WEBVTT 1 00:00:06.000 --> 00:00:18.000 Welcome to the GeoMob podcast, where we discuss geo innovation in any and all forms, whether for fun or profit. Hello, Stephen. Good to see you. 2 00:00:18.000 --> 00:00:25.000 Good to see you, Ed. In fact, very good to see you because of your headwear. 3 00:00:25.000 --> 00:00:58.000 Yes. So unfortunately our listeners will not be able to see it, but I am currently modeling one of our brand new GeoMob baseball caps that of course, with the GeoMob logo. And we are going to give these out, Stephen. So you're going to get yours at the. At the London, which is coming up shortly, to all the organizers, to, of course, the podcast hosts, and to our annual sponsors. 4 00:00:58.000 --> 00:01:11.000 So fantastic. And I'm looking forward to modeling it with you. And we will publish pictures after the next year mob. So when is the next year mob? It's September, I think. 5 00:01:11.000 --> 00:01:50.000 Yes, 16th of September. So for the benefit of our listeners, we're recording now end of August, so still a couple weeks away. I'm not sure exactly when this episode will be published, but 16th of September we will be at GeoMoblondon. Of course, our friends over in Canada will be having an event the night before on the 15th in Fredericton, which unfortunately I won't be attending. But yeah, 16th of September, you will be speaking. Alistair Graham will be speaking, and we have quite a few other very good speakers. We'll be back at geovation. Big thanks to them for hosting us. 6 00:01:50.000 --> 00:01:55.000 Yeah, going to be fun. Indeed. 7 00:01:55.000 --> 00:02:01.000 Have you been hard at work on your talk, Stephen? Practicing. 8 00:02:01.000 --> 00:02:29.000 I have actually given it a little bit of thought. I can't say I've been hard at work at it, but I sort of been trying to work out what angle I was going to take on the topic, Adventures in Vibe Coding. And I realized that I'm probably getting further and further away from Vibe coding and into sort of AI assisted coding. But yeah, I've been giving it some thought. 9 00:02:29.000 --> 00:02:41.000 Well, if I understand correctly, you've recently had some helpful feedback from the community at Hacker News, where one of your sites was featured. 10 00:02:41.000 --> 00:02:42.000 Oh, my God. 11 00:02:42.000 --> 00:02:46.000 Take us through your 15 minutes of Internet fame. 12 00:02:46.000 --> 00:03:58.000 I think it was more like 15 seconds of fame, but I. I don't know what these guys are doing, you know, I mean, is it just a snark fest or is there some meaningful discussion there? Because it just seems that everybody's bitching and crabbing. They don't read the info that's on the page, so they. It's just. Ah, for fuck's sake. Pardon me. Sorry. Yeah, it did get a little bit of publicity. I mean, some people apparently don't like the fact that Cloudflare checks that you're a real person and not a bot. Okay. Get used to it. That's the reality of the world we're in. I look at my website logs, and this is a tiny website which doesn't get tens of thousands, let alone hundreds of thousands or millions of visitors. And it's getting 25,000 hits a day from bots and search engines and things. I mean, it's like the numbers are colossal. So people complaining that you're checking that it's a real person. 13 00:03:58.000 --> 00:04:11.000 Well, this is, of course, one of the major complaints about the AI. You know, all the energy that they're crawling continuously, literally bringing down sites, and. What a waste of energy. 14 00:04:11.000 --> 00:05:36.000 Yeah, absolutely. But, yeah, we got a little bit of publicity. People didn't. What was interesting is I had this idea to make a map of pubs in England and Scotland, and the way that I did it was I used a data set from the Food Health and Standards Agency, or something like that, whatever it's called, which is probably the largest data set that you can get. Surprisingly, not every pub in the country, and certainly not every place that serves alcohol, is consistently tagged on OpenStreetMap at the moment. So the fa, this data set is the best that I could find. And the interesting thing was to map this data set and to understand which areas had the most pubs per 10,000 people. That was the whole game that I was playing. People were looking at this data set and saying, the pub on this path from some village green to some other place isn't shown on the data set. Well, no, it's not shown on the data set because they're probably not registered with the Food Standards Agency or something. You know, I mean, maybe. 