hills) and a safety level (how much you’d like to reroute to stay on bike routes and lanes). You can always visit Bikesy.com to find safe, fast bike routes around the San Francisco Bay Area but now you can add it as a Chrome App. This will do two things:

1. It will show up on your apps list when you open a new tab. This makes it fast and easy to launch Bikesy right before you set off on a bike trip to get route suggestions.

2. You’ll only need to approve geolocation once. Chrome apps allow you to grant access to bikesy.com to find your location based on browser geolocation once. The next time you return to bikesy.com and click “Map to my current location” it will just work.

Give it a try – add the Bikesy Chrome Application or just visit bikesy.com.

The WordPress 3.1 Admin Bar

WordPress 3.1 was released todayand it includes a bunch of nice improvements. The admin bar is very useful, however for some sites you might not want it showing up for all users.

You can disable the admin bar from showing up on a user-by-user basis by editing your user preferences (see below). However, this requires having each user manually hide the Admin Bar.

/* Disable the Wordpress Admin Bar for all but admins. */
if (!current_user_can('administrator')):
  show_admin_bar(false);
endif;

If you want to disable the admin bar completely, just add this:



/* Disable the Wordpress Admin Bar for everyone. */
show_admin_bar(false);

There is also a WordPress plugin that will do this for you, but its easy enough to add a line to functions.php.

From everyone at BlinkTag, we wish the city of Solo in Indonesia a very Happy 266th Birthday!

Today, February 18, 2011, the city of Sukarta (colloquially Solo) is celebrating 266 years since its capital was built by Pakubuwono II on the banks of the Kali (River) Solo.

We’re very proud to have worked along with USAID / SERASI, UN HABITAT, and a bunch of amazing people in order to create Solo Kota Kita, an online resource for Solo’s 600,000+ residents. SKK provides tools to residents in Surakarta (Solo), Indonesia for the annual participatory budgeting process – known locally as musrenbang.

Here are three of our favorite things about SKK:

1. On the Neighborhoods page, there are 51 great portraits of people from all 51 neighborhoods of Solo. Click each one to go to the neighborhood’s page. To learn more about each individual who was photographed, click on each person’s photo on Flickr and read the description.

2. Each neighborhood has an interactive map. Show population density, medical facilities, and more by selecting options on the map. As shown below for Penumping, we displayed the distance to the nearest school and the location of each school.

3. Solo Kota Kita’s blog. Check here for posts from Ahmad Rifai, Olivia Stinson, Michael Haggerty, and Ian Pramoto on how Solo Kota Kita was conceived, how it came together, and how it’s doing now. While you’re there, please leave a comment! Whether it’s a simple “Happy Birthday” or something more in-depth, we’d love to hear from you.

Of course, that’s not all we like, but you’ll have to check out the whole website to see the rest.

• English: http://solokotakita.org/en/
• Bahasa: http://solokotakita.org/

If you’re already missing the celebration in Indonesia, make sure you don’t miss these sites as well!

• Solo Kota Kita on Facebook
• Solo Kota Kita on Flickr

BlinkTag worked with the County Connection in Central Contra Costa County to format their schedules and routes into General Transit Feed Specification (GTFS).

A GTFS file is an open specification that allows a transit agencies schedule and route information to be used by developers in a variety of applications. One of the most popular applications that uses GTFS data is Google Map’s Transit Trip Planner. County Connection’s routes are now available on google maps website and on smartphones that have google maps available. Also, the transit data is now open for developers to incorporate into their apps. Examples of transit apps include Routesy, Bay Tripper and Anystop

See a sample trip on google transit: Walnut Creek, CA to Alamo, CA
Get raw GTFS file: CCCTA GTFS on GTFA Data Exchange

BlinkTag recently finished a project in Indonesia called Solo Kota Kita. We worked with a team in Indonesia to build a series of interactive maps for the city of Solo, Indonesia. This data was collected for very small regions of the city called “RTs” and complied. The statistics collected included sanitation, education, population and housing info.

The Solo Kota Kita team just prepared a video in Bahasa with subtitles that gives a great overview of the project and why it is important.

The Solo Kota Kita project has been written about in Good Magazine and Design Observer.

Check out the site and interactive neighborhood-level maps at solokotakita.org.

BlinkTag team member Caroline Dickie recently made a series of short screencasts for 511 Contra Costa on a variety of topics related to using the WordPress admin panel. These will be useful for anyone who is new to WordPress.

Adding Tags to a WordPress Post

Adding Links to a WordPress Post

Adding a BlockQuote to a WordPress Post

Embedding a PDF into a WordPress Post or Page using scribd

Embedding a YouTube video into a WordPress Post

Adding a photo to a WordPress Post

Adding a photo gallery to a WordPress Post

Properly Attributing Photos

Linking a photo to another page

Easy photo editing with picnik

Searching for Creative Commons photos on Flickr

An article was published in the most recent edition of TDM Review, a quarterly publication on transportation demand management published by the Association for Commuter Transportation.

The article titled: When Viral is Good – How Social Media Can Engage Travelers and Boost TDM Effectiveness (starting on page 21) goes over the social media strategy that BlinkTag has helped develop at 511 Contra Costa. BlinkTag helps 511 Contra Costa manage their social media (facebook page, twitter and a blog) on a day-to-day basis.