where2.0 - Wed 14th May (11am - 12mid)

Going Places on Flickr: The Significance of Geographical Information in Photos
Dan Catt (Yahoo!, Inc. )

Dan outlines the challenge for Flickr around selecting location. How does Flickr take a lat/long coordinate pair and decide exactly where a photo has been taken?

This is about reverse geo-coding.

"Places have meaning... we (Flickr) should be able to give them (a user) back a sense of meaning about the place where they have taken their photograph."

A 'ladder of locality':
- 'neighborhood'
- locality
- county
- region
- country
- continent

Flickr starts at the bottom ('neighborhood') and works up the ladder until it finds a suitable match.

"What does this mean? It means there is a bias of interpretation... and... we are all working with imperfect data."

Lots of stuff about "bounding boxes" which are used to provide a contextual means of location around an area - it's about associating point data with these bounding boxes.

"Flickr is a photo sharing website... it's not about maps." - But, maps do help users get the geocoding correct.

Once again crowd sourcing is mentioned at the conference... this time it's about using the power of crowd sourcing to improve the set of location data to help correctly define where a photograph has been taken... and ultimately to improve our geographical knowledge of the world.

-----

LocationAware: Standardizing a Geolocation API in the Browser
Ryan Sarver (Skyhook Wireless)

Development thinking is focussed around "what does it mean when a device is location aware?".

"locationaware's goal is to help drive the standardisation of how a user's geolocation is exposed to the website through the browser."

GPS, Wi-Fi and IP are different technologies which require some interesting challenges.

Announced today: Skyhook are working with mozilla labs on a prototype extension to explore geolocation in the browser (available June).

Yelp will be the first 'user client' at the point of launch to help explore some of the particular challenges around making a useful service.

-----

Lessons Learned in Location-based Gaming
Jeremy Irish (Groundspeak)

Geochaching is a global community using GPS devices to hide and seek hidden "treasure". There are over 500,000 containers in the world."

Whereigo is the next generation of geocaching - "it's a toolset for creating media rich experiences in the real world using GPS and handheld devices - taking adventure games outdoors".

A recommendation for using User-Generated Content in this context. Take advantage of local experts to improve the context.

"Players are manic-depressive - educate, motivate and reward often."

More advice on creating successful games:
- keep games short... under 30 minutes is best
- serialize your game into chapters
- simplify, simplify, simplify
- encourage players to look up from screen

"Remember, you can't control the players, a player can and will go to any length to finish a game."

Finally, "Be aware of legally grey areas", whatever that means!

-----

Crawling the web for GeoData
Juan Gonzalez (PlanetEye Inc.)

Going behind the markers on a map to uncover the lat/long coordinates... but also gathering other types of location information contained in content on the web.

There is a problem however, current geocoding techniques struggle with the large variety of different types of location data used in the real world.

The solution is, apparently, 'low-resolution geocoding'.
OK, I get it, it basically means that sometimes we can only tag content with a wider area, rather than being able to tie everything down to a specific point.

"Sometimes you need to look beyond the location information" - Useful to spot commonalities in data (for example, different address styles but the same phone number) in gaining a better understanding of location information.

"Why are we doing all of this? - Planet Eye is trying to aggregate all travel information on the web"


...and we're off to early lunch thanks to the fact that the internet is dead (not all of the internet, just our little bit).

Flickr goes video

So, the "...best online photo management and sharing application in the world." has now introduced the ability to upload video.

Admittedly you are currently only able to upload 90 second clips and, according to the video FAQs, there are two ground rules:

1. Only “safe” and “moderate” video content is permitted. Your “beautiful wife” should not be moving. (Read more about content filters.)
2. Only upload videos you have created yourself.

With the wide spread availability of video recording functionality on compact digital cameras and mobile phones I guess it isn't surprising that the divide between still and moving images is starting to disappear.

However, maybe I'm too much of a purist, but surely there are already plenty of sites on the internet for sharing short video clips? Apparently there's a site called YouTube which is already quite popular.

I really like Flickr. I love the fact that it does a simple task very well.

I hope that this latest move is not just an attempt by Yahoo owned Flickr to try and impact on the success of the Google owned YouTube.

LastGraph

Andy pointed LastGraph out to me several weeks ago but that unfortunately coincided with the service being off-air for a while as demand outstripped capability.

I'm glad to say that the site is now up and running again and so I have finally been able to visualise my listening habits of the last 12 months in quite spectacular fashion.


(click image for large version to read labels)

Of course there is also the obligatory Flickr group for sharing your musical taste with others - I'll let you decipher mine as you see fit.

Talk Like A Pirate Day 2007

Now I know I've mentioned it before, largely due to spotting this poster by accident in Cornwall last year, but it honestly had completely escaped my attention that today was Talk Like A Pirate Day.

That was until I popped over the Flickr to check that my cameraphone Royal Albert Hall photo had transferred ok last night and spotted a subtle addition to the Flickr logo in the top left corner.

They're obviously fond of pirate conversation over at the Flickr offices.

Spell with flickr

Some time ago I had what I thought was a great idea. It centred around trying to give a bit more focus to my photography whilst being more creative at the same time.

Without going into all of the boring detail it basically involved taking pictures of a whole variety of typography, signage, lettering etc and then using the captured images to create words, sentences and so on.

As with most of my ideas I never quite got around to trying it for real. Then today I stumbled across this extremely simple, and very clever, app called Spell with flickr which will take any word or sentence of your choosing and create a visual representation using flickr images.

For example:-



The fun part is that, once the initial word has been entered a straightforward URL is produced - e.g. http://metaatem.net/words/james - which can be used to recreate the word many times over using different images.

If you wish, individual letters can even be switched to alternative images bearing the same letter with the simple click of a mouse.

I think it means my idea is now pretty much redundant - must be time for another one.

Found via Ventnor Blog.