One of the developers behind the Yahoo Purple Pedals project posted a lot of details about how they went about developing a networked bike that automatically uploads geocoded photos to Flickr.

The team created background applications for the GPS-enabled Nokia N95. The software forces the camera to take photos regularly without user interaction and posts the photo, the device's IMEI ID and the current location to a server application over HTTP. Finally, the server application matches the IMEI to a Flickr ID in its database and posts the photo to Flickr for the world to see.

Both the device-side and server-side applications have been made available under the LGPL license, which should give you a pretty significant head start with developing your own mobile-photo project.

Coding a Networked Bike
Purple Pedals

The Google spreadsheet function =importHTML("","table",N) will scrape a table from an HMTL web page into a Google spreadsheet. The URL of the target web page, and the target table element both need to be in double quotes. The number N identifies the N'th table in the page (counting starts at 0) as the target table for data scraping.

The author goes on to show you how to pull a country population table from a Wikipedia entry into a spreadsheet, create a graph from it, publish the spreadsheet as a CSV, consume the CSV in Yahoo Pipes, export the Pipe output to KML, and import the KML into a Google Map. Whew!

The importHTML function will accept either "list" or "table" as the second parameter, which allows you to retrieve records from either UL/OL/DL lists or TABLE contents, respectively. If you want to retrieve something that's not table or list based, the importXML may also come in handy. With importXML, you can pull data from any XML or HTML file using an XPath query to target a specific tag or attribute. For more information on these import functions, consult the official documentation below.

Data Scraping Wikipedia with Google Spreadsheets
Google Docs Documentation: Functions For External Data

Previously:
HOWTO - track stocks in Google Spreadsheets

The Yahoo Hack Day 2008 event wrapped up this weekend and the winners have been announced. One of my favorite entries that didn't make the cut, but is worth mentioning is SnackUpon, a Yahoo Pipes application that provides StumbleUpon-like behavior using your Delicious username as input.

The output is RSS-feed based on data gathered from what you bookmark in delicious. Simply enter a delicious username in the form and the output is a feed of random webpages found by searching yahoo and delicious for a random set of tags from the given user's delicious account.

The output isn't perfect - it seems like the search algorithm could use a bit of polish to return more relevant results. That said, the idea is a worthwhile, if simplified, take on the classic "agent" device that the 1990's promised we'd have in the 2000's. Given a list of a user's bookmarks, the agent should be able to mine the news, blogs, links from similar people, and new bookmarks with similar classification, allow the user to consume the results at her leisure, and use the user's feedback (new bookmarks) to refine future searches.

SnackUpon
The Full List of Hack Day Entries and Winners

Mapstraction is an abstracted Javascript mapping API that can make use of Google Maps, Microsoft Virtual Earth, Yahoo Maps and Mapquest. Instead of deciding on a particular mapping provider, you can build your web application with Mapstraction and easily switch to a different service by changing a single line of code. From the Mapstraction site:

Mapstraction additionally fills some holes each provider's current offerings (taking advantage of existing open source solutions where possible) to normalise the feature set across platforms. In the future, Mapstraction will also talk to OpenStreetMap for people who want to build maps without restrictions on derived works.

Features

• Support for 9 major mapping providers
• Point, Line, Polygon support
• Image overlay
• GeoRSS and KML feed import
• Geocoding of addresses
• Driving directions

There's an introductory walkthrough on Webmonkey that shows you how to do the basics like instantiating a map with various providers and adding markers with the abstracted API. The Mapstraction web site also has demos for geocoding, drawing polygons, and swapping map tiles. The API appears to cover all the bases. I can't think of any reason to directly use a specific map provider instead of this.

Mapstraction
WebMonkey Mapstraction Tutorial

Yahoo recently released an official AS3 API for Yahoo! Maps, which provides another option for Flash-based GIS applications. This adds to Mapquest's official AS3 API and a couple of partially-complete, open source AS2 APIs for Google Maps.

All of these services provide the traditional AJAX APIs, of course, and that's perfect for a lot of uses. By using Flash as the rendering engine, though, there are new options available for the developer. Things like incremental scaling between tile sets, map rotation, and more advanced multi-level vector and raster overlays immediately come to mind.

Yahoo! Maps for ActionScript 3.0 - Link
Google Maps Flash Interface - Link
MapQuest AS3 API - Link
UMap: Google Maps Flash Overlay (flash above above AJAX map) - Link

It's too bad that Google Analytics doesn't have an official API, but Chris Riley came up with a fun solution for pushing analytics content into a format that is easily accessible from your web applications.

