William M. Hartnett

Mike Pride’s essay in the current issue of CJR, which one apparently can’t get online, is an excellent read. After nearly 30 years as the Concord Monitor’s editor, Pride spent his final year before retirement as a reporter. Or, as he puts it, “my job became to provide content.” If only every editor would do [...]

(Alternate title for this post: When dorks and maps collide.) Below you will find what is probably the second-best map ever made. Harnessing the latest, most advanced computer simulation techniques and mapping technology, it realistically illustrates what an airstrike on the headquarters of a certain Florida newspaper would look like. What prompted me to create [...]

Here’s an incredibly welcome development: Rooftop geocoding for 50 million U.S. addresses was just rolled out in the Google Maps API. Careful readers will recall my colleague Matt’s head-to-head comparison of geocoding accuracy in Google Maps and Virtual Earth, which I wrote about back in January. Briefly, 85 percent of Virtual Earth’s results were closer [...]

Pfft, like I know. But four days ago I uploaded a 90-second clip of our cat Pokeweed sitting upright to both Flickr and YouTube. Not a whole lot going on there, just a strange clip of our strange cat behaving a little strangely. The YouTube version has been viewed 28 times. The Flickr version [...]

Matt Waite posed a good question in the comments to yesterday’s post about making our investment in the neighborhood boundary data that underlies Backyard Post pay off. Basically, when it comes to such detailed information, do I worry about being too small? Too micro? My thoughts on that topic sprawl ever so slightly, so better [...]

Since we privately rolled out Backyard Post a few weeks ago, I’ve received quite a few questions about our neighborhood boundary data. As in, where we got it. That’s yet another thing about which I meant to be clearer in my introductory post, but the answer is simple enough: I made it.
More precisely, I made [...]

Back from a brilliant two-week vacation. Tanned, rested, free from snowmobile-related injuries, etc. I also have a rare and much-in-demand photo of your humble host to share. This is how a native Floridian prepares for any temperature below 80 degrees fahrenheit:

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I’m going to mention the word once, then not only will you never hear or see me use it again, I might actually go so far as to punch squarely in the neck anyone who insists on using the word in relation to the product I’m about to announce: Hyperlocal.
There, I said it. An utterly [...]

… to find out what, as of Monday, I’ve been working on for the past 572 days. (Yes, I count.)

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