Simon Willison's Weblog: wildlifenearyou

Owls Near Me

2018-02-04T22:26:29+00:00

Back in 2010 Natalie and I shipped owlsnearyou.com—a website for finding your nearest owls, using data from the sadly deceased WildlifeNearYou (RIP). To celebrate #SuperbOwl Sunday we rebuilt the same concept on top of the excellent iNaturalist API. Search for a place to see which owls have been spotted there, or click the magic button to geolocate your device and see which owls have been spotted in your nearby area!

Tags: natalie-downe, projects, wildlifenearyou, inaturalist

WildlifeNearYou talk at £5 app, and being Wired (not Tired)

2010-04-11T20:42:11+00:00

Two quick updates about WildlifeNearYou. First up, I gave a talk about the site at £5 app, my favourite Brighton evening event which celebrates side projects and the joy of Making Stuff. I talked about the site's genesis on a fort, crowdsourcing photo ratings, how we use Freebase and DBpedia and how integrating with Flickr's machine tags gave us a powerful location API for free. Here's the video of the talk, courtesy of Ian Oszvald:

£5 App #22 WildLifeNearYou by Simon Willison and Natalie Downe from IanProCastsCoUk on Vimeo.

Secondly, I'm excited to note that WildlifeNearYou spin-off OwlsNearYou.com is featured in UK Wired magazine's Wired / Tired / Expired column... and we're Wired!

Tags: api, crowdsourcing, fivepoundapp, flickr, freebase, natalie-downe, owlsnearyou, my-talks, wildlifenearyou, wired

5 Questions for Simon Willison

2010-02-10T14:31:57+00:00

5 Questions for Simon Willison

I got interviewed about WildlifeNearYou for the Flickr code blog, in particular the way the site uses machine tags.

Tags: flickr, interviews, wildlifenearyou

WildlifeNearYou can now tag your Flickr photos for you

2010-02-04T17:01:09+00:00

WildlifeNearYou can now tag your Flickr photos for you

I’m really excited about this feature: if you opt-in, WildlifeNearYou will now write name and latin name tags to your Flickr photos after you’ve marked the species in the photo. This is even more interesting when you combine it with our suggest-a-species feature (the photo won’t get tagged until you’ve approved the suggestion). We also set the location on photos which don’t yet have one, but the real fun is the machine tags we’ve added, which allow developers to use the Flickr API to find photos by their WildlifeNearYou metadata (trip, species and place IDs). As a neat extra touch, the identifiers we use in the machine tags are the same as the ones used by our custom wlny.eu URL shortener, so it’s trivial to turn a machine tag in to the URL for that page on the main site.

Tags: flickr, machinetags, metadata, tagging, wildlifenearyou

Applications: the real stars of the data.gov.uk launch

2010-01-27T12:23:54+00:00

Applications: the real stars of the data.gov.uk launch

A write-up of the data.gov.uk launch event at the Guardian. I demonstrated the Guardian’s World Government Data search engine and a small data.gov.uk inspired feature on WildlifeNearYou.

Tags: datagovuk, guardian, projects, wildlifenearyou

Help pick the best photos, but watch out, it's addictive!

2010-01-25T00:36:35+00:00

Help pick the best photos, but watch out, it's addictive!

My favourite WildlifeNearYou feature yet—our new tool asks you to pick the best from two photos, then uses the results to rank all of the photos for each species. It’s surprisingly addictive—we had over 5,000 votes in the first two hours, peaking at 4 or 5 votes a second. The feature seems to be staying nice and speedy thanks to Redis under the hood. Photos in the top three for any given species display a medal on their photo page.

Tags: crowdsourcing, photos, projects, redis, wildlifenearyou

Owls, Otters, Monkeys and Lions Near You.com

2010-01-19T14:54:01+00:00

Owls, Otters, Monkeys and Lions Near You.com

It’s not just Owls—we also registered ottersnearyou.com, monkeysnearyou.com and lionsnearyou.com. We’ll probably stop there though, or this could turn in to a very expensive marketing gimmick.

