I’ve just spent the last few days in London rushing around the place, not really having a clue where I was going. Meaning that most of the time I’d rather jump into a cab than take the tube.

Well that and the heat, the Underground is hot, taxis have Air Conditioning. Also I generally don’t know where the tube stations are … however if I had this …

(YouTube Link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5fZk0HaIs4s)

… then I probably would grab the Tube. As one of the comments on YouTube says …

“You missed a trick here. Surely the app could also work out my average walking speed so that as well as the distance to destination it could also display time to walk to it? :)”

To which I’d just add that it should also show when the next train is due to arrive. Allowing you to figure out if you need to speed up, or can relax.

Although not yet approved acrossair are one of the first groups of surely many many more to get AR apps out there. This is just the beginning. I also hope more people concentrate on these specific apps then general ones that’ll try and do everything.

(oh and more games plz)

[Via: LDN]

“She folds and cuts individual maps by region to produce clothes not to be worn but rather hung, mostly pleated parochial dresses and button-down shirts made out of modern maps. Universal by nature, her work is popular wherever shown.”

Several more at the site: Elisabeth Lecourt at Fairfax Contemporary Art Galleries, something to go with Map Shoes :)

Via: LDN

I had the happy fortune to read two articles back-to-back; Hypertext and Our Collective Destiny: Tim Berners-Lee talking back in 1995 …

… and Slide 43 of 44 of Matt Webb’s reboot11 talk.

The thread that joins them together, Tim Berners-Lee talked a lot back then about how he hoped the Internet would help solve problems …

“It is, then, a good time 50 years on to sit back and consider to what extent we have actually made life easier. We have access to information: but have we been solving problems? Well, there are many things it is much easier for individuals today than 5 years ago. Personally I don’t feel that the web has made great strides in helping us work as a global team.“

Although this talk was 14 years ago I think it still applies. The web for all the “great strides” is still right in it’s infancy, no matter how developed we currently think it is, with it’s Flash and it’s CSS and it’s HTML5 and whatever.

Collecting Information

We are still primarily at the information collecting stage. Wikipedia is collecting information, Flickr is collecting photos, Facebook is collecting users, OpenStreetMap is collecting data.

Personally at the end of my time at Flickr, and even now, I’m not ultimately interested in the how and why of collecting more stuff, I’m interested in doing something will all that information.

The comment about “we have access to information: but have we been solving problems?” struck a chord. And I thought “Yeah, we should be solving problems”.

Problems

I think there are two types of problems…

1. Obvious Problems; OpenStreetMap collects information to solve the problem of not having information. Wikipedia collects information to solve the problem of not having information, etc.
2. Non-Obvious Problems; (see I’m good at this) The problems that we realise can only be solved when we’ve gathered a sufficient amount of information.

This was gearing me up for the Problem Solving Stage, we’re getting better at collecting information, still not so good at solving problems.

However …

Inventing Culture

Matt Webb, on Slide 43 said …

“Because when you contribute, when you participate in culture, when you’re no longer solving problems, but inventing culture itself, that is when life starts getting interesting.”

… and because Schulze &amp Webb and all who sail in her are way smarter and far more future thinking than me, I tend to listen to them, even if I don’t fully understand it all :)

From this I take away that, if, we really want to be smart we need to look beyond collecting information, beyond solving problems, to changing culture and inventing new forms of culture.

I think that Flickr is kinda 80% collecting, 16% problem solving and 4% inventing culture.

I haven’t decided what my 100 hours are going to be, but I’m going to try and look beyond problem solving as being a topic.

An Example with Open Street Map

Stage 1: Collecting Information, we’ve seen now that OSM is getting better at collecting information, so …

Stage 2: Solving Problems. Well what are maps good for, in the scope of mass cultural/social consumption, i.e. what do I use them for rather than someone with a specific job?

Well, I use maps to get somewhere.

But do I really need a map for that? I really just need a compass and a bearing and then walk/drive in that direction until I eventually get to the place I want to go.

The only problem with that, is that I may not get to where I want to go in time. So for me, a map solves a time based problem rather than a location based on, and I suspect that applies to most users of maps.

Stage 3: The problem of getting to somewhere on time can either be solved with maps or removed by a cultural shift.

Leaving the question; What can we do to remove the need to be at certain unknown places at a set time and in the long run, the need to collect information for maps at all?

Photos by revdancatt, russelldavies and we-make-money-not-art.

Flickr just released Mobile Nearby for “smartphones” ie the iphone and that other one. Just go to m.flickr.com and there should be a new link that figures out where you are and, well, shows you nearby photos.

