KML Mashup for Flow Festival 2008

The fifth annual Flow Festival takes place at Helsinki’s Suvilahti on 15th-17th August 2008. The organizers provide map of the festival area as a static image, and the program with gig schedules on each of the four festival stages as a PDF file.

Partly as KML training and partly for raising the awareness of the KML’s possibilities with all festival organizers, I created a KML map of the festival area including the gig begin times and for all the stages and all the artists using the timeline animation feature of KML. The result is best viewed with Google Earth application, as Google Maps is unable to do the timeline animation.

The mashup contains data from the following sources:

• the venue and gig information, manually copied from the festival’s program
• the feed of most recent public, geotagged photos and videos from Flickr tagged either with “flowfestival” or “flow08”.
• Jaikus posted to the channel #Flow between 15th July and 18th August 2008.
• Weather Forecast for Helsinki from yr.no on which free forecasts are provided in XML-format by the Norwegian Meteorological Institute and the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation.

The Flickr photos are displayed at the location where the authors have placed them with Flickr’s “place on the map” feature. The recent photos are refreshed every 5 minutes. To have your Flickr photo show up on this map simple place it on the map in the appropiate festival area and add either “flowfestival” or “flow08” tag on it.

Note that the position of the posted Jaikus in just randomized around the center point of the festival area for them to be more accessible, no actual positioning data from Jaiku is used.

Download the Flow Festival 2008 KML map to be viewed with Google Earth.

How to participate?

You can add your own content to the mashup, and are very warmly welcome to do so!

• Add photos or other pictures to Flickr, geotag them (add them to the map, please use as exact position of the place of taking the photo as possible) and add either of the tags “flow08” or “flowfestival” to them.
• Write a message or comment one in the Flow-channel of Jaiku. If you don’t have a Jaiku account, I still have a couple of invites.

Your content should appear on the mashup in about 10 minutes.

This product is completely unofficial, and it has no endorsement from the festival organizers. The program information may not be fully accurate, though I try to update it as in cases of announced changes in the schedule.

Any comments or suggestions are welcome by email at ior (at) iki (dot) fi.

Unofficial KML Map for the Flow Festival 2008 by Ilkka Rinne is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 1.0 Finland License.
Based on a work at www.famfamfam.com (Silk icons by Mark James) and www.mouserunner.com (Spheres Weather icons by Ken Saunders).