Thursday, October 18, 2007

Web 2.0 Summit - Flickr's New Geotagging Design Seen At Web 2.0 Summit Lunch

As I write this, I'm having lunch at Maxfield's, a nice restaurant in the Sheraton Palace, a place where, according to Attorney General Jerry Brown, a president got shot in. I don't know which one, off the top of my head.

At any rate, it's pretty crowded with people, and all of a sudden. And by their the tags around their necks, they're here for Tim O'Reilly's Web 2.0 Summit. Having just presented my friend Monte Poole with an award from the San Francisco Black Journalists Association, I was hungry and decided to not just stop by but gain some information.

One of the interesting online devices I've seen is what appears to be a new Flickr application. It seems to mate photos with geographic location so that if you press on a part of a map, it matches all of the photos you have for that part of the map into one area called, "San Francisco" for example.

As the people demonstrating this were at a table nearby, I managed to get this video of what they were seeing.




According to Paul Miller over at Nodalities, Flickr was at the Summit to report ...

a replacement for existing geotagging service...

115,000 geotagged photos per day, one every 1.3 seconds.

Merge tagging and locations to deliver a new ui that scales better to handle growth in usage.

“But there's more...”

Current 'interestingness' algorithm for photos can also be applied to the geolocation, creating pages of 'iconic' images at a given location.


That was what I saw, and what you're seeing here. I wish I'd turned the camera over their sooner as there were more interesting screen shots I could have taken.

Bionic Woman - Third and Fourth Episodes Are Terrific!

The Bionic Woman's shaping up to be "must see" TV for me. The last two episdodes -- Sisterhood and Faceoff -- further develop the dysfunctional set of relationshiips surrounding Jamie Sommers, who's played by my new Favorite Actress Michelle Ryan: with her Bionic "sister" Sarah Corvus (Emmy Award-level performed by Katie Sackofff); with Isiah Washington's Antonio Pope, who it seems she both wants to kiss and then killl at the same time; with her little sister Becca, and of course with Jonas, who actually seems to have a heart when it matters most.

What makes the show work is that it's stuffed full of these kinds of relationships. So much so that you can't wait to see what's going to happen next week.