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Google Map Markers – 1 to 36

16 Feb By Jon Davies Filed under Uncategorized, blog. No comments.

Bit of a niche post this one, but thought i’d share in case it saves someone else some time. I’ve been noodling around with Google Maps over the past few days on a job which started simple and then rapidly got more complex (don’t they all!)

It also pointed up some of the limitations within the My Maps version of the product. I was building a map of the UK, showing around 300 of my clients locations. I started out with a bit of a ropey spreadsheet, which after some cleanup I fed through the very useful batchgeocode.com which happily takes delimited text and chews through it geocoding the info (even if all you have is a postcode) and creating lat/long co-ordinates.

Once that’s done you can save it as a KML file and import it into Google MyMaps. That’s where the !=fun begins. For some reason MyMaps pages the results when you hit 200 markers, so from then on the map will only show one page worth of markers at a time. Not so bad on the site, but a bit sucky if you intend to embed the map (where the paging isn’t shown).

At this point I realised we’d need to wheel out the Maps API to save the day and here my technical knowledge falters a little. Particularly as not only did we need to show the 300 pins from the KML file…but each location was also allocated to one of 36 areas and each area was in one of 5 divisions.

I knew i’d be wanting something like numbered pins showing the areas and perhaps of different colours to denote the divisions. This way you get clusters of colour showing the divisions and the numbers are also clustered (more or less) into areas.

But doing all that with the API was a bit beyond my limited knowledge so I handed it over to my talented team of techies who had it worked out in very short order.

Which just left me needing to locate a set of graphics for the markers, I know there are fancy pants ways of generating them programmatically but for reasons we won’t go into I needed a folder full of PNG files.

Actually finding something to fit the bill was tricky, eventually after some hunting I hit on this post at benjaminkeen.com which had a set of markers (and a PSD file, hurrah!) from A-Z in 10 different colours.

So, for those of you searching for numbered markers instead, I present below, my version. A PSD with the numbers 1-36 (I only needed that many and I don’t love you enough to go up to 99) and the 10 colours.

Google Map Markers 1-36 (markers.psd) 616Kb 

May it save you a little time and effort if it can.

Pecha Whatcha? Death to death by PowerPoint

14 Feb By Jon Davies Filed under Uncategorized, blog. No comments.

I recently gave my first Pecha Kucha style presentation. I’ve been wanting to for a while, ever since first seeing them at Geekup in Leeds, where the format generally involves much heckling and a trip to the bar if the subject really doesn’t grab you. For the uninitiated Pechakucha is a “lightning” presentation format of 20 slides shown for 20 seconds each giving a total presentation time of 6m40s. There’s also a variant called Ignite, mainly used by O’Reilly at their events of the same name, which is 15 seconds a slide.

The kicker is that the slides are set to automatically advance, meaning you either practice what you’re going to say meticulously, or else move the hell on before stuff starts getting thrown at you. It had been at the back of my mind to give it a go for a while and then I attended one of the first Ignite events in the UK, held at OBH in Leeds. It was a revelation, around 20 speakers  in 2 hours with a couple of breaks for refreshments and networking. What made it special was the range of topics, we flitted from one idea or concept to the next and even if one didn’t appeal, you knew you were never more than 5 minutes from the next.

One speaker showed some fantastic ways in which people in Africa are using ingenuity and the materials they have to hand to build technological solutions, another spoke about the pitfalls of developing apps for the iPhone and one spoke in depth about coding something so technical that I now can’t remember even the tiniest detail. Special mention however goes to Tom Scott, who’s “My Life in 20 graphs”, had the audience roaring with laughter with a mix of Graphjam style lulz.

What they all had in common was that they were concise, punchy and in at least some measure intriguing, even when they were subjects I wouldn’t normal even consider.

So, finally I bit the bullet and pulled together a presentation of my own. I’d been asked to present my strategic plan for the year to my counterparts from our other offices and was aware it could easily turn into a bit of a stats filled yawnfest (something which I hasten to add my counterparts avoided!) and so tried to use an image led format, although eventually some more traditional bullet points did creep in.

