Podcasting 2.0 - Episode 268: Dead Hanging Safari

Show Notes

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00 - THE LOCATION TAG — SPEC TO DATASET TO GLOBE IN 48 HOURS

The lead, and it's yours: Wednesday afternoon Dave posted — "There is a new locations data set on the public datasets page... The db tables are still back-filling since I updated the db and aggregators to support the new tag format. After a couple of days it should be mostly complete." He cc'd @james, @alberto, @js and then @DavidMarzalC. That cc list is the whole story — within 48 hours all four had done something with it.

@dave — the locations dataset post (20 Aug)

The shipping trail: web-ui PR #608, "add locations export to public data sets," branch public_datasets → merged to master the same afternoon. This is the first public dataset built on the new location tag format rather than the old one.

Then somebody built the map. By Friday morning Alberto had radar.rss.io/#globe up — a spinning globe of podcasts made in or about places on earth, drawn from the free dataset, most entries carrying full OpenStreetMap references. James put it in front of the OpenStreetMap community directly: "One for excellent people using @openstreetmap."

James's review, and the two asks: "This is so cool. Really shows the power of the location tag. The globe — would be nice to add filters to that (made in vs about). Or maybe just colour the dots differently? The next trick would be some OSM lookups on the IDs to work out what the places are."

The flaw he found, and it's a good one: "One drawback is that some people have chosen 'Queensland' as a location, which is 2.6x larger than Texas." — the granularity problem in one line. A location tag is only as useful as the smallest box someone is willing to put themselves in.

Dave, on seeing it — and he is in Birmingham, Alabama: "Wow, this is incredible. I already see a podcast from Birmingham that I didn't know was based here." ❤️ ❤️ Dave, Friday: "It's beautiful. I can see this data powering so many cool app and platform features."

@dave — Wow, this is incredible / Birmingham (20 Aug)

@dave — It's beautiful (21 Aug)

The bug found by using it: @alberto and @james noticed the rel property missing from the export. Dave: "That co