geobloggers

I was curious where the world’s most interesting place was. So I quickly threw together a map and some JavaScript to figure it out. Turns out it’s the south end of City Hall Park, NY, right next to the site of World Trade Center. But I’ll get back to that in a second.

It’s all very back of the napkin stuff, here’s a ‘heat map’ of San Francisco and I’ll explain…

The idea behind the above map, is that ‘Hot’ is defined as the place with the most, most interesting photos. I start by grabbing the 250 most interesting photos for the area of the map using the API, splitting the map into 25 sections and working out how many of the interesting photos fall into each bucket. The one with the most, most interesting photos, is, errrr… the most interesting.

Once more we’re talking flickr interestingness, rather than relevant location interesingness (that’ll come in time).

I then grab the 250 most interesting photos for each of those sections and split up the results again. I’ve done this down to three levels (the above is showing two levels), but you really don’t gain much for the length of time it takes.

In the case of SF above, apparently the place with the most interesting photo, and therefore the most interesting place to take photos (although this point is easily argued against) is around Market, Union Square. The next step is to zoom into that area and run the code again, indeed that’s what I did from a world level and I’ve posted some of the maps from that below.

Like I said before, this is a quick and dirty hack, with much room for refinement. For a start you’re probably looking for interesting photos from lots of photographers, rather than an area that has lots of ‘interesting’ photos from just a single user. There’s also a big difference from what you’d want as a general overview, as in this case and an on-the-ground walking around case, which I’ll post about tomorrow.

Notes:

‘Heat Maps’ are a good way of getting an overview of what’s going on, but there are several different metrics by which you can create them, interestingness being one, rate of photos posted and even change in the rate of photos posted are another couple.

Heat maps are great for quickly drilling down to a location, before moving onto the more traditional display of photos/posts/audio/whatever on maps. Each have strong and weak points, currently we only have the latter in Flickr.

Being on the inside, I have faster and more direct access to the database, which I’ll probably be making full use of, but in this instance I wanted to do something that anyone can do via the API.

FortiusOne have some cool stuff going on with Heat Maps over here [via Ogle Earth].

Now onto the most interesting place in the world. In each case I zoomed into the ‘most interesting’ 25th of the map and ran the code again. I’m just posting every other photo rather than the whole lot, although if you’re keen it’s easy to work out the naming convention.

The first one looks a little odd because of the map projection.

P.S. Imagine these zoom in with a click and whir sound, James Bond or Bladerunner Fashion.

Filed under: flickr, maps