Using Google Analytics' scheduled reporting feature, you can have an analytics report automatically sent to a public, read-only Google Group in XML format. From there, the group's latest post can be pulled in through Yahoo pipes where it is filtered and exposed as a JSON service, ready for you to pull into a web application via Javascript. Yoikes!

Chris' example shows you how to do this to add a popular posts feature to your blog. You should be able to tweak the code to export other information from Analytics as well, including geographic distribution, popular search terms, or even visitor and pageview data.

No Google Analytics API? No Problem! - Link

Via the Hacks Authors' Blogs feed, we find Jim Bumgardner's Pipes Picayune & Daily Tube mashup news ticker:

Headlines from a BBC RSS feed are fed, via Y! Pipes, to my news ticker, which is implemented in Flash. Click on the spinning newspaper to read the story in full on the original website. This widget can work with any RSS feed, but I'm using the BBC because they tend to write short pithy headlines which fit my faux newspapers better.

UPDATE:

In the comments, Jim points out that he's now added an easy-to-use form for generating custom RSS tickers. Check out this feed of Hackszine:

Powered by Yahoo! Pipes

Related:

• Yahoo! Hacks
• Mix and Match the Web with Yahoo! Pipes
• Make Family Feeds as Yahoo! Pipe

After playing around with Yahoo! Pipes a bit, I've just created my first aggregated feed: a single-subscription roundup of the three sites in the Make family (Makezine.com, Craftzine.com, and Hackszine.com). This simple pipe doesn't do much more than provide a single RSS feed for the three sites, but it hints at more fine-tuned possibilities. If you'd like to see everything we post across these sites, but perhaps with a limitation or two (say, removing posts written by me), go ahead and clone the feed and edit to your heart's content. But report back here, because we want to see any innovative uses you come up with for this promising new service.

Related:

• Yahoo! Pipes: Some Tips (O'Reilly Radar)
  
• Yahoo! Pipes: Deconstructing a Pipe (O'Reilly Radar)
  
• Yahoo! Pipes: The Modules for Building Pipes (O'Reilly Radar)
  
• Yahoo! Pipes (Mac DevCenter)
  
• Geek to Live: Create your master feed with Yahoo! Pipes (Lifehacker)
  
• Yahoo! Hacks

Can't decide where to eat today? Flickr Hacks coauthor Jim Bumgardner (who now works at Yahoo!) has created a great Yahoo! Local mashup to make the decision for you. Just plug in your ZIP code and a query, and give the Wheel of Food a spin:

Cambridge has so many great Indian joints, it's often tough for me to pick one. I didn't think it was possible, but the Wheel of Food actually uncovered a few places I didn't even know about, making it a great way to find new restaurants, in addition to providing a random decision maker for the indecisive.

(via Paul Bausch)

Related:

• Yahoo! Hacks

Ted Nelson coined the term Hypertext over 30 years ago, and articulated its principles, most of which have been ignored in the triumph of the Web. One of the principle elements of Nelson's vision that was left out of the web is the inherent bidirectionality of hyperlinks. This just means that a link from A to B should be visible, and traversable, from B to A as well. A simple idea, but suprisingly difficult to implement if you start with the sort of document-centric model that the WWW uses.

The problem is that bidirectional linking requires a certain level of cooperation between referencers and referencees. You can't force every publisher of every document to maintain a trackback-style referencing policy or system. Fortunately, however, you can expect that someone will be in the business of crawling and indexing the web, and the topic of references, as any fan of Pagerank will tell you, falls squarely into the search domain.

LinkBack is a Firefox/Greasemonkey plugin that queries Yahoo web services as your browse the web, displaying incoming links for the web pages that you visit. It's pretty much like using the "link:" qualifier in a Google search, except that it does this automatically for you for every page that you visit, showing the results in a semi-transparent floating div over the document you are viewing.

Of course, there are privacy issues with sending all your browsing information to Yahoo, and the results are only as good as the search engine is capable, but it's a step in the right direction, and for the most part, it works. -Link.

In my previous post Yahoo! Pipes: The Modules For Building Pipes I explained the tools available for building a pipe and mentioned the Apartment Near Something pipe. It allows you to input what you would like to be near (for example: "parks"), what city (for example: "Palo Alto, CA"), and how far (for example: 2 miles). It outputs GeoRSS of available apartments in a Palo Alto, CA that are near parks. In this post I am going to step through this pipe. If you want to follow along you can check the debugger in the editor to see the output at each step.

• Pipes and Filters for the Internet -- Link
  
• Yahoo! Pipes: The Modules For Building Pipes -- Link
  
• Yahoo! Pipes -- Link
  
• Yahoo! Hacks -- Link