Microsoft’s Virtual Earth has a phenomenal addition to Live Search Maps that allows users to create virtual aerial tours. Here’s an example using pictures from my trip to Kauai:
The tours can be exported as a video file and uploaded to a video sharing site (as above) or shared by link to Live Search Maps. Like many such links on AJAX sites, it doesn’t preserve the correct state. Click “Tour in 3D” in the upper left and “aerial” above the map for best effect.
Tours can be created manually by pushing pins into a map. The service also plays nicely with GeoRSS, GPX, KML or KMZ files. The above tour was imported from my flickr pictures. (Unfortunately, flickr caps geo exports to the most recent 20 pictures per search.)
Major cities, like San Francisco, benefit from 3D models of key buildings. The blue line in the video is the tracklog.
Both of these tours were created using the default settings. You can also customize the view shown at each location by rotating, tilting or zooming. I don’t see an option to playback the full tracklog.
I finally got around to uploading the last of the pictures from my Kauai trip in February. Between the two of us, Wanita and I shot more than 1,000 pictures. I’ve narrowed them down to a highlights tour of 56. More are available on flickr.
Kauai remains one of my favorite places on Earth. We thought the “Scenic Overlook” signs were a bit ridiculous (we saw about five) given that most of the island is a panorama of natural beauty.
Unfortunately, the island is being rapidly developed. If you’ve dreamed of going, you should go sooner rather than later. A large swath of the Southern part of the island is blocked off for a giant construction project as they build more malls and timeshares.
As always, there’s a map of the trip. (Some of the geocoding will be slightly off because Wanita wandered away from the GPS.)
Why Lane Hartwell Popped the ‘Bubble’ Video (WIRED) - The hilarious video by the Richter Scales parodying the Web 2.0 bubble to the tune of “We Didn’t Start the Fire” disappeared from the Web after photographer Lane Hartwell filed a takedown request with YouTube. A picture she took of Valleywag’s Owen Thomas was used for a fraction of a second in the parody video. Although she’s gotten a lot of flack for it, it’s hard to fault her for protecting her rights as a photographer.
The issue also brings up the challenge that the Web and amateurs pose for people like Hartwell. It’s easy to steal commercial content and it’s easy to find freely usable “good enough” amateur content. When flickr makes it so easy to find pictures that you are free to use, why go through the hassle of improperly using a commercial image? (The picture in this post is a Creative Commons image from Telstar Logistics.)
Amazon Ordered to End Free Delivery on Books in France (IDG News Service) - The French high court rules that Amazon is selling books too cheaply because free shipping constitutes an illegal discount. Under French law, booksellers can’t discount a book by more than 5% off the list price. (Discounts of 50% on bestsellers aren’t uncommon in the United States.) via Dave Smith
Search: 2010 - A Review (WebProNews) - A look at the future of search with Marissa Mayer from Google, Larry Cornett from Yahoo!, Justin Osmer from Microsoft and Daniel Read from Ask. More of the usual stuff. Usability consultant Jakob Nielsen speaks of moving from “relevance” to “usefulness” to evaluate search. Good luck measuring that. via Jim Simmons
Dodd Challenges Google to Provide Leadership in the Digital World (WIRED) - Presidential Noshot Chris Dodd speaks at the Google campus about providing leadership in the new information driven economy. He chastens Google for their approach to China and encourages them to stand up to governments (including our own) when they seek to trample the rights of their citizens.
My friends who’ve seen me walk around with a GPS as I take pictures on vacation or hikes think I’m a little bit odd. But apparently, I’m not the only one. In the 15 months since Flickr officially supported geotagging, more than 35 million pictures have been geotagged — enough that they can launch Flickr Places to show them off.
One of my big complaints with most travel sites is that they downplay the visual and visceral elements that make travel fun. At Flickr Places, that’s front and center. Places offers a gorgeous travelogue of places around the world. You can see pictures, Flickr groups about the location and connect with photographers.
A tag cloud shows the top tags for an area; this sounds more useful than it is. Most places I searched came up with words like clouds, sunset, people, church. It’d be nice if the universal words were thrown out and the focus places on words that are unique or much more common for an area.
I’d also like to be able to zoom in on the map and see where the most photographed places are. (There are some data quality issues with this, but they’re manageable.)
Flickr also changed the way maps are presented. Although the maps and overall presentation are more visually appealing, some key functionality was lost. In the previous version, the map represented your search. If you zoomed in or out, the new map defined the boundaries. As a result, you could see new pictures that didn’t appear in the other view.
The World Map view now provides a tag visualization that shows the latest tags from around the world. (See my earlier coverage of World Explorer from Yahoo! Research.)
Here’s a fun trick: copy the KML link from the bottom of a flickr page and paste it into the Google Maps search box. Here are my favorite flickr pictures plotted on Google Maps. (Click through to view it full size.)
There are many things I hate about Facebook’s Photos application:
It doesn’t support high resolution photos.
I get a Java cache error every time I try to upload pictures.
You can’t search the pictures.
It doesn’t use commonly provided EXIF data, including timestamps and orientation.
It won’t read tags and captions embedded in pictures.
I can’t see my pictures on a map.
Flickr doesn’t have any of these problems. But flickr lacks one thing that makes Facebook’s Photos truly compelling: the social graph. People tagging is the basis of an incredibly powerful distribution and recirculation engine.