Two quick things;

1) I’m still waiting for broadband to be connect here, so I’m doing everything via the iphone. Of course version 3.0 came out while we were up in the sky that I can’t d/l ’cause I have no internets. And I can’t tether my laptop to the iPhone to d/l it because I don’t have tethering.

Also can’t copy and paste links, you’ll have to find the code.flickr.com/blog post yourself.

2) Interestingly Google map tile :)

After the last post I’ve been thinking about Ants* a lot, but more of that later (later time-wise not post-wise), in the mean time I missed this post from Fast Company a couple of days ago …

iPhone Augmented Reality

Which, while not being earth shatteringly insightful does add to the build up of interest in the subject.

However, how long until we can talk about the subject without mentioning a way to find the nearest Coffee shop? Stabby stab stabbity stab stab stab. Please, no more coffee shop/pizza ordering examples for maps/geo/AR, k.thnx.

*Ants

Last night I was mulling over the new iPhone and 3.0OS stuff, and then Brady goes and covers most of it anyway: What the iPhone 3GS and 3.0 OS Means for Geo Devs.

Really the two elements I was most interested in were the Compass for pretty much the reasons Brady (damn him!) states … the Augmented Reality bit. Regular readers will already know I have a soft spot for AR … Where I’m actually living in augmented reality, Jefferson Airplane and what does this mean for photos and Nearly Augmented Reality – Step 5.

So when the phone knows roughly where you are and roughly which way you’re facing you can start to do some fancy/interesting, or at the very least something that overlays information based on your current location.

Throw on top of that the Camera refinements which, once again, sigh, Brady points out means it’ll have a better time reading QR Codes both close up and now slightly further away. I’ve never had any trouble myself using Optiscan from airsource on the iPhone. But it should help it pick other markings placed to help an app key into exact location.

… oh wait, third thing, the Peer-to-Peer API, useful for groking a location if you don’t know where you are, based on people nearby who do. Probably the best introduction to why this works and is good is Leonard’s talk from last year’s WhereCamp: Proximity and Relative Location: Theory and Practice.

Hopefully now it’ll be possible to prove the location aware, information/data sharing, roaming mesh-network can now be done on readily available consumer hardware.

iPhones are the new ants.

Photo by grateful420angelina

Oh #spymaster, I saw this comment posted to twitter the other day …

“decides to stop following everyone who uses #spymaster. Do you guys even know what twitter is for?”

… I have no arguments with the “stop following” part, everyone is free to do what they want. It’s the whole knowing what something is for that bugs me. My short answer is this …

“the street finds its own uses for things”

William Gibson – Burning Chrome – 1982

… the aphorism that has also become somewhat of a manifesto for people around my age who share(d) an interest in technology, Sci-Fi, Hip-Hop, 1950 electronics magazines, post-future urbanism, The KLF/ORB/FSOL and flying cars, while growing up. Don’t tell me we’ve turned our back on it?

The slightly longer answer …

There are many websites and even technologies that started off as one thing and become something else. An example randomly off the top of my head is Flickr, which has a fairly well documented history of starting as a game and turning into a rather successful photo (and video) sharing website.

And you know, people have turned this whole internet thing from a military and general system for academic communication into something you can *gasp* play games on, don’t you know what its for?

Kids, get your Galactic Empire off my X.25 Pad!

Experience tells me that on websites with large communities there are many camps, two of which we’re concerned about here…

1. The very vocal minority, often early adopters, very techno-savy, who have strong opinions of what a service should or shouldn’t be.
2. The vast majority of users who just carry on using the website on a daily basis and don’t really care about the finer details of technical implementation as long as their friends are there and they can carry on using it with too much friction.

Take for example the whole #fixreplies firestorm that hit a while back. In a nutshell, Twitter removed an option, that was turned off by default anyway and that only 3% of people turned on …

… and I’m guessing of those 3% most are from the early adopter, techno-savy group. Who of course noticed when it went away. But having it turned on pounded the servers for everyone else.

When you build a huge, massively used system it’s generally a good idea to build in the ability to progressively turn bits off should it become unstable. If turning one of those bits back on would make the whole system unstable again and magically instantly fixing it isn’t an option, then you leave it off.

The vocal minority get pissed (and those in the tech industry should probably know better), the vast majority (97%) carry on as normal without noticing a thing other than increased uptime and reliability. Or you keep the vocal minority happy and screw your main user base.

So what does this have to do with Spymaster?

