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

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.

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 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

TechCrunch created their own “Buzz it” button and posted a link to the code in the comments. Its easy to add to any wordpress site (or really any other content management system. The following steps will show you how to add a “Buzz This” link to your site, like the one above on the BlinkTag Blog.

• Open the single.php file of your sites template. You can do this via FTP or in WordPress by going to “Appearance” -> “Editor” and selecting single.php.
• Paste the following code where you would like the Buzz It button to appear. If you are not sure where, the line right before or after <?php the_content(); ?> is a good place.

<a href="javascript:var%20b=document.body;var%20GR________bookmarklet_domain=&quot;http://www.google.com&quot;;if(b&amp;&amp;!document.xmlVersion){void(z=document.createElement(&quot;script&quot;));void(z.src=&quot;http://www.google.com/reader/ui/link-bookmarklet.js&quot;);void(b.appendChild(z));}else{}">
<img src="http://IMAGE HERE" border="0" alt="Share on Google Buzz" /> Share on Google Buzz</a>

• Replace http://IMAGE HERE with the URL of your image, or remove the image code entirely to have a text only link. If you want, take this 16×16 Buzz Logo image: but please copy it to your site, don’t link directly the image hosted on BlinkTag.
• Save the single.php file. Test it out on an individual posts page on your site.
• This same process can be in used in page.php or any other template file to add a Buzz link to your WordPress pages.

Respond in the comments if you come up with a better way to accomplish this. If you liked this post, please Buzz it!

When a narrator, describing other candidates, says, “Political insiders and career politicians,” a woman’s face appears onscreen and she says, “What? Are you shitting me?” (The word “shitting” is bleeped out, as are all the other curse words in the add.) Then, a man comes on and asks, “Are you fucking kidding me?” He’s followed by another man who simply says, “What the fuck?”

We’re excited that James is getting good publicity and that he is getting recognized for his innovative campaign. Take a look at his website: http://jamesperry2010.com.