15 00:05:36.000 --> 00:05:42.000 Are they. Does that data set only include pub if it serves food, maybe, or. 16 00:05:42.000 --> 00:06:19.000 No, it doesn't. It's licensed premises or whatever. I don't quite understand why stuff is included. I mean, the other thing is, although the data set has coordinates, not every row in the data set has coordinates. And if it doesn't have coordinates, guess what? It didn't get mapped. Anyway, it was an interesting moment because the figures on the site went up. When I looked at the comments, I thought, oh, God. And I posted one thing and then signed off, and we'll never go back there again. 17 00:06:19.000 --> 00:06:21.000 Well, you know, how did you find it? 18 00:06:21.000 --> 00:06:23.000 Because you're the one who told me about it. 19 00:06:23.000 --> 00:07:39.000 Well, I just happened to look at Hacker News, which I do, you know, occasionally. It's not that I'm not a. I would not describe myself at all as a heavy user. But, you know, occasionally I do glance at it and, you know, you were right at the top, which, you know, many people spend a lot of time and energy scheming as to how to get there service on the top and. And you did it without even trying. So congrats on that. But. But yes, we do have to always keep in mind the first rule of the Internet, which is never read the comments because. Yeah, I mean, I think one part of the problem was whoever had submitted your. Your site, which. Which is kind of, I mean is. Is about pub density, like where the most. Right. But whoever had submitted it, they had put us the title, you know, find your nearest pub or something like that, which is not what your site does. So of course a lot of people are then, you know, what the hell, this doesn't let me find my pub. Or it doesn't have this pub. And I don't know. And of course it was like, find, find your nearest pub in Great Britain and in the uk. 20 00:07:39.000 --> 00:07:40.000 And it was Great Britain and it 21 00:07:40.000 --> 00:07:43.000 was Great Britain, which, you know. 22 00:07:43.000 --> 00:07:44.000 Yeah, it's criminal. 23 00:07:44.000 --> 00:08:05.000 I know, is a horrific sin. But yeah, anyway, it's cool to see that your work, someone submitted it, someone found your site. So people are finding it and getting. Enjoying it and sharing it. And you know, the only thing worse than bad feedback is no feedback. So. True, true. 24 00:08:05.000 --> 00:08:08.000 I'll live with it. I'll live with it. 25 00:08:08.000 --> 00:08:09.000 So congrats to you. 26 00:08:09.000 --> 00:08:15.000 I think it may be a millennium before I appear on there again. 27 00:08:15.000 --> 00:08:20.000 What else is new at Mappery? I know you've had some exciting new release over there. 28 00:08:20.000 --> 00:11:15.000 Yeah, we have, we have, we have. And this is 90% Arno and 10% Stephen. So big shout out to Arnaud. A few years ago, we used to have a map on the site which showed all the thousand or more posts that we had at the time as clustered pins on a map. And you could click on a pin and it showed you the picture and then you could link to the full post. And the plugin wasn't being maintained. And we had some problems because it exposed your Google API key. We took the map off the site and got rid of the plugin. We said at some stage we'll rebuild this. Some stage was two years later, we finally got round to it and the first thing that we discovered was we lost the coordinates because when we deleted the plugin, it had deleted all the coordinates. Not very friendly. So anyway, we salvaged the coordinates. I did some work on Claude to actually plan out how we would build this plugin and what we needed to do. Shared that with Arnaud. And then we sat down one afternoon and we talked through what we were going to do and worked out what was basically going to be a minimum viable plugin project. The idea is that once you've installed the plugin and we're going to make the plugin publicly available in probably a few weeks time, when we've just done a bit more polishing and testing, the plugin appears as a little panel at the side of a post on WordPress. You can connect to the OpenCage geocoder and I'm going to rave in a minute, so don't get embarrassed, Ed, but I mean, we're using the OpenCage geocoder as a forward geocoder, not a reverse geocoder. And you can put in a place name, whether it be a tiny village, an art gallery, a museum, a theater, any sort of famous building, fires it off to open cage. We get back, I think we get back five suggestions for what it might be with a confidence rating. And the confidence ratings are a thing we could talk about on another day. We've talked about them before, which is more of a granularity rating than a conscience. Confidence. 