Well, some people seem to be getting a bit upset about how the game uses twitter and how people chose to play the game. I’m not directing this at Joe and his bullet pointed list of actions specifically, he just happens to be linked to from this TechCrunch post.

But here’s the thing, the way I play the game (details below) introduces me to a lot of users I wouldn’t normally interact with. Most of them have around 11-190 followers, have a twitter stream full of spymaster tweets, @replies to followers and people they are following and general chit-chat. Of the people they are @replying to, some seem to have nothing to do with #spymaster and other follow the same pattern.

These are the from the vast majority of users pool, users who are, and I can hardly even begin to believe this, having fun. Enjoying playing the game and even adding commentary above that added by spymaster itself …

“@revdancatt HOW DARE YOU”

“@revdancatt Don’t know who you are, but you and I are done professionally! It’s on, I tell you! It’s on!”

“flickr celeb @revdancatt keeps wounding me. I’m gonna go cry in the corner”

“@revdancatt — Sir, THIS WILL NOT STAND!!!! [pounds shoe on table fer dramatic effect -- Odor Eater falls out, blunting aforesaid effect...]”

I’ve even seen accounts that look so new (default icon, only a few followers, all tweets are #spymaster ones) that they’ve obviously been set up to play spymaster. Some of these will be people creating a second account so as not to annoy their friends (how wise) but others will be people who have now joined twitter, just to play. For them Twitter is a gaming platform first and foremost.

“the street finds its own uses for things”

William Gibson – Burning Chrome – 1982

I think that roughly makes my point: If you don’t like all the #spymaster tweets from people you are following, unfollow them or ask them to stop, it’s that simple.

“But wait!” you may say “If we the vocal minority don’t speak up, Twitter will never fix stuff, like blocking hash tags!”

Well a) it’s not “Broken” so doesn’t really need to be “fixed”. It’s “Broken” for how you use it. b) I’ll get back to that in the section “Customized Clients or a new Twitter” if you want to skip ahead.

How I play Spymaster, a rough gameplay analysis and why the @spymaster Twitters are important.

So I like to dissect game and try and figure out the mechanics, find optimal paths and so on, and this is what I’ve come up with for Spymaster^*.

1) I appear to make most of my money from people attacking me and failing …

… To put it into context, I’m only level 3 in the above screen-shot, doing “Tasks” will earn me about 1k and I can only do a few before having to wait a while for my energy (a limited game resource) to fill up again. An average failed attack will give me around 18k, which I could “earn” in around two hours of actually paying attention.

2) I earn more from a failed attack against me than I lose from a successful one. The below shot shows 6 (co-ordinated) attacks, each person won and lost an attack (the last one killed me, which seemed to have no effect other than make we wait 15mins before I can play again, fwiw) …

… overall I lost £5,832.07 and “won” £28,350.35 for a net gain of £22.45k all for very little effort … but still some effort …

So it seems that if they are high level and attacking you (a lower level player) and they win … they don’t get much as they are attacking below their level. If they lose then they lose a whole bunch of cash to you, seemly as punishment for attacking down levels, but also because they probably have more of it than you.

In essence my tactic (which is just a tactic btw, not the best tactic), can be summed up as … attack people above your level, in the hope that you can provoke them into attacking you back, as that’s when you get the money. Also, because they are higher level they’re probably earning more money from tasks and so on.

Just one more thing though, normally attacking (or being attacked by) people high above your level is a bad thing, so any winnings I get instantly get spent on arming myself to the teeth, I suspect I have a disproportionate amount of hardware for my level :)

So how would you go about finding people who are a few levels above you?

Well handily Twitter appears to be part of the game, just fancy that!


http://twitter.com/#search?q=I just reached level 4
http://twitter.com/#search?q=I just reached level 5
http://twitter.com/#search?q=I just reached level 6


… you can construct other searches too, depending on what you’re looking for.

Clicking through to the players we can start to get a feel for what kind of target they are, here’s “billyforce”, we can see what he’s been upto and how many followers he has, etc …

Now the good news for people who hate #spymaster …

A general essence of games, is that you shouldn’t give information away to the other players, or at least you should know more about them, then they do about you.

Meaning one of the best overall tactics to playing #spymaster is to shut the fuck up. Fortunately for me lots of people don’t do that.

Consider these two options:

1. You want to track how often player A attacks and wins, and how often other players are attacked by A. How fast player A moves up the levels and if they are spending their money on safehouses.
2. You want to target a user who has just purchased a safehouse (which generates cash) and then gone to sleep … so you can let their income from the safehouse build up without them spending it. Which means you’re looking for a player in a timezone ahead of you.