What did I learn:

- Avoid the temptation to have more than one thought per slide, I flip flopped between thinking I wouldn’t have enough slides and having too many and crammed too much in.

- Practice several times out loud, I tried it in my head on the train to London and it’s just not the same. 

- When you practice, keep yourself at a measured pace, I have a habit of speaking quickly anyway and it’s easy to almost hyperventilate as you try and get stuff out quickly.

- If you have the prep time, then write a script, learn it, then throw it away (you don’t want to be reading by rote on the night)

On the day itself, the presentation went pretty well, people seemed to like the format and the idea and I almost got a round of applause for making to the end (although I did have to cheat a little halfway through), the main problem was I had too many thoughts per slide. Even three short bullets can easily take more than 20 seconds once you’ve introduced them and added some context. Ideally slides with one picture, or one word on make life much easier. Fortunately I had a written document that accompanied the presentation, so anything I missed will still get picked up later. But at something like an Ignite event there’d be a real danger of missing out vital info.

Would I do it again, absolutely!

My top tip, should you be tempted to cram too much in though, is to sacrifice one slide half way through for a picture of a kitten. After all, you can never have too many kittens…and while people are going awwwwww, you have a chance for a breather and a drink!

Online Recuitment 2009 – The year ahead

3 Feb By Jon Davies Filed under Uncategorized, blog. 1 Comment.

Thursday last saw me down in London for the day at a conference hosted by Enhance Media. Online Recruitment, The Year Ahead.I was accompanying a couple of my clients and it was an interesting day with some great presentations, in the pleasant surroundings of the Royal Geographical Society in Kensington.

A few highlights of the day:

Lisa Mauro from Youtube gave a good presentation on using the site for recruitment, with some nice examples of a more guerilla approach to shooting videos with line managers talking about the role directly to the candidate. Not so polished, but the shaky camerawork actually lends to the trust factor, also nice to see some of them filmed in the office where you’d be working too. How many job interviews have we all been in where all we saw of the company was an anonymous grey conference room! But ultimately, there was nothing amazingly new to me, just that more people should do more video!

Workcircle gave what was, for me, quite an interesting presentation about setting up an aggregator from scratch and scaling up an adwords campaign, it was nice to see a concrete case study of the long tail in action. I think some of the audience however found it a bit detail heavy in places. It was great though to hear a really down to earth presentation where they made it plain that their business model is essentially about buying candidates at one price and selling them on at another. Many companies would dress that up in a lot more fluff.

Jeremy Mason from Revenue Science gave a good overview of behavourial targeting, which I knew about, but it was good to see some of the more advanced stuff they’re now doing and to learn that the big minimum spends that used to act as a barrier to entry for a lot of clients have now been relaxed a little.

Facebook, never fail to be interesting and gave a stats packed presentation with one or two useful nuggets which give the lie to some of the more commonly held assumptions about their audience. One that stuck in my head was that 25% of their users are over 35. Great to see some examples of their new video and event engagement ads and avanced targeting too. Also interesting to see that the low cost PPC model of Facebook Flyers has led to an increasing number of  candidates running their own ad campaigns targeted at employers they want to work for!

There were some interesting nuggets in some of the other presentations, but alas by that part of the day my memory is becoming hazy, you can catch up on some of the action too by reviewing the people who were tweeting the event live with the hashtag #c9

Overall it was a good day, I bumped into a few people I knew too and it was great to catch up. But, if anyone from Enhance reads this I was left with a bit of a feeling that the event couldn’t quite decide who it was aimed at. Some presentations clearly had clients in their sites, others were more agency focussed, some were very heavily techie, others a much lighter overview.

..and over lunch I even managed to slip out for 10 mins of fresh air to make some calls and snap some pictures in nearby Hyde Park.

Job Bored

2 Feb By Jon Davies Filed under Uncategorized, blog. No comments.

A few days ago I took a look at the soon to be launched search.co.uk, a job board from the people behind the Search recruitment consultancy.

Andrew makes some very valid points about the “revolutionary” nature of their offer, or lack thereof. But my first glance concerns were slightly different.

What the hell is going on with the job board market?

