Google Street View in Bakersfield
‘Most’ of Bakersfield is now part of a limited Google map feature called Street View. In its LatLon Blog, Google recently announced adding the Street View feature for the California cities of Bakersfield, Fresno, Sacramento, and Stockton. Read more
WordPress Digital Scrapbook Example
Created by Mike Pilley
I wrote an article earlier this year about using WordPress as a digital scrapbook. Although it has been a while, I finally put an example together based on my original thought.
My son and I recently went camping, so I put some of the content from the trip together in a post. The elements of the post included using an embedded Google map based on the GPS location I took at the campsite; an information balloon within the map that contains information about the campsite, weather during the trip, and links to a Picasa album; scanned PDF of the campsite map; and a narrative of our trip and some highlights.
Below is the Google map and a link to the campsite map. I used the Google Maps Quicktag by Daniel Denk, as I regularly use the Google My Maps and this plugin was the easiest to incorporate the embed link to display the map.
Here’s a slideshow:
To take the digital scrapbook idea to another level, you could create a My Maps of a larger area (say the United States) with markers of event locations that would link to smaller focus maps.
By combining available content such as pictures, video, GPS coordinates, and Google maps within WordPress, you can easily create a digital scrapbook to capture life events in a format available to family and friends.
Below is a narrative of day one of the camping trip.
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Digital Divide in Kern County
A few years ago after becoming active in the Kern County community, I found this report titled, Conectados: Connecting Los Angeles Underserved Communities, which was completed by The Tomas Rivera Policy Institute (TRPI) in April 2003. The TRPI is a Latino think tank that is a free-standing, nonprofit policy research organization which is headquartered at the University of Southern California.
And it is ironic as I write this now, because when I came across the report several years ago, I had no knowledge of GIS or its power, but I was fascinated with the maps that were included in this report. So now that I am familiar with GIS and have become empowered to help our community, I think a study of the digital divide in Kern County would be beneficial to find out where publicly accessible technology is available, and where it is not.
Especially if we, as a community, want to bring more technology training and technology-related jobs to this area. I feel that if we can find the digital divide in Kern County, then we can focus on areas that are in need of technology and training.
Google’s Local Business Center Good for Bakersfield Companies
Bakersfield companies would be wise to take advantage of adding a map listing in Google’s Local Business Center (LBC). It’s currently free and an easy way to give your company more exposure on the Internet when it comes to mapped searches. In addition, Google has other new and innovating uses of this data which will help your company stay up-to-date with emerging search technologies.
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