In that second case, at around 3-4pm I could start looking at players from the UK, where it’s 11-12pm for them, searching for people securing safehouses …

http://twitter.com/#search?q=spymaster secured a safe house

… once identified, keep an eye out for lack of tweets for around 5 hours and then attack.

Both of these two cases sounds like a lot of hard work, something computers are much better at keeping tabs on. If only the game had some messaging system, and ideally where the players were located in the world and an API. That would allow a computer to keep track of these things … oh wait, Twitter …

Customized Clients or a new Twitter

But first, back to the original “problem”, to re-cap, I’d rather Twitter spent their time improving stability and scaling, rather than the ability to filter out #hashtags on the website for the vocal minority (actually it’d be nice if they could do both, but that’s not always very practical).

Anyway, I suspect that most cutting-edge users who are upset by #spymaster use twitter clients anyway. I’d be surprised if after this that the next updates to popular clients didn’t include the ability to suppress #hashtags.

So we can built twitter clients that exclude all mention of #spymaster, good!

Now what if we build one that keeps track of only #spymaster comments? We can use a combination of the URLs I use above …


http://twitter.com/#search?q=I just reached level 6


… to discover players, attempt to discern where in the world they live for the timezone. Then once it’s found the players, consume their streams to monitor progression through the game, purchases and attacks. It wouldn’t be too much of a stretch to find quickly rising players with an appropriate number of followers.

The other thing these clients can do, is then share their information via twitter using their own #hashtag with other clients, allowing for a distributed network to track playing statistics and so on.

But, while do-able is probably a bit much for #spymaster. Not however for the more sophisticated games that will surly follow.

As web applications become more complex, a lot of focus can be put on the internal messaging and queueing needed to keep things running and scaling. If game developers can offload a bunch of this messaging (both client facing and internal), notifications and user authentication to a system that already has the issues of scaling and so-on nailed, then there’s no reason for them not to.

Using Twitter as a backbone or infrastructure to a game isn’t a bad idea, and for players Twitter just becomes a gaming platform with extra social aspects thrown on-top if they want it.

Is that what I want Twitter to turn into? No not really, would it surprise me, hummmm, not really, people like playing games it’s in our nature.

It does point to the possibility of creating something like Twitter that handles all the messaging and authing, the scaling and APIs, that games (or whatever) can build on-top of. The nice thing about this is that …

1. A user, can play #spymaster and whatever new games come out on a dedicated “platform” rather than mix it in with the Twitter they already have (but remember for some people, twitter as a gaming platform is already the only thing they use it for)
2. A user can play more than one game on the system, with all the messages for each game being mixed in with each other. Clients, blog-widgets and so on can separate them out and display them however they like.
3. Other games could be built on-top of the mechanics of already existing games
4. Meta-game and analysis can take place by aggregating all the data.

With Twitter extending their API, location based knowledge and stability, if they threw in private groups (for internal game messaging, oh and for a cost) and the option to piggy-back on their system in return for adverts placed in the messages. Then it becomes a pretty exciting platform for game development, if that game is narrative/location/social/casual driven.

So I’m sorry everyone who hates seeing #spymaster “spam” but I’m all for more games that’ll build up a rich history of plays, turns and actions. Hopefully your twitter clients will save you while the rest of us have fun.

;)

Bonus Controversial Statement for people who have gotten this far.

As big as World of Warcraft is, with it’s super rich graphics and immersion, it’s a closed system. With LUA you can build add-ons within the game, but it’s very hard to extend the games interaction out into the web. New “casual” games built on systems like Twitter(clone) that therefor have APIs for “free”, can be built out in all sorts of directions, and can be easily integrated and played on many different devices, from rich front-ended 3D games, to web-browsers, to iPhones, to real-life meetings and QR-Codes.

Just the Auction House in World of Warcraft can be a fun game in itself, but you can’t get at it from anywhere else other then the game. EVE online has broken away from this by having tools they tell you when you’ve leveled up a skill in the game, thus pulling you back to logging in to set the next skill away.

Unless games like WoW start to have more out of game interaction, they’ll finally get toppled by newer games that do.

Which isn’t #spymaster …

yet.

^*I’ve set aside the whole number of followers part for simplicity.

Where 2.0 has finished now, although it carries on with WhereCamp. It was fun and the first one I’ve been to where I didn’t have to do any talking, which makes it doubly fun, possible for everyone. I missed Wednesday, but managed some of the workshops on Tuesday and talks on Thursday.