Social media is in many ways still finding it’s feet as a recruiting platform, but gaining speed rapidly so right now should be, if not the heyday for job boards then at least a chance to make some hay.

But what are the major job boards doing? Either plodding on as per usual or occasionally dressing their site up in a pretty new frock and passing it off as something incendiary and revolutionary. This is going to sound like I’m very down on job boards. I’m not, I think they have a definite place in the marketing mix. But, it’s increasingly frustrating to see them cast themselves as cutting edge, without really doing much to earn it.

So, what about search.co.uk? As a site it feels like a bit of a greatest hits approach to a job board. The personalisation of Monster, meets an Adwords style pay per application model and finally, hey lets throw in ads for houses, cars and classifieds to boot. Those Fish4 fellas do it and it seems to work for them.

Well, yes, but Fish4 has it roots in the local press and as such has a ready source of content to draw from and a national network of publications to market the service in.

Search however, are a recruitment consultancy, i’m intrigued to know where they’re planning to source the content from for the other sections and how well they’ll function.

So what does search.co.uk have going for it? Well, it’s a fantastic domain name, you almost wonder what the hell they’ve been sitting on such a valuable property for so long for!

Also, the design is pretty good, clean and bright; certainly as good if not better than the recently relaunched (and still rather leaky) monster.co.uk which continues to be fussy and overcomplicated.

So, is anyone doing anything other than smear the same pig in a different lipstick?

There are a few sites trying out new models, last year theladders.co.uk launched with a proposition built around only listing roles with salaries over 50k and, get this, charging candidates to sign up to the site.  You’ve got to admire the chutzpah, and it seems to have paid off with double the number of new members in the first year than predicted. But I suspect that maybe all is not quite as rosy as it seems given that they’ve recently quietly relaxed the rules and included viewing roles in the free basic membership. Paying 10 quid a month now gets you a critique of your CV, a personalised salary report and some unspecified tools to “manage your career search”…so what do I get in month two?!

Jiibe.com for example lets users answer “psychometric” questions which compare their current and their ideal workplaces and then use that crowdsourced data to recommend workplaces that might suit. Ultimately though, it’s a sucky user experience. You answer an interminable number of questions, some of which are repeated more than once and a list of workplaces is dynamically updated at the left hand side.

You very quickly realise though that the company reviews are actually just a selection of badly cobbled together statements with some vague relation to the traits you indicated a preference for. The recruitment equivalent of a psychic doing a cold reading.

At least you don’t have to cross their palm with silver…yet.

Planning holidays with Google MyMaps – an idiots guide.

29 Aug By Jon Davies Filed under blog, technology. 3 Comments.

This post may seem a bit, “well duh” to some of you, but it’s the kind of thing that you often see on a site like Lifehacker and think, “why didn’t I think of that..”, so what the hell, here we go:

For my last few holidays i’ve been using Google MyMaps to help with planning where to stay and what to see. If you’re not familiar with MyMaps it’s the offshoot of the main maps.google.co.uk which allows you to stick your own pins in the map and create sharable collaborative maps.

I’ve found that it really comes into it’s own when you’re visiting a strange city and you’re not sure of the relative distances between things. Typically when visiting a European capital i’ll already have a shortlist (rapidly growing) of bars and restaurants I want to visit, museums and attractions I want to see and other points of interest.

There’s also a rather handy tip at the end of this post to help you take all that info with you….so how do we get started?

  1. 1. Voodoo – Gather materials and start sticking in pins
    Ok, lets get this party started. First thing to do is gather some resources. If you’ve got a travel guide, great, if it’s online even better and if you’ve started making a short list of things to do and see; even better. Divide these up into categories. I typically go for Bars, Clubs, Restaurants, Shopping, Attractions (Museums etc)

    Fire up maps.google.co.uk, click on the My Maps tab and select Create a new map. At this point you’ll need to name the map and select whether it’s public or private. Public maps are great if you’re travelling with friends as you can share the results with them or even edit it collaboratively.

