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  • Tom Goskar 4:23 pm on 16 November, 2006 Permalink | Reply  

    What was here? 

    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/

    What Was Here interface, November 2006
    (More …)

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  • Tom Goskar 10:59 am on 5 September, 2006 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , , ,   

    Flickr does Geotagging 

    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.

    Geotagging within Flickr

    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.
    (More …)

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    • Eduardo Manchon 10:38 am on 6 September, 2006 Permalink

      Flickr geotagging interface is brilliant, but Yahoo Maps coverage for most of the World is very poor. This is a important issue because Flickr’s geotagging interface is not designed for accuracy, but for massive geotagging, what it is perfect for some people, but not for others.

      If you prefer Google Maps for mapping your photos via drag and drop interface and you care about accuracy, our project, Panoramio, may be interesting for you. Btw, you can later watch the photos in Google Earth KML feed, a much better experience than web based maps.

      Eduardo

  • Tom Goskar 2:08 pm on 18 July, 2006 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , , , spatial, zooomr   

    Geotagging Photos: Zooomr 


    Silbury Hill, Wiltshire
    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.

    Zooomr photo sharing
    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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    • Kristopher Tate 2:37 pm on 18 July, 2006 Permalink

      Hi there and thanks for posting Zooomr!

      I suppose I’ve tried to make sure that geotagging is as simple and easy as possible. Though, in regard to community, we’re steadfast on building community systems into the whole picture.

      Flickr does a good job, but there is just sooo much more than can be done when you look at it.

      Looking forward to showing it to you and others.

      Best,

      Kristopher Tate

    • Tom 3:10 pm on 18 July, 2006 Permalink

      Thanks for responding Kristopher – it’s encouraging to know that a) you’re managing to run Zooomr and still reply personally on people’s blogs, and b) that community tools are on there way. This is great news.

      On a social level, people are tied to places, not just on a physical level – but memories of places, and pictures are memories in a way. To be able to tie the two together in a natural way is certainly the way forward, especially since GPS is beginning to appear in digital cameras now.

      Keep it up! :-)

    • Paul 1:30 pm on 28 July, 2006 Permalink

      That’s the way forward; gps feeding straight into a camera. I like the idea of geotagging but in practice, it’s a bit of a pain. There are fields within the exif metadata standard for location, so why not use them and automatically populate them from a gps unit…? Ideal solution :-)

      atb,
      Paul.

  • Tom Goskar 1:11 pm on 20 April, 2006 Permalink | Reply  

    Map Mobbing 

    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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    • Alligator Descartes 10:40 am on 22 April, 2006 Permalink

      I had a similar thought last week regarding height data and handheld GPS devices. It’d be good to be able to derive decent ( /-5-10m accurate) height data at a better resolution than that supplied by the SRTM datasets. They’re pretty good (for free), but not detailed enough at the city level. I hope the OSM guys put out the full 3D data and not just derived 2D plans…

      That said, anything’s good at this stage…

      Another decent dataset worth looking at is the georeferenced Landsat imagery. It’s quite detailed, but I’m not sure if it’s good enough for city mapping again…

      A.

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