There are a few thing I want to comment on (new Yahoo! stuff, Flickr Shapefiles for example) but for the time being… Making Maps.

… quoting Kellan always add an extra level of sophistication to a presentation!

Anyway, there were a couple of workshops; Maps from Scratch: Online Maps from the Ground Up (where that slide above is from) and Be a Cartographer: Thinking About the Design of Maps, that suggest that people are looking beyond just adding maps to sites and throwing pins on to show data, to actually thinking about the form and function of maps.

Obvious people have been thinking about the form and function of maps for a long time, I’m just saying it’s “new” in the way that online maps were “new” a few years ago.

(You can find out more about Maps From Scratch at http://www.mapsfromscratch.com/).

What I particularly enjoyed about Maps from Scratch from the Stamen team is that what they do is very much like the Penn & Teller Cup and Balls Routine …

… in that, by using clear cups Penn & Teller show that what makes the “magic” in the trick is not concealing secret knowledge but just by being very good at what they do, the slight of hand, distractions and so on.

And that’s Stamen, Michal showed us all the tools (mapnik, TileCache etc.) that they use, the mystical command-line incantations needs to summon new tiles into existence and so on. Michal started by showing us a selection of finished tile sets (Cup and Balls with the Red Plastic cups) and then, from start-to-finish producing a new set of map tiles from thin air, including the how-to part.

And yet, even knowing how it’s all done, being able to watch it over and over again, it’ll take a fair bit of practice before getting that good.

Overall, impressed.

Yay, it’s Where 2.0 time again, which means heading off inordinately early in the morning. Last year was at Millbrae …

… this year San Jose. Where [badum] I’m hoping to catch-up with the many interesting people who make the yearly pilgrimage. Somehow this seems to happen via each of our Profile Pages (only slightly edited from last year) or, most likely, in the bar :) I’m around Tuesday and Thursday, but not Wednesday, fwiw.

I’m not, as it happens, presenting this year due to (back then upcoming) entertaining timing issues ;) but the wonderful Aaron Straup Cope is with a live performance of The Shape of Alpha…

History and geography remain powerful anchors through which we orient ourselves to our communities and the world at large. This is reflected in the practice and evolution of story-telling, the interpretation and naming of place and the disputes that sometimes follow. As locative technologies play an increasingly important role in all aspects of daily life so too will the ability to interpret and contextualize the abundance of data produced in the precise but distant language of machines.

… which I’m make super-extra-special effort to go and see. I’m also going to get my hands dirty with Maps from Scratch: Online Maps from the Ground Up, because maps are fun!

Hopefully see you there, assuming I don’t get lost on the way.

Places page: Millbrae, featured photo; How to Not Meet Girlz by cstoller.

“… at an airport the individual is defined, not by the tangible ground mortgaged into his soul for the next 40 years, but the indeterminate flicker of flight numbers trembling on an annunciator screen. We are no longer citizens with civic obligations, but passengers for whom all destinations are theoretically open, our lightness of baggage mandated by the system. Airports have become a new kind of discontinuous city, whose vast populations, measured by annual passenger throughputs, are entirely transient, purposeful and, for the most part, happy.”

J.G. Ballard 1930 – 2009

Airports hold a particular fascination, dystopian near-miss 1950s futures forked somewhere back in 1967. Like miniature Metropolises, with shops and gyms and showers and bars, utilities, police forces and mail services, museums, hotels and meeting rooms, magic moving walkways with phasing soundtracks all of their own. Towering brave architecture, archingly high ceilings hinting at wind blown Tallships setting sail out towards exotic lands and the sinking horizon. Or slabs of post-military-undustrial concrete, smoothed to the curves needed to accommodates the passing hordes of a yet unwritten Romero movie.

So what of these mini cities?

Dopplr sends me emails, citing when my friends are traveling around the world. At any one time, give or take a few days, there’s generally someone I know passing through an airport. Millions of other people are flowing through these citadels to modern travel each day.

Crunching down time, overlapping those days, collapsing each airport to its own naked singularity, we all have the same general experiences, move in unison on the same magic walkways, each taking our own 2.5 hours to pass through the system.

When I see that someone is flying to Chicago, I can instantly hear the distinctive clack clack clack sound of suitcase wheels on the O’Hare tiles. London Heathrow, Terminal 4, the long distant but still present dull bitter tang of worn Silk Cut imbued carpets. SFO, the monorail symmetry and looping arrival/departure roads.

Back to Flickr.

Flickr (to me) is about more than just photos (and videos) it’s about sharing experiences. People take photos to record their story of passing though a location or event. Flickr collects and collates those stories. That’s kinda where the Places idea grew from.