I uploaded the same set of pictures to flickr and to Facebook last night.
When I added the people tags, each of the people I tagged received a message that there was a new picture of them online. Who wouldn’t want to log in to see what kind of potentially embarrassing pictures might be up there? When they logged in to view the pictures, some of them also left comments. Which triggered a message to me saying people left comments. And then I logged in to see the comments.
I didn’t know all of the people in my pictures. One of my friends tagged a few other people in my pictures. Which triggered notifications to those people.
You can also tag people who aren’t on Facebook by providing their email address. Yet another way for Facebook to grow their user base.
People who weren’t in the pictures — my friends or friends of people I tagged — saw messages in their news feeds, furthering the distribution.
In less than 24 hours, the pictures received four comments. The same pictures on flickr didn’t receive any.
Regular readers of this blog know that I’m a big proponent of geotagging. As I’ve gotten deeper into Facebook, I’ve also become a big fan of people tagging.
People tagging allows you to uniquely identify people in pictures. Tagging can also be a collaborative effort. When I’ve uploaded pictures with people I don’t know, my friends have filled in the gaps.
Viewers can rollover the picture and the names are displayed.
It’s surprisingly addictive and it forms the basis of the real power of Facebook photos. More on that later.
It also raises privacy issues, beyond those that I discussed yesterday. On flickr, I deliberately don’t include last names because I don’t want the pictures to be searchable in general purpose search engine. I’ve been more comfortable uniquely identifying people in Facebook’s more closed environment.
Still, I wonder about the database that I’m helping to create. Given the enormous popularity of Facebook photos — it’s the number one photo sharing site — it’s likely that Facebook has the largest privately held database of individually identifiable pictures in the country. It would make a great training set for image recognition software. You’ve got uniquely identifiable people in a variety of situations and camera angles.
So far, most public efforts at image recognition haven’t been very successful. Riya, which started out as a visual people search tool, used tags and other metadata to help improve the results. Even that wasn’t good enough. Riya has largely refocused on identifying merchandise.
A common refrain in journalism schools is “show don’t tell.” It means to make your writing sufficiently descriptive that readers can visualize what you’re talking about. Instead of writing that the “laptop looked old,” you should write “The laptop bore the logo of a long deceased company; the keys were sticky with years of donut crumbs and oil from fingers. The casing bore a tinge of yellow.”
Technology gives us an easier way to show: pictures. Unfortunately, most newspaper sites haven’t mastered this. They’re still stuck in a print mindset where the written word is king and photos are expensive window dressing. They edit photos for the one or two spaces they have in the paper.
Consider this story about the North American Sandsculpting Championship in Virginia Beach. It’s a story that’s screaming for pictures. The photographer who shot that story very likely shot dozens of pictures. They were edited down to the two that are shown.
In print, where you only have so much space and color costs money, this makes perfect sense. Online it doesn’t. Every photo that adds to that story should be online. (Except photos with serious exposure problems, nearly identical photos, etc.) Compare the two photos that are online with the selection of pictures I took at the event.
The two photos from the The Virginian-Pilot are certainly better than any of mine; but mine do a better job of giving users the flavor of walking down the beach and seeing the sculptures. My photos are also geotagged, making them easy to search for on maps. (This can be done by carrying a $150 GPS around while shooting.)
Slideshows are extremely popular among readers. They are also an easy way to tell the story better and get a lot of extra page views. Especially when the people who are in the pictures send the link around.
Flickr is one of the treasures of the Web. You can find high quality images on just about every topic imaginable. It’s great for sharing with friends, planning vacations and illustrating blog posts. It also raises a lot of issues relating to intellectual property, privacy rights and publicity rights.
The New York Times has a piece on the intersection of social networks, privacy rights and intellectual property. Virgin Mobile in Australia used a picture of Alison Chang posted on flickr as part of a billboard. The picture had been uploaded by photographer Justin Ho-Wee Wong, who assigned a Creative Commons license, allowing for commercial use of his picture.
Under U.S. law (which I don’t think would apply in this case), there are two separate issues. One is the rights of the photographer who took the picture. It seems that in case, the license provided by Wong allowed for use by Virgin Mobile. The other issue is the the rights of the person in the photo. Generally speaking, your picture cannot be used for commercial purposes without your consent. It can however be used for editorial purposes; if you’re at a news event, a newspaper or TV station doesn’t have to have your permission to show you.
Of course, this brings up the issue of defining “commercial purposes” and “consent.” Is Google Street View a commercial use? What if they put ads around the Street View images? Many semi-public places like sports arenas and theme parks state (often in fine print on the back of your ticket) that you give consent to commercial use of your likeness by entering. These same places prohibit you from using pictures that you take inside for commercial purposes.
I’ve thought a lot about these two issues as I’ve uploaded pictures to flickr. I typically post pictures with a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license. People are free to use my pictures for noncommercial purposes, as long as they credit me. They can also make derivative works, as long as those works are also shared. In two cases that I know of, my pictures have appeared in print publications.
The other issue is privacy. I try to edit out (or at least mark private) any images that might be embarrassing to my friends. I don’t include people’s last names in the tags or descriptions to prevent directed searches. I’ve had a couple of requests to take down or edit images of friends, which I honor.
Why Lane Hartwell Popped the ‘Bubble’ Video
