July 8, 2009

Introducing Placemaker - YDN Tuesday talk in London, England

Every first Tuesday of the month is YDN Tuesday in London, England, which means that Yahoo engineers give free tech talks in partnership with Skills Matter. This time the topic was Placemaker, our new (beta) geolocation service.

Almost 40 attendees had signed up to come and see the talk, but torrential rainfall (of almost biblical proportions) in London lead to the closure of several underground lines and made it hard for people to get to the venue in time and good health.

It probably is due to the proverbial English stiff upper lip that half of the attendees managed to show up. Those who succeeded went to the pub with us and then home, with a much better idea of what Placemaker is and an understanding that adding geographical information to content is not really dark magic anymore.

During the talk we covered:

• The need for a system like Placemaker (making the web more location aware and adding structure to the chaos)
• A basic example of how to use Placemaker
• Annoyances with Placemaker and how to work around them
• How to build a tool to analyse text and automatically add geo microformats using Placemaker
• How to use YQL to work around Placemaker problems and how to use it in pure JavaScript
• Implementations of Placemaker like GeoMaker and TweetLocations and how they were built

The slides of the talk are available on Slideshare:

The notes and code examples are available and you can listen to or download the MP3 of the talk at archive.org.

Skills Matter also filmed the talk and the video will soon be available on their web site.

See you next YDN Tuesday!

Chris Heilmann
Yahoo Developer Network

Posted at July 8, 2009 6:42 PM | Permalink

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Comments

Posted by: arikrizky at July 10, 2009 12:54 PM