William M. Hartnett

I had a good chat about the digital future of local newspapers with Ryan Pitts of The Spokesman Review of Spokane yesterday after teaching a mapping class he attended. They’re looking for a developer to, among other things, help rebuild their site from the ground up with Ellington/Django. It sounds like an exciting opportunity to [...]

I’m relocating to Houston through this weekend for the IRE/NICAR computer-assisted reporting conference. Maybe I’ll be posting, maybe I won’t. What’s it to you, anyway? In the meantime, have a look at this trippy photo of the Houston skyline by Flickr user telwink.

Did I just blow your mind?

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Things kicked off here at wmhartnett.com on Feb. 13, 2007, which can mean only one thing: A self-serving post to mark the site’s first birthday with a bunch of thoroughly unimpressive statistics. Here’s to even lazier adherence to and significantly greater indifference toward widely accepted rules of good blogging in year two!
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Sigh. Another big Street View update from Google today, but still a gigantic swath of outdated aerial imagery here in South Florida. The love, Google. Where is it? On with the inevitable collection of newspaper buildings (or at least buildings in the general vicinity of newspaper buildings) as seen in the newly added Street View [...]

I’m bringing back the meh T-shirt from my September post on Google hosting wire stories on the occasion of another Google News development. (Note, however, that Howard Owens says in a comment on TechCrunch that this feature isn’t new. I must be thick, because the Google News Blog post was the first I heard about [...]

Careful readers will have noticed I have a certain admiration for Microsoft’s Live Search Maps and the broader Virtual Earth platform. Not only is it a worthy competitor to Google Maps, but in some respects it’s a superior product. Mileage may vary depending on your location and needs, but I have crazy love for Virtual [...]

I think I’ve talked more than enough talk in the past 11 months, so how about a little walking for once? I’ve been headed in this direction for quite some time, but now it’s official: I’m joining the web staff full time. Starting now-ish, I’m The Palm Beach Post’s online innovations editor.
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Here’s a new year’s treat for the South Florida map geeks: Microsoft has added oblique aerial imagery for all of Palm Beach County to Virtual Earth/Live Maps. That’s over 2,000 square miles, people; Bigger than Rhode Island, and almost as large as Delaware. I’ve been waiting for this since I heard earlier this year that [...]

Ah, 2007, what a memorable year it’s been. In the past 12 months, I started rambling away on this site, had my eyes opened by the many thoughtful members of the journalism blogosphere, and set my career on an entirely new course as a result. (More on that last bit soon. Or soon-ish. Maybe. We’ll [...]

Google dropped Street View on eight additional cities today, but still can’t be bothered to update its routine aerial imagery down here in South Florida. Here’s what my neighborhood looks like in Google Maps. That’s what it looked like two years ago, anyway, as careful readers will notice that there’s nothing in that view except [...]