29 00:11:15.000 --> 00:11:20.000 Yeah. That's our great mistake. We should have named that field differently. 30 00:11:20.000 --> 00:11:36.000 Yeah. But anyway, when you understand what it does, it's brilliant and it's fine. You just need to understand what it does, what it is. Anyway. So you select the one that you want to use, it populates the coordinates 31 00:11:36.000 --> 00:11:39.000 and 32 00:11:39.000 --> 00:13:20.000 the PIM will appear on the map. Arno went off after we'd had this afternoon meeting and I think within 24 hours, or 48 hours at the most, he'd got a complete deployed plugin. Connections to OpenCage, connection to Thunder Forest. Shout out to Andy Allen and his lovely Atlas canvas maps, which were perfect for this kind of thing. And we had a map and we were testing the map and then I took over because I've been doing all these map projects, means that I've got a little bit of understanding about interface and how to handle loads of pins when they're overlapping each other and clustering and stuff like that. I did a few hours work on the map side and now we've got a beautiful map on the site. Plugin works brilliantly and we're almost ready to publish it for anybody else who wants to use it, it's quite useful, you know, if you've got a tourist site or any other kind of WordPress blog where you Want to display maps of your posts or embed maps in your posts, you can use our plugin and it will be there free. I've used WordPress for 20 years and now we finally get a chance to contribute something back and put a plugin out there that people can get some fun from. 33 00:13:20.000 --> 00:13:27.000 Well done, well done. Congrats to all involved. And of course, we'll have the map linked in the show notes so people can check it out. 34 00:13:27.000 --> 00:13:59.000 And I think it's worth saying that I don't use opencages, the geocoder very often. I do use it occasionally and I've got an account and all that of that. And you always talk to me about it being better at reverse geocoding than forward geocoding. And I guess if you want building level accuracy for residential addresses, it's still got a way to go. But if you're talking about that depends. 35 00:13:59.000 --> 00:14:38.000 We do have customers who use us for that use case. The problem is, of course, we're relying on OpenStreetMap. I mean, not, not problem, but, but the good and the bad of it. So, yeah, you know, in areas where OpenStreetMap, where we have the data, it's good. In areas where we don't have the data, you know, then we fall back to the road or the village or whatever, what have you. So, nevertheless, the OpenStreetMap has of course, improved massively over the last, you know, now 20, 22 years, but specifically in the last, I would say last decade, and continues to improve every day. 36 00:14:38.000 --> 00:14:43.000 I was really, really impressed by the results that we were getting with this. 37 00:14:43.000 --> 00:15:25.000 Well, full credit goes to the OpenStreetMap community. Also, I do want to highlight the work. So we do several different geocoding technologies behind the scenes, but one of the main ones is nominate them. And for years now, we have sponsored the work that Sarah leads, Sarah Hoffman leads on Nominatum. And, you know, there's no silver bullet. It's just slow, steady progress. You know, they've completely rewritten the service and it keeps getting better and better. Not, you know, Sarah leads it, others contribute as well, and, you know, every day it gets better. So congrats. 38 00:15:25.000 --> 00:15:42.000 Fantastic work. So well done to the OpenStreetMap contributors to Sarah, to OpenCage. And in a tiny way, we'll be making that accessible to a few more people when the plugin gets published. 