Natalie Chillington

For a previous assignment (see previous post) I had attempted to map local gigs on daily basis for my web operation, The Music Quarter which is aimed at promoting up-and-coming local artists in Birmingham. I focussed on trying to programme Google maps to update itself so that data didn’t have to be added everyday. Although I learnt a lot, my efforts came to no avail and so here I will explain how I tried again with the advantage of knowing what definitely doesn’t work.

Research

There seems to be little information regarding creating self-updating maps and I could find very few examples of those showing ‘upcoming’ events rather than a static map that didn’t change. Generally, the gig maps I found showed where a band had already played or plotted an upcoming tour which didn’t need to be updated such as an AC/DC tribute band called Live/Wire’s which has been made using Europa Technologies software.

I had already been using the social networking site Last FM as a way of promoting TMQ by creating ‘events’ for upcoming local gigs which users can attend in a similar way to Facebook. I knew that my upcoming events could be viewed in a Google Calendar but I searched the site for another way of presenting them. There was no direct link to Google Maps but I found the Last FM Music Map in the app section of the site which is a mashup between Last FM Audioscrobbler and Google Maps APIs. It works by typing an artist or location in the search engine and in theory, every artists events will be displayed on the map. However, when I tried searching for local artists hardly any were found so this wasn’t a viable option to pursue. Furthermore, the map isn’t embeddable at the moment.

Mashable has a useful post on ‘Google Maps: 100+ Best Tools and Mashups’. Here I came across an interactive map that pinpoints the location of theatres in Chicago and lists current and upcoming shows when clicked on; also on Mashable was a site called Gruvr which allows you to search for any gigs a band is playing across the country. Once you have found a gig, you can add that band to ‘Your Band Radar’. You can also get an RSS feed of upcoming shows for that artist or tour map KML data. However, Gruvr doesn’t pick up some local bands I searched for such as ‘Rogue States’ and ‘Tom Peel’. It also doesn’t allow you to embed the maps, instead it provides a link to the map on Gruvr.com.

Nevertheless, I opened up an account with RSSmapper to make use of the RSS feeds Gruvr could provide. The main problem I found was filtering the gigs to the Birmingham area because Gruvr plots gigs across the country. Furthermore, it was quite time consuming having to search for a band, copy the RSS feed and then feed it through RSSmapper. Then finally I discovered you can’t add more than 10 feeds to a map which is when I decided to move on. However, I will keep Gruvr in mind because it could be used to plot a tour for an individual band to accompany a review or feature. I also tried using the KML data with the Embedded KML Viewer Google Gadget but this would only create a map per a band and showed up very basic content when clicked on.

Next I looked back to Last FM where events were already made and ready to make use of and it was with these and Google Calendar that I found a way of creating a self-updating map.

Production  

I found a guide to ‘Displaying Google Calendar Events on a Map’ on Ouseful which eventually led me to my final piece of multimedia after a lot of trial and error.

I intended to make use of Last FM events still but this time instead of using Last FM’s general ‘add all gigs to Google calendar button’ I exported each gig individually to a new calendar which meant more detailed info regarding location was included. After making it public, I took the XML feed which is essentially an RSS feed and put it through Yahoo Pipes to geocode the Google calendar feed. The results are displayed on a Yahoo map from which can’t be embedded but you can get a KML feed url by saving it as a KML file then uploading it somewhere (my personal blog) and then use it in the Google map search box. From there I grabbed the html and embedded it into my blog to preview it. This worked but when I updated the Google calendar, the map didn’t update and similarly, old gigs didn’t disappear.

Further down the instructions was a guide to a side-by-side calendar agenda view and map display mashup. The Ouseful gCalMap mashup generator  claimed to allow you to view your upcoming Google Calendar entered on Google Maps. It’s main feature was the ability to generate code to embed a Google Calendar alongside a Google Map. 

