The post has been constructed purely to allow me to link to this image that I’ve just persuaded Heather it’s now ok to mark as public, nothing else below the photo really matters…
…Exhibit A, taken by Heather on the 19th of January, 2006.
Yup, that’s one of the very rough concept drawings that later turned into Flickr maps. Originally we were just going to allow users to find kittens but decided to expand that out to all photos.
Just after Flickr geotagging was launched, or more precisely just before people were saying stuff like “It’s interesting to see Flickr finally pick-up the ball after we’ve been doing integrated geotagging for over 6 months now”. Kord Campbell wrote a whole post on why Flickr Sucks for ripping off the idea of geotagging photos. Which is all fine, but I need to correct one item, Kord says “we quickly implemented [Google maps]“ which they did, launching it on the 28th of May 2005.
Then “Within a few months [snip] an ad-hoc way of geotagging appeared on Flickr with tags”. This however is wrong, which brings me onto the first geobloggers post on the Flickr Hacks group dated the 2nd of May 2005 here…
The fairly obvious Flickr/Google Maps Hack :)
Rev Dan Catt says:Well it was going to happen sometime.
www.geobloggers.com
Anyone can easily(ish) add photos by adding three tags to a picture, a “geo:lat=xx.xxx”, “geo:lon=xx.xxx” and “geotagged” tag.
[snip]
Which sums it up really “Well it was going to happen sometime”.
That anyone can try and claim thay their site came up with the concept of putting photos on maps is just silly. It’s been going on since people were drawing “Here be Dragons” on ocean maps. People have been trying to link maps with real location information for years, and we’ll all continue to do so, be that drawings, descriptions, audio, photos, video, 3D models, virtual reality and so on.
From my point of view, I started putting Flickr photos on to maps on that 2nd of May 2005 and that’s what I’ve been doing ever since. Originally outside of Flickr and now from the inside.
The details of why it took so long I’ll leave to a much more detailed post when I get back after my week away.
Yeah, and geobloggers was great for a while. Then it disappeared. Nobody could use it. You did your thing and people moved on to systems that were there to use. Flickr’s mapping kind of sucks because they use Yahoo maps, but at least it’s there. YuanCC has bugs, but it’s _there_ for people to use.