39 00:15:42.000 --> 00:17:31.000 Congrats, Congrats all. Congrats all. Yeah. All right. Maybe I should give a little update of what we've been up to at OpenCage. On that note, to be honest, it's been a bit of a quiet period, of course, because holiday, actually last week I was kind of all alone because everyone was on holiday, so just kind of holding down the fort. But now slowly the team is coming back and we've rolled out now some, I would say, more fine tuning features. We kind of made it simpler to do spreadsheet upload and we're about to launch a search on the site. So you can search through all the documentation and the help pages. We have a lot of help pages. We did a big cleanup of this. But the problem is we can create these amazing help pages. People need to get to them and read them and understand them. We're trying to work on simplifying that. But the other big thing, Steven, maybe you can help me with this. Obviously I'm coming to London for GeoMob and as is Mark Tobias, my co founder. But for the first time we're bringing the entire team and we're going to do a team event the day before or the day of geomob. And we're trying to figure out exactly what to do for our team event that would be, you know, it's not so much about work, it's just kind of also about having fun and bringing the whole team together and experience it. We're going to have a nice, nice dinner the night before. But what are your thoughts on this? Any suggestions? 40 00:17:31.000 --> 00:17:36.000 So we're talking about geographic fun or are we just talking about fun? 41 00:17:36.000 --> 00:17:39.000 Well, obviously, how could it be fun if it's not geographic? Steven? 42 00:17:39.000 --> 00:17:48.000 Okay, okay. So, well, you mentioned you already have had a thought about going to the Prime Meridian. 43 00:17:48.000 --> 00:18:40.000 Yes, well, this is kind of also, I don't know if you know, but when we first started the OpenCage project, this was when we were part of my company in London, Loku, of course, we worked with Gary Gale. He came and was with us for six months. And we kind of looked at would it be viable to create a geocoding source. Anyway, we kicked off that project by Gary, Mark Tobias and I went to the Prime Meridian. That must have been like 2013, maybe 2014. So I thought it might be fun. And we usually get on the boat, we go to Westminster, get on the boat, go down the Thames, get off in Greenwich, hike up the hill, took a picture of the Prime Meridian and then did the whole thing in reverse. So I thought that might be a fun one. 44 00:18:40.000 --> 00:18:53.000 I think that's a fun one. But you know what I would juxtapose it with is I would juxtapose it with hands on aerial imagery. 45 00:18:53.000 --> 00:18:54.000 Okay. 46 00:18:54.000 --> 00:19:02.000 So you could either go to the top of the Shard. 47 00:19:02.000 --> 00:19:04.000 Okay. 48 00:19:04.000 --> 00:19:12.000 The top of the. I don't know what it's. We call it the Telephone building, but I don't know what its proper name is. 49 00:19:12.000 --> 00:19:16.000 Which building is this? This is by the. By the Eye kind of. 50 00:19:16.000 --> 00:19:19.000 Or no, no, the one by. Near Bank. Near the bank. 51 00:19:19.000 --> 00:19:21.000 Oh, right, yes, okay, okay, I know what you mean. 52 00:19:21.000 --> 00:19:24.000 Yeah, I know it's got a beautiful sort of. 53 00:19:24.000 --> 00:19:26.000 It's like at the garden up there, 54 00:19:26.000 --> 00:19:30.000 roof garden up there, which is a great place to have a drink. And any. 55 00:19:30.000 --> 00:19:32.000 I've never done that. 56 00:19:32.000 --> 00:19:52.000 It's a lot of fun. It's a lot of fun and the views are spectacular and it's like, it's like you're in the. You're. You've got real life aerial imagery. But the third one, the third option would of course be to take them on the Eye, which if you've. If people haven't been on the London Eye, is great fun. And when you're up at the top. 57 00:19:52.000 --> 00:20:19.000 I have never been on the Linen Eye. I have been to the top of the Shard. The only thing about the Shard, maybe it's changed now because I did it right when it opened, but you had to get an appointment well in advance and then it's kind of hit or miss if you have good or bad weather. Because I had some friends who did it and it was a super foggy day and they saw nothing. So the other thought we had is 58 00:20:19.000 --> 00:20:22.000 the telephone building is good. 59 00:20:22.000 --> 00:20:56.000 Yeah. Because there you can just show up. Right. You don't need an appointment. The other idea we had was this. I don't know if you know, but actually not far from Geovation, kind