This time, the tool asked for the calendar ID found within the settings of Google Calendar instead of the XML. By placing the calendar ID in the gCalMap Generator I was able to generate iframe code. When I viewed this in a draft post on the blog you could only see a small section of the calendar and map through the frame so I downloaded the IFrame Widget on Wordpress which allows you easily adjust the size of the frame. I also found that when I updated the calendar, this time the map updated itself. However, there were two problems. First of all, the map was zoomed out and I couldn’t figure out how to make it appear zoomed in. Secondly and rather oddly, some of the text on the map had translated into German which made the balloons hard to read.

So I went back to experiment with the Google calendars XML feed again with and yahoo pipes. After some support forum research, I discovered you could make the Google Calendar feed only include future events by adding ?futureevents=true to the end of the address.Once I had done this, I ran the pipe again with the new address and instead of taking the KML this time, I took the RSS feed of the pipe which was already geocoded and searched for it in Google maps which worked. Not only did this make the points on the map visible, but it also updated the map insync with the calendar and only showed future events.

I’m not sure why or how Yahoo had translated some of the text from the feed in to German when it became an RSS but I solved this problem by adding a Babelfish module to the Yahoo Pipe which changed any German in the feed to English.

Distribution 

See the final results here. I have embedded both the map and a separate calendar agenda on this new page of TMQ. As there are many upcoming gigs at the same venues, the map only shows the next gig at each. The agenda isn’t linked to the map unfortunately, but it acts as a comprehensive gig listing and a map of each can still be clicked on. I think the balloons would benefit from some neater formatting which can be done on the Google Calendar but the general function works.

I have also distributed the new page on the blog to TMQ’s social networking profiles such as Twitter and Facebook.

Conclusion 

Ideally, I would now like to work out how to create similar balloons to those on the Chicago map which lists upcoming events when each venue is clicked on. I think this would be the most efficient way of presenting comprehensible listings on a gig map and remove the need for an additional calendar agenda. Furthermore, if this map was available in the form of an iPhone app I believe it would be more accessible and useful to music fans on the go.

As my web operation, The Music Quarter (an MA project) is a website aimed at promoting up-and-coming local artists in Birmingham, it primarily revolves around gig listings. Therefore, I thought trying to map local gigs on a daily basis for the reader (as there are often a number of gigs in local venues across the city on any one night) would be an experimental form of online journalism. However I already knew how to do that, and thought it would be better if the map could update itself somehow so I didn’t have to input data every single day so that soon became the focus of my research.

Unfortunately I was unable to find a way to make a map update itself. Here I will explain what I did and consequently what I learnt from my mistakes.

Research

First of all, I made accounts with several different online tools that used Google maps and experimented with them briefly. I found Mapalist.com would pull data from a Google Spreadsheet easily enough and would update itself automatically when you amended the spreadsheet. However, as far as I could see, Mapalist didn’t explain any way of formatting the spreadsheet so that it would automatically update the map according to the date which is what I was after.

Drawing your own maps like Quikmaps enabled you to do didn’t seem appropriate and I didn’t want to add moving maps to a video like VisualPin would allow. Geocoding images with Zonetag or Robogeo wasn’t relevant either. I had some experience of using Umapper.com for promoting gigs before and thought it looked good but it was only really suitable for displaying a small number of gigs over a short period of time and didn’t have a self-update option either. Similarly, Nearby.org.co.uk didn’t appear to have a spreadsheets option.  And so it seemed the only obvious and viable option to explore was using Spreadsheet Mapper.

Several searches on Google with terms such as ’self-updating Google maps’ came to no avail. A lot of searches came up with results that talked of coding which I didn’t understand. Experience of coding would have been very useful with this research and may have been the key to finding an answer.

What I Did

Having found some instructions on how to use Spreadsheet Mapper 2.0 I followed these. I found Spreadsheet Mapper allows you to enter data in to a Google Document from which a set of placemarks can be generated in Google Earth and Maps. I read ‘instantly publishes updates’ and assumed this meant I could format the spreadsheet to update itself for a period of time.

