I decided today to attend BarCampMilwaukee at the end of this month. Because BarCamp requires participation, and because I’m interested, I’ll be doing a session on "Online Maps, Mapping Tools & Geohacking." I had a project in mind that loosely falls under this title, which someone else had proposed as a session topic, so now I just need to make it and talk about it in the next couple weeks.
I’ve never attended, much less presented at, a technical conference before. I think BarCamp will be a good place to start. I have presented at and attended other conferences before on topics such as linguistics, gay rights, and general academic research, and I’ve read a lot about BarCamp and other tech conferences, so I think I have a pretty good idea of what I’m getting into.
I seem to have done something recently that landed me on a to-be-invited-to-conferences list. I’ve been working online for ten years and hadn’t been invited to a single tech conference until a couple weeks ago when I was personally invited to a more prestigious and expensive conference. Among other problems, the conference speakers list didn’t include a single woman (though I was assured it was not for lack of trying), which didn’t sound very interesting to me.
But then this morning Pete Prodoehl sent me a personal invitation to BarCampMilwaukee. I looked at it and it seemed interesting, it’s free, and it’s not too far away, so I’m going. I’ll flesh out my session in more detail after I’ve written the code on which it will be based, which hopefully won’t take long. But really with a word like "geohacking" in the title, how could it not be interesting?
Here's my plan for a useful Google maps tool: take the FCC's database of radio station information (e.g. stations in Des Moines), and figure the span of each station (like so) to provide a tool that allows people to click a location on a Google map, and get a list of radio stations and signal strengths for that location. Bonus points: 1) Search Google for each station's website, 2) Search each website for an online version of the station's audio, 3) Provide an interface for listening to each station.
Now, who wants to make it?