    Now run a search on the map for the first of your tourist attractions (or bars, or whatever), check you have the right place and either select “Save to My Maps” in the speech bubble that pops up when you click the pin. Or use the tool at the top of the map to drop a new pin at that location. Choosing an appropriate icon at this stage can be helpful. Eg. Knife and Fork, Cocktail glass or just a plain ‘ol pin for an attraction.

    Repeat this until you have a good spread of the main attractions/bars etc marked. Doing this in Firefox or IE7+ is a good plan, as you can open lots of extra browser tabs to check details, confirm street addresses or find other things to mark using other city guide sites.

  2. 2. Now zoom out and look for clusters
    The result of our labours should be some clusters of attractions allowing you to scope out the best areas to stay in. Typically i’ll be looking for the clusters of bars/clubs.

    The reason? In the morning it’s usually no trouble to hop on public transport and whizz off to see the sights, then spend the day working your way back to a hotel. In the evening however, (or the small hours) when you’re a little the worse for wear, a hotel in staggering distance from the main bars is a godsend!

  3. 3. Start finding hotels in the areas you’ve marked
    If you’re anything like me you’ll be looking for that happy medium of a good hotel, in a great location at a fantastic price. At this point it all starts to get a bit crazy flipping between sites and comparing hotel deals. I tend to use a combination of:

    kayak.co.uk (an excellent hotel/flights scraper and comparison engine)
    laterooms.com
    hotels.com

    All of the above will find you great deals, my next step is to check out any that sound good on tripadvisor.com, after some narrow escapes I now never book ANYWHERE without checking out the reviews first.

    Hopefully by now you’ve got an idea of 3 or 4 hotels in the right price range and roughly the right locations. It’s at this stage I stick some pins in the map for that shortlist of hotels and one of the big payback points of this whole exercise comes in.

    Now you can play around with the map and start to find patterns in the data. Several times i’ve realised that the hotel I was about to book is on a noisy main road or actually a lot further from where I wanted to be than it suggested. Many hotels say they are “just a few steps from…” to mean 10 minutes walk!

    Often while you’re realising this, you also spot another hotel nearby that’s better, cheaper, quieter or all three.

    You’ll start to see, very easily, how well located the hotels are in relation to the bars and attractions and even more importantly, in most major cities, how close they are to a metro/bus/tram/tube stop and by clicking that stop which lines run from there.

    MyMaps also enables you to use “Mapplets”, little bolt on applications. The Distance Measurement Tool mapplet is really useful at this stage, it’ll let you draw lines on the map between points and see how far they are apart in miles/km/olympic swimming pool lengths etc.

  4. 4. Tidy up the map
    Ok, so we now have a nice personalised map, we’ve hopefully booked our hotel. So we can now delete the pins for the hotels we’re not using and remove any other stuff that got added and is now redundant.

    Your map should now have bars/clubs/museums and your hotel marked. For extra credit you can now start doing stuff like working out the best route in from the airport on public transport.

  5. 5. Take the map with you…
    Right, this is where it all falls down.

    Obviously the next thing you’ll want to do is take the map on holiday and keep a copy with you while you’re sightseeing. But, having built a fantastic mapping application, Google seem to have tacked on the printing functionality in a bit of a rush at the end of the day and never got round to improving it.

    Printing your MyMap doesn’t really work that well, you get a map with all your pins on and an accompanying list of pins and symbols. Unfortunately, that means you have 5 cocktail glasses on the map and 5 bars listed at the side…and no way of knowing which is which. Unfortunately there’s also no way of adding numbered pins on a printout, or adding small tooltips to the pins with the venue name.

    In the past i’ve had to resort to printing out a few copies of my map, usually at different zoom levels or zoomed into various cluster areas of pins and then scribbling the names next to each pin with a pen. Not ideal.

    Until now. Someone rather wonderful (and unnamed on his site unfortunately) has created a script which sucks in the .KML file of your MyMap (a link to which is at the top of the MyMap screen as “View in Google Earth”) and spits out a version with numbered pins and a list underneath of what they all are. Perfect for printing and taking with you.

    You’ll find it here:
    http://maps.taurich.org/cgi-bin/print-kml.cgi

    Of course, in these enlightened days, taking a paper printout with you all seems a bit luddite. After all, surely we could just look at it on our iPhone?

