Yahoo! Traffic Conditions data in an RSS Feed
Submitted by brett on May 5, 2005 - 8:11am
Yahoo! has opened their Y! Local Traffic content to allow Apple's Dashboard to create a Y! Local Traffic widget. For this to work, Yahoo has to expose the data in an easily digestiable format. As it turns out, Yahoo has decided to use RSS to accomplish this.
This is huge since it is now easily consumable by RSS readers, so other people can piggy-back on the feed. There’s already a blog post describing how the widget works and it even provides a little form for making your own URL.
In short, here is how the feed works:http://maps.yahoo.com/traffic.rss?csz=45202&mag=4&minsev=2
The parameters are:
- csz The location from which you want to do your search - as far as I know only cities are supported at the moment. You can provide both a zipcode, a city or an address - all seem to work.
- mag The level of ‘magnification’. 3 = 4 Miles, 4 = 10 Miles, 5 = 40 Miles
- minserv The minimum severity of the traffic condition. 1 = Minor, 2 = Moderate, 4 = Major, 5 = Critical
I am looking forward to see how many interesting things people can come on ways in which this data can be used..