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September 1, 2006
Flickr...once more infovis
As posted on the flickr blog some days ago, the rumors about the mashup "Maps&Pictures has come to an end.
Infact Flickr Team has realased an Ajax based solution to make user able to define where they took the picture or the place related to the picture; its also available a front-end for all.
The web based application is available onLine, into the "Organize > Map section of your account and, with a simple "Drag and Drop interaction, you can allocate your pictures on a specific point on the Earth.
The main problems are related to the limited European maps coverage, that is not so accurate as the USA one.
This application is a clear signal that maps are becoming more and more important into allday lifes.
If adding METATAG to the picture to better search results was the revolution brought by Photofinder by HCI Lab of Univeristy of Maryland, Fickr did a new revolution adding to it the METATAGGED Pictures the social networks rules.
Today, bearing of the successful projects like GoogleMaps and YahooMaps, Flickr move one step ahead, simply declaring that a METATAGGED Picture has more information is its also related to a physical point on the Earth surface.
If the trend of other cool Flickr tools is also including geotagging features ( for example, see MobUp ), I could move to a thought.
Considering the digital picture as the outcome of physical process involving: light, lents, 1 point on the Earth and users PointOfView, we could easy think to geotagging; but if we consider the digital image in general, instead, we also could be able to think that a picture could represent a place, could let the viewer feel to be in a place, could represent no-place at all, could be similiar to several places, and so on...
One "limit of the Flickr geo-software is that we could not think of a picture is related to several points...
Maybe its should be true if we consider the GeoTagging process as the expression of the relation:
Picture-PhysicalPoint-WhereTheCameraShootedThePicture
but...think of a METAPICTURE...
Youre in the bookstore in Milan and you would like to take a picture of a wonderfull NewYork skyline, printed on the front-cover of a book....
In this scenario if we would like to geotag the picture we should decide if itis related to Milan or to NewYork...even if we would like to say: "The picture is geotaggable to both cities
Im trying to say that geotagging could be usefull also to create relationship from one picture to several physical points, bearing of the reason the user geotagged the picture on that specific point and infovis could help and improve the growth of this emerging process.
Ideas, infoVis / information visualization / infoviz, Personal, resources, rias / Rich Internet Applications, User Experience, User Interfaceshttp://www.mentegrafica.it/blog/?p=124
Posted by InfoVis at September 1, 2006 1:41 PM