of on Exim Market, there's that Mount Pleasant Postal Sorting Station. And they. Apparently they have a. There used to be a kind of dedicated tube line beyond the ground for the postal service for the Royal Mail to transport mail around London. And you can apparently do tours of this. 60 00:20:56.000 --> 00:20:57.000 Yeah, I've done it. 61 00:20:57.000 --> 00:21:02.000 And they. I don't know how frequently it runs. I need to look into this, whether this would be a viable option or not. 62 00:21:02.000 --> 00:21:32.000 It's. It's cool. If anybody's claustrophobic, they might not be 100% comfortable. So I check that out. I think going up high and looking down on London is more fun than being on a tiny little train going under. Yeah, I've done both, but I would certainly say go high. 63 00:21:32.000 --> 00:21:50.000 Okay. All right, fair enough. I'll have to mull the options here, of course. I mean the goal is just to have fun, of course, and get people out of their day to day and get everyone interacting and some of the team are going to be meeting kind of for the first time in person. 64 00:21:50.000 --> 00:22:12.000 So yeah, you don't want anything too serious. I mean, the other one that occurred to me is the London Metropolitan Archive, which has got some incredible maps and things. But what's on display when you go, you know, they have various exhibitions I don't on at the moment. 65 00:22:12.000 --> 00:22:24.000 It's a shame because there were several. There was a good exhibit last year, I think it was about maps of London or something at the British Library, if I recall correctly. But we kind of missed that one. So. 66 00:22:24.000 --> 00:22:43.000 Yeah, I went to that with Arno. I think Arno and I went. I think we met Ed Parsons there as well. Yeah. So you've got lots of options and. Yeah, do it, have fun. 67 00:22:43.000 --> 00:23:14.000 It will be fun. And at the end of the day, of course we'll head to geomob and it should be. It should be a great one. We have a good lineup, yourself included and I'm expecting a big turnout. I checked the signups earlier, you know, the list is filling up and we haven't really started promoting it. Probably later this week we'll start gearing up the social media promotion and you know, I think it'll be another fantastic evening, so look forward to seeing everyone. 68 00:23:14.000 --> 00:23:20.000 Indeed. And there's another little milestone that we haven't talked about. 69 00:23:20.000 --> 00:23:23.000 Oh, right, yes, of course, of course, yeah. 70 00:23:23.000 --> 00:23:25.000 350. 71 00:23:25.000 --> 00:24:01.000 350 episodes. Actually, this episode will probably be like in the upper 350s by the time it's published. So huge. Thank you to everyone for listening, for everyone who sends feedback, for all the guests who came on the show, of course, to Fred, our producer who puts all the audio together, to our sponsors. We have had several sponsors and actually I'm happy to announce that we have several new sponsorships coming in the pipeline in the autumn. 72 00:24:01.000 --> 00:24:02.000 Fantastic. 73 00:24:02.000 --> 00:24:18.000 Because it does actually cost a bit of money to run this whole operation. And of course to our hosts, Steven, to you and I and to the other members of the team. 350. Wow. 74 00:24:18.000 --> 00:24:38.000 Yeah. I have to say, to the other members of the team, Jeremy, Alistair and Denise, it really makes a difference having some more hands on board and not feeling under quite so much pressure to turn an episode out every week. So thank you particularly to those three. 75 00:24:38.000 --> 00:25:13.000 Absolutely. It does make a big difference. It makes a difference in kind of spreading the load across more shoulders. But also I find it makes a difference also in terms of us just getting more diversity in the guests and bringing fresh perspectives and new topics and things like that. So, you know, I feel like, no offense, Stephen, you and I, we've chatted many a time and long may it continue. But, you know, there's a limit to how much we can chew the geofat. We kind of. 76 00:25:13.000 --> 00:25:14.000 Yeah. 77 00:25:14.000 --> 00:25:16.000 So it's good to have others on board. 78 00:25:16.000 --> 00:25:40.000 Yeah. And I've also found recently that because I'm not feeling under pressure to record an episode every fortnight, I can spend a bit more time prepping and finding guests and things like that. And I think. Yeah, I hope that it makes for better podcasts as well as easier podcasts. 