

Flickr reverse engineers the shapes of continents, countries, cities, and neighborhoods. - danw
http://code.flickr.com/blog/2008/10/30/the-shape-of-alpha/

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raldi
I don't get this. It seems to say, e.g., "We reverse-engineered the shape of
Texas by drawing a line around all the photos marked 'Texas'."

So? How did the photos get marked "Texas" in the first place?

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robg
_Each one of those illustrations represents the boundaries of a particular
place whose outline was generated using nothing but the latitudes and
longitudes of the geotagged photos associated with that location’s WOE ID._

~~~
chime
Correct. But where does the WOE ID come from? Are people manually typing those
in or they are using something like <http://developer.yahoo.com/geo/> to come
up with the WOE ID? If WOE ID is generated based on latitude/longitude of a
place, then all they are doing is a plotting data originally retrieved from
their own DB.

Say I have a table of 40,000 zipcodes in US. You take a picture in zipcode
33708 and ask me for WOE ID / state and I say "Florida" and then you upload
the picture. Now do this ten million times for every zipcode. Now I will look
at every picture with WOE ID / state = Florida and find a list of zipcodes and
map them. Obviously they will map out the entire state of Florida. After all I
gave you all the state names.

Not that this isn't cool or anything. Just trying to determine how cool it is.
If they had used latitude/longitude + tags to generate this, then it would be
super-cool indeed. But if they did it by the method above that I described, it
is cool but it's also a big "duh."

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vlad
That's because the submission title is misleading (the blog post says nothing
about "reverse engineering" anything.)

Here is what flickr actually did:

"Over time this got us wondering: If we plotted all the geotagged photos
associated with a particular WOE ID, would we have enough data to generate a
mostly accurate contour of that place? Not a perfect representation, perhaps,
but something more fine-grained than a bounding box. It turns out we can."

So yes, they're just tracing around the points in their database to see what
kind of shapes they will get, for the experiment of seeing how well they could
represent a given (country, state, town) by connecting coordinates of photos
taken closest to the real borders of those actual regions.

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hugh
I'd be more interested in seeing the cases where this kind of thing fails.
Surely there must be some?

Does New York have an outpost in Las Vegas surrounding the New York New York
casino? Is Venice a bi-lobed city spread between northern Italy and southern
California? Does Sydney exist primarily in Australia, but have a lot of tiny
outposts surrounding all the places where girls called Sydney have posed for
photographs?

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jodrellblank
Flickr, or almost any social network site - particularly with an Amazon style
"real name" option - would be in a great position to geotemporally track
names.

As of Q4 2008, this is the worldwide distribution of Hugh's, and you can see
that name changing in poularity around the world as you drag the visualisation
back to Q1 2003...

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Jonathan-e
What a load of hype about nothing. All they are trying to do is fool the
uneducated into thinking they have actually done something special. A very
cheap marketing ploy.

They are the ones who specify which location geo-coded photos fall in to, so
it is no surprise that when they over lay them on a map, they match the
borders of the actual locations....

~~~
nailer
Flickr have reverse-engineered the technology to physically locate states.
This information is no longer limited to a few select vendors who've signed
NDAs and non-compete clauses.

Finally people can develop their own mapping applications that work with the
existing statename / location combos. This means you will be able to tell
where you are. I thought I was in London, which coincidentally turned out to
be right when I checked on Flickr's new reverse-engineered 'map' technology,
but it could have totally gone the other way.

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Tichy
Cool, I speculated on this a couple of months ago in my blog (although even
then it was already fairly predictable).
<http://blog.blinker.net/2008/04/15/exploring-geotags/>

Another application could be to monitor the spreading of plants and animals,
or other memes (fashion sense, cars, etc.).

When I wrote the blog article, it was difficult to get GeoTag information out
of flickr (no search option for "images with GeoTags"). Anyway, I wish more
data was freely accessible...

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cousin_it
Too bad that for commercial use, this information is locked up within Flickr.