Places pages are for Cities, and Towns and Villages … and now even neighborhoods, for people treading the same footsteps but at different times. For many of us, the Airport is also a Place …

… and yet, a while back if you geotagged a photo taken at Heathrow Airport (for example) Flickr would say it was taken in the London Borough of Hounslow. When you arrive, depart or pass through Heathrow Airport, you don’t really think “My, that London Borough of Hounslow is a terribly busy place” while at the same time Hounslow probably doesn’t think of itself as having 1/4 million people passing through it each day … even though this is true.

Which is why, at some point, it changed, to this…

http://www.flickr.com/places/LHR
… and this …
http://www.flickr.com/places/LAX
… and this …
http://www.flickr.com/places/FRA
… and this …
http://www.flickr.com/places/CDG
… and this …
http://www.flickr.com/places/AMS
… and this …
http://www.flickr.com/places/HKG
… and this …
http://www.flickr.com/places/ORD
… and this …
http://www.flickr.com/places/SFO

Well, you get the idea …

Collecting together our transient, purposeful and, for the most part, happy airport experiences.

Photos from Daniel H. Agostini aka dhammza, Telstar Logistics, heather and straup.

http://www.fluffykittens.com/projects/panda2

Very alpha, you kinda need a fast machine and Firefox/Safari. More information here and here.

That is all :)

I can now officially say that after nearly 4 years I’m no longer working at Flickr, today was my last day, and I think it’s fair to say I’ll miss it terribly. There’s no other job quite like it. I’ll miss the people, I’ll miss the coding and I’ll miss the blogging. And besides, where else can you get to build rainbow vomiting pandas?

To put a little background around it, we (The Catt Family) are moving back to the UK (up near Manchester fwiw) for various family reasons. Over the last few weeks/months we’ve been poking around various options, none of which are incredibly practical. So in the end, it’s a case of take the money and run :)

Which means we get to finally have a look around San Francisco as tourists and take some much needed time off (while being paid for it, which is nice) before we fly back to the UK in the next few months.

So there’s two obvious things.

1) What am I doing next, employment?

I have no idea, I’m taking a couple of months off and the most pressing thing is to get back to the UK. The whole family thing is currently > work. Once that’s sorted we’ll think about the next adventure.

Of course if you want to employ someone who’s worked at one of the top photo sharing web sites called Flickr in the World, from when it was still tiny small(ish) and just moved to the US from Canada, to the huge beast it is now, yada yada yada maps blah etc. then drop me an email (unless you are ning.com, in which case could you please stop already).

Especially if you’re Google with a desk free in the Manchester office :)

If you need a reference just ask, well anyone really, you probably already know me by at least 1 degree of separation.

2) Will you still be working on Flickr stuff?

Yes, of course … along with more Processing stuff and poking around at a couple of js libraries I’ve not had a chance to play with yet.

But back to Flickr, I’ve often joked that I could probably get more stuff done working with the Flickr API outside of Flickr than inside. Mainly due to the simple removal of the Lawyers-Layer more than anything else ;) But I’ve always been concerned about doing stuff that clashes with the list of things on the Project board.

It’s not really possible to ethically build something in my free time that, well you know … which is why I wound down geobloggers as a geotagging your Flickr photos on a Google Map site …

… but now, I’m once more freeeeeeee (well in two months anyway) to just build whatever I feel like again + processing + new javascript libraries + map tiles :)

But in the meantime, I think I’m going to enjoy putting my feet up, playing with the kids, messing about in San Francisco, getting a few D&D session in and maybe even, you know, having time to blog a bit more.

Onwards!

Photos by Rev Dan Catt, Matt Biddulph and Dee Adams.

Single Sentence Synopsis: Buildings could offer WiFi photo uploading service, in return for keeping the photos taken of them.

This post is the second part in a trilogy, but also the part that’s been bouncing around in my mind the most. So in Star Wars saga style, I’m writing the middle part first. I’ll get round to parts #1 A World Without Flickr & #3 Peer-to-Peer Photos, a culture tax on your Hard-drive, at some point in the nearish future. For more information see the companion blog post over on my (other) personal blog.

In part one (that hasn’t been written yet) we played out (in theory) the thought experiment of; What would happen if Flickr shut down tomorrow, what happens to all of the photos?

