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/

As the press release says, the website aims to allow everyone to contribute to building a history of the world, beginning with the pilot area of Liverpool, UK. You can contribute words and photos to the site, and associate them with a new or existing marker on an embedded Google Map.

This is a great idea, but not completely original. Your History Here, Wikimapia, and a few others have been doing similar things for a while now. However, whatwashere.com have been liaising with various groups around the Liverpool area, such as schools, the BBC, and Liverpool Libraries in order to get a good body of quality material for their launch. There is also a version of the website for under 16′s.

The interface seems a bit cluttered to me on my first look around the site, but I do like the way that they have implemented the temporal aspect. It is very easy to wind back time and see what records are available for any century. Each century is then divided up into ten year slots, allowing you to be quite specific in your search. Results are displayed to the right of the map. When you’re waiting for your query to take place, a nice little message tells you to “Please wait – there’s a lot of history to tell”. I like that!

You can click on points on the map, which expand a bubble with a summary of the information for that point, and a link inviting you to open the material in the viewer to the right of the map. There is a tab in the viewer allowing comments, or another story about that place where you can type away and upload new images.

It looks like a great site and I’m looking forward to when they expand to the rest of the UK. It would be nice if they could link to other services like Flickr and YouTube, as well as provide GeoRSS, but let’s give them a chance to get settled!

Is this the real beginnings of ‘Citizen History’, to go alongside ‘Citizen Journalism’ and ‘Citizen Media’? It’s certainly an application of geotagging the past, and the possibilities are positively exciting if this takes off. It really could help to enrich the past.

Read the press release, or visit whatwashere.com (which is actually www.whatwashere.com – if you miss out the www, as they do in their press release, the site doesn’t work at the time of writing).

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.

Whilst this is great, it’s not actually that great if you live outside of the USA. Yahoo’s mapping for the UK, for example, is very basic. Angular lines mark major roads and railways, and that’s about as good as it gets (unless you want satellite photos of London).

So what do I do to geotag my photos on Flickr? I use the Localize Bookmarklet which was created by the talented aemkei, which uses Google Maps (which has excellent UK coverage). You simply drag the bookmarklet link to your bookmark bar (and rename it to something like “Flickr Geotag”). That’s it. When you’re viewing a photo in your photostream, simply click the bookmark, and the photo will be replaced with a Google map. Navigate to the spot where your photo was taken, and click. That’s it. Hit save, and the geotags will be inserted to your tag list, and a link to Google maps showing the location of the photo will be appended to your description.

At the moment (5th September 2006), this doesn’t add the photo directly into Flickr’s geodatabase, so you have to import them manually (thankfully, it imports all your newly geotagged photos in one go), by following this link (or access it from “Your Account“).

One imported, Flickr will show where the photo was taken as text, e.g. “Taken in London, England (map)” with a link to a Yahoo map which floats above Flickr when clicked. This is on the lower right of the screen, above the date and camera model information.

One observation is that the spatial database behind this all must be pretty powerful. This photograph of a butterfly was taken within the grounds of a medieval park, close to Salisbury in the UK. I geotagged it some time ago using the bookmarklet, and Flickr imported the coordinates when I did my first import a few days ago. I noted that Flickr shows that the photo was “Taken in Clarendon Park, England”. The underlying Yahoo engine (anyone know what it’s called?) has perfomed a spatial query and identified that the photo was taken within the boundary of the park. The fact that it’s a relatively obscure historical deer park reveals that Yahoo’s spatial database must be rather detailed, and the engine that powers it, rather powerful.

It makes me think (and hope) that improved mapping for the UK is just around the corner…

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!

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