    Sadly not, the iphone’s built in Maps applet doesn’t support MyMaps, or any of the more fancy custom features. Putting a maps URL into the built in Safari causes it to ping you into the maps applet and if you do manage to get it running in the browser then it’s not terribly stable or usable in mobile Safari.

    I guess in the meantime you could PDF the printout and load it onto the phone via an email? Better ideas greatfully received in the comments…

 

Wordpress for iPhone!

22 Jul By Jon Davies Filed under blog, technology. No comments.

Wordpress have been putting out teasers for their open source iPhone client for a couple of weeks now and I’ve been keeping one eye eagerly on the app store ever since.

Finally it’s here and I’m typing this post on my phone and do you know what it’s pretty damn good. They don’t seem to have compromised on functionality to cram things in to the interface and hooking it up to a self hosted blog is a snap.

They’ve even done a very nice job of integrating safari into the client to show a live preview of your post. Only drawbacks I’ve spotted so far is that any photos added to a post just get dropped to the bottom rather than being able to insert them as you go and you don’t seem to be able to add links to posts which is a pretty major omission.

On that note, below is a little sign I spotted at kings cross that made me smile.

photo

iPhone 3G – launched, bought, but not there yet…

11 Jul By Jon Davies Filed under Uncategorized, blog. No comments.

7.02am – Bradford, West Yorkshire, one hour until the O2 store opens and as I pull into the car park I notice quite a few cars. It’ll be the staff I tell myself as I round the corner and find a queue of 21 people (some with folding chairs) waiting for the store to open.

 So, at least 21 people are sadder than me, which is a start!

 Over the next hour, I got chatting with some of the other people in the queue, including a couple of magicians who were practicing their sleight of hand coin tricks. The O2 staff were really good, keeping everyone jollied along, handing out free water and keeping everyone up to date with progress. A nice camaraderie began to develop.

The store only had around 10 16GB iPhones which disappeared almost instantly so a few people peeled off as they didn’t want to settle for an 8GB. By about 8.20 I was in the store and sat down while the very friendly assistant took my details, filled out paperwork and took copies of my ID….at which point the O2 credit checking system fell on it’s arse.

 A little disappointing given their experience earlier in the week with the online store, given the decision to open almost all the stores at 8.02am, it was hardly going to be a surprise that the online credit checking service was going to get a sudden hammering.

So, i’ve “bought” an iPhone, pending the credit check. But I can’t actually get my mitts on it until they’ve run the check and given me a call. Which realistically means this evening. I can’t really fault the on the ground staff. Just a shame the infrastructure didn’t live up to it!

BBC iPlayer goes up to 11!

26 Jun By Jon Davies Filed under blog, technology. 1 Comment.

So, there I was this evening, with unusually a free evening and nothing planned…and there’s nothing on television. Apart from Heroes later, but i’ve already recorded that. So I fired up the iPlayer to see if it had anything to offer.

Since I last looked (and apologies if this is old news) they’ve launched a new beta version with a much more comprehensive interface. It makes it much quicker to browse through programmes with a more TV guide like approach. They’ve also made it easier to find multiple episodes of the same programme and group them together. But best of all, it certainly seems like you have to wade through a lot less daytime dreck like Doctors and Flog It! to get to the good stuff.

But as with most software, more choice brings more confusion and the array of new ways to slice and dice the data is, at first at least, quite arresting. Not so bad for me, but I can see my mum, who’s only just getting to grips with the whole TV over IP thing getting a bit of a surprise next time she logs in.

BBC iPlayer volume sliderBut the thing that really made me smile, and that I really hope is a deft little nod to Spinal Tap from the developers is that the volume control when streaming a programme, goes up to 11. That’s one louder. Marvellous.

Quintessentially British

18 Jun By Jon Davies Filed under blog. No comments.

There’s something quite sweet about the message that you get from the BBC iPlayer if you’ve yet to download anything. Most software would say something like “0 programmes downloaded” or “Programme Library Empty”, the BBC have gone for something a little more sweet and polite. It gives my inner pedant the same little frisson I get when I see the checkouts at M&S with their signs saying “5 items or fewer.”

iPlayer Library

(No) cable on the line…

16 Jun By Jon Davies Filed under Personal, blog. No comments.

On the train down to London this weekend, we were joined by the passengers from several other trains making it, to use Victoria Wood’s wonderful phrase, “nose to nipple” in the carriage.

