Developers have been busy playing with Yahoo’s Placemaker since its inauguration at the recently past Where 2.0 conference, resulting in a pair of interesting new tools.
Developer Christian Heilmann has announced GeoMaker, an app that makes it dead simple for the average web user to geo-enrich content with Placemaker data. Developed using PHP and Yahoo developer libraries YQL and YUI, GeoMaker allows users to enter any text or a URL to be automatically geo-enriched behind the scenes. The app outputs a Yahoo Map with the relevant location data pertaining to the input text, and the code needed to place the map on your blog or website via copy and paste. For content creators looking to add some semantic markup to their data, GeoMaker also outputs the data in Geo-Microformats.
If you try out GeoMaker, Heilmann is currently looking for feedback so he can improve GeoMaker after which he plans to open source the code on GitHub. You can see a short video explaining GeoMaker here.
Heilmann has also created a WordPress plugin called Geo This that enables publishers to add geographical information to blog posts and other content with the click of a button. Of course using Placemaker data, Geo This is a Greasemonkey script to Firefox that adds a Geo This button under the text box on the WordPress platform. When you press the button, it sends the content of the text box to Placemaker, crunches it for ‘place’ data and returns the relevant Geo-Microformats. Heilmann is working on a plain vanilla Javascript version so the plugin can be used for any form or content delivery system on the web. You can find out more on his blog.
As a quick refresher, Yahoo Placemaker is an open API that enables content publishers and application developers to add geographical structure to content. It basically extracts place names and locations from structured or unstructured content and returns geographic metadata such as latitude and longitude coordinates. The main idea behind the service is that by adding geo-structure to web content, it will make the internet increasingly hyperlocal.