Here’s the next thought experiment of how we could protect against that just a little bit, for a very specific area of photography. This isn’t ground-breaking, or even particularly well thought out btw, I just wanted to get it down :)

a) People, like to take photos of things, those things are often outside and fairly buildingy in nature, indeed in the paper Mapping the World’s Photos (David Crandall, Lars Backstrom, Daniel Huttenlocher and Jon Kleinberg, 3.4MB PDF) out of the 7 top landmarks, 6 are buildingy construction type things … eiffel, trafalgarsquare, tatemodern, bigben, notredame, londoneye and empirestatebuilding. The “trafalgarsquare” acting as the odd one out, being more of a location than a building.

b) Lets imagine that things like Eye-Fi cards exist more and more, sometimes even built into the camera, not forgetting all the cameraphones that also have wireless access. We’ll recall that they also do geotagging with the help of skyhook wireless. And imagine that people all over the world are interacting with architecture and taking photos while doing so, every … single … minute … of the day.

c) The Street as a Platform, which I’m doing a terrible disservice to, but you get the idea. When that person, takes that photo near that building, that building should offer them free WiFi, for them to upload that photo to Flickr (other photosharing services also exist). But in return (with a click-through Terms and Conditions^[1]) it gets to keep a copy of the photo on it’s servers, in the basement. All large buildings should offer that service.

One more thing than that however, whenever a building receives a photo, it exchanges a copy of it with another building within WiFi/internets reach. So the act of a photographer uploading one photo, would put two copies of that photo into two buildings, and a copy of a second photo would jump buildings.

And if you think I’m joking, read Eye Fi Standalone Server – Eye Fi Linux Hacking. It doesn’t necessarily help, but I like to think it adds some validity to my argument :)

a + b + c) Overtime a building will gain a corpus of photos not only of itself but also it’s neighbors.

The building need not do anything else with the photos, its main job it to protect them. Obviously it would be lovely if it did do something with the photos, an ever changing wall of shimmering self images and so on, but yada, yada, copyright, blah, etc.

The city becomes it’s own protective cultural distributed archiving network.

I like to think of this as digital footprints, trails left behind by the many previous travelers through the city. That somehow the building is collecting 1000s of tiny snapshots of people’s memories. They took that photo of that building, because they wanted to remember being there. For someone that angle, position and time was important. For the building it’s a way of recording it’s own history through the eyes of everybody.

I also like to think that this is possible now, to a degree. Not that whole cities need to sign up, but at least one or two buildings or constructions could join in.

To take a stab at a terrible pun …

… what if Cloudgate were built with servers and wireless inside, right from the start, offering to consume the photos taken of it. You take a shot with a wireless enabled camera and it could store a copy for you. It’s building up a library of itself, in all seasons, in all weather. Meanwhile you, have a backup, findable by time and browsing, stored safely in the Cloud!

See, I told you it was a terrible pun! But really, instead of keeping photos stored in the “cloud”, they’re really stored in the urbanized crust.

And that’s pretty much it, see I said it wasn’t groundbreaking, but I also think it really aught to start happening. Anyway, they’ve probably figured out how to do all this and more at Museums and the Web #matw already :)

But what of normal everyday at home snapshots? Well that’ll have to wait for part #3.

Photos used under CC license from .schill, - reuben -, Vlad Lazerian & DC Meatloaf

Which means, I don’t for a minute expect any of the above to get off the ground, but it’d be nice if it did just for once wouldn’t it.

I’ve just made a post over at the Flickr Code Blog: Panda Tuesday; The History of the Panda, New APIs, Explore and You about the new Panda APIs, mainly flickr.panda.getPhotos.

Why, you may ask, is this of interest to your general geoblogger?

Well, when you call the flickr.panda.getPhotos method you pass in the name of one of the Flickr Pandas. In our case we’re interested in Wang Wang the GeoPanda^[*], who supplies us with a stream of geotagged photos. Here’s the API call you’d make …

http://api.flickr.com/services/rest/?method=flickr.panda.getPhotos&api_key=[your API key]&panda_name=wang+wang

