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

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!

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

“I remember thinking that this would be a pretty harmless easter egg, that no one would really use it, but I was very wrong. When we released Netscape Navigator 1.0 we did not document the blink functionality in any way, and for a while all was quiet.”

I like Lou’s reaction to the first time he saw the BlinkTag in the wild:

“It was a lot like Las Vegas, except it was on my screen, with no way of turning it off.”

Read the rest of the Origin of the Blinktag.

I had my first opportunity yesterday to play around with the GeoAPI geo-referencing service. Although not quite as intuitive as Google Map’s forward and reverse geocoding services, GoeAPI gives you immediate access to geo-located feeds from Twitter, Flickr, and YouTube, plus the ability to create custom neighborhoods (what they called “guids”) for you to query.

Sounds nerdy – so here’s the English translation:

You now can, with a few lines of code, get Tweets happening real-time in your neighborhood.

Fun? I guess it depends on where you live. Mostly what I’ve been finding is that my neighbors are kind of pervs.

Here’s a quick and dirty Python code sample for you to get started. You’ll need your own API key first.

Also, you’ll need to know the latitude and longitude of a point in the neighborhood you’re interested in. Try (37.766 -122.417) for the Mission. Also, because sometimes you get garbage for location data (like Where: !!!!Frisco U noe!!!!), I’ve add a quick parser to find correctly formatted latitude and longitude pairs. Plenty more you can do with this with a few minutes of time.

– Nerdy Part –

import sys, os, json, urllib, re

#usage: python get_tweets.py [lat] [lng]

lat = sys.argv[1]
lng = sys.argv[2]

# Regex to find properly formatted lat-long pairs in the where response.

lat_lng_re = re.compile('^[\D]*[^-^\d](?P[\d\.-]+)\s*\,\s*(?P[\d\.-]+).*')
api = '[YOUR API KEY]'

parent_request = 'http://api.geoapi.com/v1/parents?lat=%s&lon=%s&apikey=%s' % (lat,lng,api)
response = urllib.urlopen(parent_request).read()

json1 = json.loads(response)

# Find your neighborhood 

guid = json1['result']['parents'][0]['guid']
print "\n\nYour neighborhood: %s\n\n" % json1['result']['parents'][0]['meta']['name']
print "--TWEETS--\n\n"

# Get Tweets in your neighborhood

tweets_request = 'http://api.geoapi.com/v1/e/%s/view/twitter?apikey=%s' % (guid,api)

response = urllib.urlopen(tweets_request).read()

json2 = json.loads(response)

for tweet in json2['result']:
	print "Tweet: %s" % tweet['text']
	print "When: %s" % tweet['created_at']
	loc = lat_lng_re.match(tweet['location'])
	if loc:
		print "Lat: %s Lng: %s" % (loc.group('lat'),loc.group('lng'))
	else:
		print "Unusable location: %s" % tweet['location']
	print "User: %s" % tweet['from_user']
	print "Profile image url: %s\n" % tweet['profile_image_url']

Things worked great, and it was easy to set up the custom url with bit.ly pro by changing the A record for the domain name, however this meant that anyone going to 511cc.org directly with no hash on the end would be redirected to bit.ly’s main page. We needed this to redirect to a URL of our choosing, in this case 511contracosta.org. This isn’t an option in bit.ly pro, according to their FAQ its only available for bitly.Pro Enterprise users which costs $995/month. This was way beyond our price range.

Fortunately, its pretty easy to use .htaccess to carry out this.

• First, you need to set up the short domain name to use namesevers that point to a hosting account you control. For us, this was Media Temple so we set nameservers to ns1.mediatemple.net and ns2.mediatemple.net.
• Next, add a file called .htaccess
• The contents of the .htaccess file should be:
  

  RewriteEngine on
  RewriteRule ^/?$ http://511contracosta.org [L]
  RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://bit.ly/$1 [R=301,NC]

  view raw file1.txt This Gist is brought to you using Simple Gist Embed.

  


• You should replace “http://511contracosta.org” with the domain name you’d like to redirect the root to
• Enjoy bit.ly pro, with at least one feature of bitly.pro enterprise

However, there currently isn’t a way to get display the transit or bike map layer. However, Google Maps allows you to create your own tile layer and load in into the map. It’s not too difficult to create your own custom tile layer and actually refer to the actual bike map or transit map tiles and load them directly from Google.

The URL template you need for getting bike maps is:

http://mt1.google.com/vt/lyrs=m@121,bike&hl=en&x={X}&y={Y}&z={Z}

and for transit maps:

http://mt1.google.com/vt/lyrs=m@121,transit|vm:1&hl=en&opts=r&x={X}&y={Y}&z={Z}

To create your own tile layer, use one of the URL templates above:

function initialize() {
  var map = new GMap2(document.getElementById("map_canvas"));
  map.setCenter(new GLatLng(37.880002, -122.189941), 11);

  //Create new Tile Layer
  var gTileUrlTemplate = 'http://mt1.google.com/vt/lyrs=m@121,bike&hl=en&x={X}&y={Y}&z={Z}';
  var tileLayerOverlay = new GTileLayerOverlay(
    new GTileLayer(null, null, null, {
      tileUrlTemplate: gTileUrlTemplate,
      isPng:true,
      opacity:0.8
    })
  );
  map.addOverlay(tileLayerOverlay);
  }

These URLs could change at any time, so there is no guarantee that this won’t break. You can see this in action at whereisbart.com

Google just announced support for PubSubHubbub (PuSH) in Google Reader. With PubSubHubbub, new posts show up nearly instantly in Google Reader instead of up to a half hour delay. This means content gets pushed to your readers faster.

However, this will only work for sites that have PubSubHubbub enabled. Fortunately, this is very easy on WordPress:

• Install the PubSubHubbub plugin – you can do this by going to Plugins -> Add New and searching for PubSubHubbub. Two plugins exist, the one called “PubSubHubbub” seems to be the more popular and actively maintained plugin, so go with that one.
• Once its installed, activate it:
  
• Thats it. Your posts should now show up in Google Reader nearly instantly.