I opened the ’starter spreadsheet’ in Google Documents and made it public by publishing it as a web page. By copying a link to the published data and inserting this into the started spreadsheet, I was able to generate a ‘View Placemarks in Google Maps’ link in KML.  Here, I could pick from a variety of six templates. Next, I entered placemark names and locations on the PlaceMark date sheet for eight gigs spanning four days to use as a test map. To find latitude and longitude coordinates, I added a mapplet to my Google Maps tab which simply provided coordinates when I searched for each gig venue.

Then I applied a template to each marker according to how I wanted the gig to be promoted in terms of an image, links and text. On the PlaceMark data sheet there was an option to enter a ‘TimeStamp’ or ‘TimeSpan’ which I assumed meant entering a time or date during which the placemark would appear on the map. Before spending a long time researching and experimenting with different date and time formats it became clear afterwards that this was not the case and from what I gather, both just mark a period in time and do not actually affect the visibility of the placemark.

Results

Not knowing this yet, I published changes and shared the layer in Google Earth which I had to download. By right-clicking on the network link I was able to download a KML file which I could post on the website. When it came to trying to embed the layer, I uploaded the file onto this blog instead of the website because I just wanted to test it first. I used the ‘Embedded KML Viewer’ gadget to try and change display settings before generating code to embed on to my blog. Once I had this, I copy and pasted the HTML onto a new blog post and previewed it (see below). The problem was that all the placemarks were viewable no matter how I adapted the ‘TimeStamp’ and ‘TimeSpan’ so it was at this point I realised my experiment hadn’t worked and I would have to input data manually to provide the reader with a Google map of up-and-coming gigs

If you have the answer, please let me know!

You can download an exclusive live version of the Birmingham band’s new single here courtesy of Times Online.

‘You Don’t Know Love’ is released on January 25th

Also tonight…decisions, decisions.

http://www.myspace.com/sonsofthedesertuk

I’m gutted to have missed this gig! Even more so after reading this heartfelt review by Andy Roberts of The Blue Whale Blog :

http://bluewhalestudios.wordpress.com/2009/12/24/review-calories-sunset-cinema-club-green-gables/.

Monthly music magazine Brum Notes held it’s first Christmas party earlier this week and as you might expect, the line-up consisted of some great local talent.

Complimentary mulled wine (and a festive Urban Pie if you got there early enough) on arrival at The Victoria on John Bright Street was a welcome treat and warmed us up nicely ahead of the evening’s entertainment.

Little Palm aka Anna Palmer, was first up and despite apologising for being bunged up and ’sounding like a man,’ had everyone hushed and gazing at her adoringly.

Anna’s stunningly powerful vocals, beautiful melodies and faultless piano skills never fail to impress with songs like, ‘Run Little Rabbit,’ ‘Ghost of a Girl’ and ‘Ragdoll’.

Meanwhile, local indie-rockers; The Traps and Missing Sid keep the party going with sets on the decks alongside This Is Tomorrow DJs.

Prog-rockers, Is I Cinema were the second Brummie act up and looked as if they’d decided upon some dodgy jumper dress code for the night – or do they always dress like geeks? Never seen them live before.

I enjoyed the mix of quiet and loud and lead singer, Dominic Fletcher made the live set all the more evocative with his intense pounding on the drum.

Scarlet Harlots were the penultimate act of the party and the best set of the night by far in my opinion. Their thumping baselines made it hard to stay still and yet you still found yourself focusing on their eloquently polished vocals.

Smiles and friendly banter from the crowd shows that these local heroes have it spot on.

The night was topped off with London’s electo-pop trio; Chew Lip’s last appearance of the year.

Well done and many thanks to Brum Notes for a fantastic evening!

Pics to be added soon..

 For acoustic folk/pop visit http://www.myspace.com/boattorow

http://www.myspace.com/coffeeandcakeclub