Tom Martin shapes up Digbeth
Written by Nicky Getgood on Monday, November 17th, 2008 ( 4 responses )
Tags: antonio roberts, Digbethisgood, Flickr, links, substrakt, toblog, tommartin
The shape of Digbeth – Tom Martin at Substrakt Design creates an outline of the area using photos geo-tagged ‘Digbeth’ on Flickr:
‘Flickr recently made a loads of interesting geo information available, by plotting the outside edge of geotagged photos they’ve managed to roughly show where a ‘place’ is according to people that have taken photos in that area.
‘Interestingly it looks like our new home on Fazeley Street, doesn’t quite qualitfy as ‘Digbeth’ yet. If you’ve got some photos of Digbeth on Flickr, why not spend a few minutes adding them to the map so we can represent where we the true shape of Digbeth.’
It seems my flat also falls just outside of the border, but that’s probably my own stupid fault. You see, I must admit to having my own Flickr account but have been far too embarrassed by the poor quality of my photos to tag them in order for them appear in others’ searches.
But now it seems Flickr are not only storing and showing photos but using them to map areas. So I’d better swallow my pride and do my civic duty by tagging and geotagging my photos, using the instructions Tom’s linked to, to help build a more accurate shape of Digbeth.
However, Antonio Roberts has pointed out that the current shape looks kind of like a goofy cat, which I like lots.
Comments:
on November 17th, 2008
Does anyone think there’s a new game in this, a variant of googlebombing, where people conspire to rename places according to a whim? I’m nearly tempted to go through the hassle of creating a Flickr acount just to add some other places to Digbeth.
on November 18th, 2008
DP: Did you hear the story Heather (from flickr) told when she came to brum to talk about community building. The morning after they opened up geotagging they looked at their world map and found someone had worked for hours to spell f**k across Greenland. Anything is a possible.
on November 20th, 2008
Nick, nope, I didn’t hear it. But I take it to mean that someone, somewhere is having fun with the code.
on January 3rd, 2009
[...] I saw this (via here): [...]
What is your opinion?