This week sees the launch of wherewashere.com:
whatwasHere.com wants to revolutionise how history is written. Its pilot website in Liverpool tells history like it’s never been told before: by everyone. It doesn’t only tell the capital H history of Liverpool, but the everything-interesting-that-ever-happened-to-the-people-who-actually-live-there history of Liverpool. It’s oral history for the My Space era.
Based around Google maps, the site lets people instantly publish the stories that matter to them on the spot where they happened, discuss other people’s stories, use the Timeline to go back in time, make connections between big events and small across the map. If you know something that happened in Liverpool, put it on!
whatwasHere.com’s aim is to get everyone - yes everyone - writing history.
You can follow the project blog at http://blog.whatwashere.com/
Continue reading ‘What was here?’
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I’m a little slow in reporting this since I’ve been away on holiday, but Flickr have announced that geotagging is now one of their built-in features.
This is a great move, since it can be quite daunting if you’re really into knowing (and seeing) where photos were taken, but don’t want to move over to rival Zooomr, or delve into some of the arcane geotagging browser extensions or 3rd party tools. It’s all done within Flickr’s Organizr, and it’s all drag and drop. You can even set levels of accuracy, i.e. associating photos with whole cities, or even down to street level.
Continue reading ‘Flickr does Geotagging’
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Silbury Hill, Wiltshire
Hosted on
Zooomr
There’s one thing that Flickr doesn’t support natively, and that is the ability to ‘geotag’ photos. In a nutshell, geotagging is just associating spatial data (i.e. a set of coordinates) showing where you took a particular photo (or where the subject is located). You could then see where it was taken on a map, or browse photos via a mapping service such as Google Maps.
A number of determined people have written hacks to get geotagging into Flickr. But these often use a plugin for Firefox called Greasemonkey, and a further set of scripts to build in the functionality into your photo pages. If you’re not technically minded, it’s not easy to do, and I think that most people will be put off by this approach.
If you do use extensions such as GMiF, coordinates are stored in with your tags, so your tag lists will eventually become cluttered with tags such as “geotagged” and “geo:lat=51.519606″ etc. It’s not very elegant, but it does work.
Step in Zooomr.
Zooomr have built geotagging right into the heart of the system, with elegance. Your geotags are nicely hidden away (but still accessible). Viewing where photos were taken, or simply browsing photos by location on a map are all built-in, and very easy to use. Not to mention kind to the eyes.
Zooomr doesn’t yet have the community aspect that Flickr does. Community is what makes Flickr so brilliant, and it is now very well established. I think that startups like Zooomr fill a nice gap at the moment, and help to keep giants like Flickr innovating and on their toes.
Good luck Zooomr!
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A group from OpenStreetMap are gathering en-masse (well, 15 of them) to make a map of all roads and footpaths on the Isle of Wight, UK, which they will then make freely available.
MAPPING REVOLUTION TARGETS THE ISLE OF WIGHT
This weekend, 5th - 7th May, the Isle of Wight becomes the center of a global mapping revolution. Contributors to the OpenStreetMap (OSM) project are meeting on the Island with the aim of mapping as many of the roads and footpaths as possible.
The OSM project aims to create free geographic data, such as street maps, to anyone who wants it. The project was started because most maps you think of as free actually have legal or technical restrictions on their use, holding back people from using them in creative, productive or unexpected ways.
OSM contributors, including one travelling from Germany, will be driving, cyling, and wandering the Island with GPS (Global Positioning Sytem) Units recording the route of as many of the roads and footpaths as possible.
Further information can be found on the project web site http://www.openstreetmap.org/
In the UK, most current mapping is all privately owned (by the Ordnance Survey - despite being a government department, and a number of others). Using it can be either expensive, or you tread dodgy ground by trying to make your own derivatives from it (including digitising their aerial photographs).
With the rising interest in location-based stuff on the internet, such as geotagging, geocaching etc, in the name of the freedom of spatial information, there’s an “open source” mapping movement, which I applaud. It also sounds like quite good fun.
Related Link (blog): OpenGeoData
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