Fortunately I was already seated, but I did a double take when the guard announced the reason for the overcrowding.

Not, as i’d assumed a broken down train. Instead, trains between York and Doncaster were not running due to a “Cable Theft“, which as excuses go, is a pretty good one.

Much as we may, pardon the pun, rail against the high prices of train tickets in the UK, which are now verging on the obscene. But, you have to have some sympathy from the operators when even the parts of the network they can keep in good repair then get stolen like the lead from church rooftops.

Tesco, this time it’s personal(ish)

14 Jun By Jon Davies Filed under blog, rant. No comments.

While we’re on the subject of dodgy direct mail. A couple of weeks back I got my latest Tesco clubcard statement. Yes, I know, I know, i’m giving all my personal data to the Tescopoly, but there are some infringements i’m willing to bear (and quite a  few erosions of liberty that i’m not.)

What struck me though, is that Tesco as arguably the most sophisticated profiler and user of Direct Marketing in the business uses variable printing for it’s quarterly clubcard mailer.

What does this mean? Well, you receive a nice blue and red leaflet where about two thirds of the black printed text on it has been tailored to you. Offers you might like, your personal details, the address, a cheery greeting like “Dear Mr xxxx”.

So given that the Tesco supercomputer knows i’m a bloke and probably, given the level of their knowledge base, a single bloke with a predilection for cashew nuts.  Why did the front of the leaflet say (in black variable print no less), “Inside, great vouchers to pull out and put in your purse.”

The only guy with a purse that comes readily to mind is Tinky Winky, substitute the word wallet and it wouldn’t have jarred nearly so much.

Dear British Telecom

12 Jun By Jon Davies Filed under blog, rant. No comments.

We need to talk. Sure, we’ve had some good times but I feel like I’ve moved on as a person. It’s not me, it’s you and I’m sorry but…there’s someone else. I’ve been seeing another telecoms supplier.

At first it was just carrier pre-selection, I thought it might add some spice to our relationship, but soon I realised it was more than that. All you did was take…and I have so much less to give.

But seriously…

About 4 months ago I finally left BT and decided to start getting my line rental, broadband and calls from a different supplier. Financially, paying &pound11 a month for a line I only used for ADSL, along with £23 for the DSL service (it was an old old Pipex package) while getting my calls through TalkTalk was becoming untenable.

So I switched, to TalkTalk for the lot, at just over £16 a month, it represented a pretty decent saving. Now, I know that TalkTalk aren’t the best of suppliers. In fact their customer service is regularly slated. But, given that i’d phoned the other suppliers less than 3 times in the past 6 years I figured I could cope. Sadly, the by all accounts excellent O2 broadband wasn’t available in my area at the time.

Apart from one slightly painful off-script conversation with the TalkTalk offshore call centre it was all pretty smooth and has been fine ever since…

Apart from one thing, BT won’t leave me alone.

I’ve closed my account and severed all ties. Which has sent their Direct Marketing department into overdrive. Now, I work in advertising and we sometimes use DM (not often!) so it would be hypocritical of me to blindly rant against DM as a concept.

BT, however now send me a letter at least once a month if not more often, in a variety of different sizes and shapes all telling me how useless my new supplier is, and how I’d be much happier with them, and that they’d be more than happy to welcome me back with open arms.

The tone of voice is slightly condescending suggesting that, aw shucks, we all make mistakes. It’s as if they’ve hired Michael Sophocles from The Apprentice to do their marketing, with his by turns, bullish, hectoring and the finally pathetic wheedling as an approach.

I’ve had partners that were less needy, BT are like the nasty ex who sits in the corner of the local bar sniping sotto-voce that your new partner has an ugly nose, and you could have been so happy together.

So, BT, let go, move on. We’re both different people now. I wish you every happiness…just not with me.