Tags: lions, monkeys, otters, owls, projects, wildlife, wildlifenearyou

owlsnearyou.com

2010-01-19T14:45:50+00:00

owlsnearyou.com

Nat and I built this over the weekend. It asks for your location, then tells you where your nearest Owl is (using sightings data people have entered on WildlifeNearYou.com). If you’re using Firefox 3.6 or an iPhone it grabs your location using the W3C geolocation API so you don’t have to type anything at all.

Tags: geolocation, iphone, owls, owlsnearyou, projects, wildlife, wildlifenearyou

WildlifeNearYou: Help identify animals in other people's photos

2010-01-15T01:35:07+00:00

WildlifeNearYou: Help identify animals in other people's photos

The first of a number of crowdsourcing-style features we have planned for WildlifeNearYou—users can now help identify the animals in each other’s photos, and photo owners get a simple queue interface to approve or reject the suggestions.

Tags: crowdsourcing, projects, wildlifenearyou

WildlifeNearYou: It began on a fort...

2010-01-12T22:53:20+00:00

Back in October 2008, myself and 11 others set out on the first /dev/fort expedition. The idea was simple: gather a dozen geeks, rent a fort, take food and laptops and see what we could build in a week.

The fort was Fort Clonque on Alderney in the Channel Islands, managed by the Landmark Trust. We spent an incredibly entertaining week there exploring Nazi bunkers, cooking, eating and coding up a storm. It ended up taking slightly longer than a week to finish, but 14 months later the result of our combined efforts can finally be revealed: WildlifeNearYou.com!

WildlifeNearYou is a site for people who like to see animals. Have you ever wanted to know where your nearest Llama is? Search for "llamas near brighton" and you'll see that there's one 18 miles away at Ashdown Forest Llama Farm. Or you can see all the places we know about in France, or all the trips I've been on, or everywhere you can see a Red Panda.

The data comes from user contributions: you can use WildlifeNearYou to track your trips to wildlife places and list the animals that you see there. We can only tell you about animals that someone else has already spotted.

Once you've added some trips, you can import your Flickr photos and match them up with trips and species. We'll be adding a feature in the future that will push machine tags and other metadata back to Flickr for you, if you so choose.

You can read more about WildlifeNearYou on the site's about page and FAQ. Please don't hesitate to send us feedback!

What took so long?

So why did it take so long to finally launch it? A whole bunch of reasons. Week long marathon hacking sessions are an amazing way to generate a ton of interesting ideas and build a whole bunch of functionality, but it's very hard to get a single cohesive whole at the end of it. Tying up the loose ends is a pretty big job and is severely hampered by the fort residents returning to their real lives, where hacking for 5 hours straight on a cool easter egg suddenly doesn't seem quite so appealing. We also got stuck in a cycle of "just one more thing". On the fort we didn't have internet access, so internet-dependent features like Freebase integration, Google Maps, Flickr imports and OpenID had to be left until later ("they'll only take a few hours" no longer works once you're off /dev/fort time).

The biggest problem though was perfectionism. The longer a side-project drags on for, the more important it feels to make it "just perfect" before releasing it to the world. Finally, on New Year's Day, Nat and I decided we had had enough. Our resolution was to "ship the thing within a week, no matter what state it's in". We're a few days late, but it's finally live.

WildlifeNearYou is by far the most fun website I've ever worked on. To all twelve of my intrepid fort companions: congratulations - we made a thing!

Tags: devfort, django, flickr, projects, python, wildlifenearyou

Videos from DjangoCon 2009

2010-01-03T11:02:11+00:00

Videos from DjangoCon 2009

The videos from September's DjangoCon are now available, including my "Cowboy development with Django" talk (also on the Internet Archive).

I talked about building Wildlife Near You on a /dev/fort trip to Alderney and the MP's expenses project at the Guardian.

Tags: conferences, django, djangocon, python, the-guardian, wildlifenearyou