OMG I AM TEH FAMOS!!!!!!!

To be precise, I’m on the Slashdot, which means I now have +1 Nerd Cred. Admittedly, it popped up on Easter Friday, which would probably be in the top 3 slowest news days of the year. And you have to dive in to the numerous links (no, not from a comment, from the actual ‘article’) to find my name in one tiny corner. And the blog post it linked to is over two weeks old. And it’s not as outrageously remarkable as Bonsai Kittens. But I’m there, dammit.

The blog post it linked to is from my work blog, which is more product announcy than personal diary-y, but, yeah, for the last few months I (with help from my colleagues, especially David) have been working on getting GeoRSS and KML to show on Google Maps and also through the Google Maps API.

There were a lot more linkbacks to that post than I was expecting, and it was a little odd, when just surfing around, to follow the trail from Jeremy Zawodny’s linkblog (one of my occasional internet timewasters) to Sam Ruby’s Which Way Is Up, which opens with, whoa, my name. It also made the O’Reilly Radar.

Which Way Is Up also mentions that GeoRSS isn’t officially standardized – it’s a partially undefined specification, with respect to boring details like what’s the XML namespace, are lat/lng co-ordinates separated by commas or whitespace, blah blah blah. That’s not to say that KML is perfect either – a personal boring detail peeve is how it’s sometimes child elements rather than attributes: <LineStyle> <width> 3 </width> </LineStyle> rather than <LineStyle width=”3″/>. But really, that’s a boring detail I ought to save until around the 50 hour mark when we’re stuck in a borked elevator together and have totally run out of other conversation.

Backtracking a bit, the thing with GeoRSS being somewhat loose means that the example that I chose to demonstrate GeoRSS-on-Maps could be held up as exemplary, or “officially blessed by Google”, even though it’s imperfect wrt this loose standard, or so the discussion went at Which Way Is Up. But really, it was just an arbitrary decision by me made in like 3 seconds when I needed a reasonable looking GeoRSS example and SlashGeo was the first one I saw on my Tomboy note full of these things. It made me wonder (briefly) about what other standards have been ensconced somewhat accidentally…