79 00:25:40.000 --> 00:25:56.000 I do hope so, too. Do you ever go back and listen to the old episodes? I've debated. To be honest, I never do. Very, very rarely. Maybe if I'm, like, going to speak with someone who was a guest or something, but it would be actually a fun extra to go back and listen to some of our old episodes, maybe. 80 00:25:56.000 --> 00:26:07.000 Yeah. I have a problem, which is I hate the sound of my voice recorded. I'm just horrified by it. 81 00:26:07.000 --> 00:26:13.000 It's truly not that bad, Steven. But. All right, fair enough, fair enough. 82 00:26:13.000 --> 00:26:19.000 I don't know. There's something about hearing my voice recorded, and it's not just on the podcast. Podcast is. Whenever I've heard it recorded, I sort of. 83 00:26:19.000 --> 00:26:24.000 No, I get it. A lot of people have that. Kind of have that. 84 00:26:24.000 --> 00:26:55.000 But also, I sort of. I wonder. It's a good idea, Ed. I was going to say, why would I want to listen to myself talking? But actually it will be interesting to go back and listen. Yeah. To some of the podcasts. You know, we've had some. Some quite scoopy podcasts in the past. It might be worth listening to them. But we've also had some fantastic guests that weren't super sort of outrageously famous or anything, but we're just really interesting people to talk to, you know, and I can think of it. 85 00:26:55.000 --> 00:27:16.000 Yeah. And also, I mean, just for the historical significance of being like, oh, what was I thinking five years ago? Kind of. Yeah, whatever. Because it has now been. We started in March 2020, so February 2020. So we're coming up on, you know, six and a half years. It's a lot. 86 00:27:16.000 --> 00:27:31.000 It's a heck of a lot. And, yeah, so we should do that. We should listen to a few. I. I struggle to listen to all of the. The current episodes without going back, but I will give it a try and pick a couple. 87 00:27:31.000 --> 00:27:43.000 I Usually listen to them. It's rare that I don't, but. So anyway, on that cheery note, you. You have earned your GeoMob baseball cap, Steven. 88 00:27:43.000 --> 00:27:44.000 Thank you. 89 00:27:43.000 --> 00:28:11.000 Only took six and a half years and I look forward to presenting it to you in London and looking forward to a fun event and that. London kicks off the autumn season. We're going to have Berlin two weeks later. And I'm working on getting a Barcelona event set up as well, kind of in October. So here we go again, back to work. 90 00:28:11.000 --> 00:28:26.000 I guess towards the end of the year, I'm going to have to think about how we can make the map of all the GeoMob events much easier for you to maintain. 91 00:28:26.000 --> 00:28:38.000 You know what? I'm going to try to get this done, Stephen. There is an open ticket about this and it's just every day there's something else, but I'm going to make it happen, I promise you. 92 00:28:38.000 --> 00:28:51.000 Let me tell you something. Even I can copy a folder onto a website and then put a link to it on the website. 93 00:28:51.000 --> 00:29:07.000 Yes, that is true, but then how does it stay maintained and how does it. The thing is, it'll get overwritten at the next update. Okay, this is my point. There's always a little more to it than just. 94 00:29:07.000 --> 00:29:24.000 And I need to go back and revisit it and work out a way to make it easy for Danny or somebody to actually update the event details and add new event details, speakers and stuff like that. 95 00:29:24.000 --> 00:29:33.000 I have an idea. I'm going to ping you with an idea about this. We're going to solve this. We can manage this. 96 00:29:33.000 --> 00:29:36.000 We absolutely can. 97 00:29:36.000 --> 00:29:40.000 All right, Steven. Okay, great to chat and I will see you in London. 98 00:29:40.000 --> 00:29:43.000 Enjoy the rest of the summer. Take care. 99 00:29:43.000 --> 00:29:44.000 Bye. 100 00:29:44.000 --> 00:29:48.000 Bye. 101 00:29:48.000 --> 00:30:22.000 Thanks for joining us today on the GeoMob podcast. We hope you enjoyed the discussion. You can get the show notes over on the website, which is@thegeomob.com and while you're there, you can sign up for our monthly newsletter and find links to our accounts on Mastodon and LinkedIn. So you can stay up to date on all our upcoming events. We hope to see you at an event soon.