… and this is the response …

<rsp stat="ok">
<photos interval="60000" lastupdate="1236129430784" total="80" panda="wang wang">
	<photo title="Evening Vision" id="3326982620" secret="8626d95cb9" server="3373" farm="4" owner="11704283@N07" ownername="njscott-H" latitude="40.54133" longitude="-74.51065" accuracy="11" />
	<photo title="Getting off the Hydrofoil in Paros, Greece" id="3300861831" secret="d29a150e21" server="3338" farm="4" owner="33848747@N02" ownername="micromanager" latitude="37.138424" longitude="25.224609" accuracy="8" />
	<photo title="Paros, Greece" id="3300861823" secret="0d5a05b3c3" server="3568" farm="4" owner="33848747@N02" ownername="micromanager" latitude="37.138424" longitude="25.224609" accuracy="8" />
	<photo title="Beach in Paros, Greece" id="3300861839" secret="ceea8a3bec" server="3561" farm="4" owner="33848747@N02" ownername="micromanager" latitude="37.138424" longitude="25.224609" accuracy="8" />
	<photo title="Juvenile Flathead" id="3327026432" secret="3362f150d0" server="3653" farm="4" owner="28607385@N04" ownername="funkyfoton" latitude="-38.358315" longitude="144.772596" accuracy="12" />
	<photo title="Paros, Greece" id="3300861813" secret="343a068166" server="3645" farm="4" owner="33848747@N02" ownername="micromanager" latitude="37.138424" longitude="25.224609" accuracy="8" />
	... and so on ...
</photos>
</rsp>

… latitudes and longitudes are at the end, if you need to scroll.

This gives you the geotagged photos from the last 60 seconds. If you wanted to show geotagged photos on a map as they (pretty much) get geotagged, this is a good source of them.

The interval and lastupdate values tell you when the information was last updated, and how often it’s updated. So you can tune your application accordingly … i.e. at the moment asking once every 60 seconds should be good enough.

You never know, one day with may even get a XMPP stream going for it.

^*I was hoping to coin the phrase GeoPanda, but alas, it’s been done.

Apparently, as covered by all the other geoblogs, probably.

Oh and happy 2009, when my newest daughter reaches 6 months I’ll probably have had enough sleep to start blogging again, still in hibernation mode atm.

Over at Flickr we’ve just turned on shapedata for various locations around the world. Aaron posts way way more over on Flickr’s Code Blog: The Shape Of The Alpha.

Now when you call flickr.places.getInfo if we have shapedata for that place, it’ll get sent back to you in the response. See Aaron’s post and the flickr.places.getInfo page itself for more information and example response data.

Since it went live I had a quick play asking for the shapedata for the States of America and it looks very much like this …

I did this by calling getInfo for each state in turn, asking for the response in JSON format. Using a canvas object over the top of the map I plotted each shape in turn. The results are pretty good.

Here’s France for fun …

… as I said in this post over here: Location, keeping it real on the streets, yo! …

“On a slightly more philosophical level, it’s a never ending process. We’ll never reach a point where we can say “Right that’s in, all borders between places have been decided”. But what we should end up with are boundaries as defined by Flickr users.”

These are not government borders, council borders or outlines from other agencies. These are generated based on the actions of Flickr users and how they choose to define their own locations, and which anyone can download and use themselves, with obviously the understanding that these are not government borders, council borders or outlines from other agencies, these are generated based on the actions of Flickr users and how they choose to define their own locations :)

Which is why it sometimes gets a little messy, see London Center Zoomed in …

… there’s various amounts of overlap, and sometimes gaps … in this case the big gaps are because I’m only plotting the top 100 “places’ in London, many of which fall outside of this view. The thin gaps between the shapes is due to the nature of the algorithm.

Anyway it’s kinda a fun stab at taking the local knowledge of the masses and turning it into something hopefully useful that anyone can use. Free shapedata for all … as long as enough people have taken a photo there :)

I’m pretty sure I’ll have to say on this topic again soon (oh and an example of how the canvas stuff all works).

Related: Here’s an image from Jim Bumgardner generated by grabbing geotagged photos tagged with the names of the lower 48 states: “Alabama”, “Arizona”, etc. and plotting them, allowing the shapes of the states to emerge …

(cc licensed http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/deed.en_GB)

Here’s the breakdown, first I’ll mention augmented reality, then I’ll ramble a bit, then I’ll make a point, or not, depending on how the rambling has gone. First the Augmented Reality part.

I’ve downloaded RjDj onto my iPhone, it’s basically two things 1) Awesome, 2) Sound processing software that samples your environmental soundscape and plays it back to you mixed, looped, pitch shifted and generally fucked around with. It’s hard to explain so here’s a couple of photo/video things to try and explain.

First, this is me walking out of Montgomery Muni Station in San Francisco. It’s all very motion sickness inducing and next time I’ll try and make a steady-cam version. Wobblyness aside, this is now what I hear with the Eargasm scene selected as I walk around. The Eargasm scene is like being enveloped in your own Dystopian Future Eno Soundscape.

Here’s one from YouTube, a more tranquil outdoor soundscape …

To really have a go Download RjDj, insert in-ear noise blocking headphones, select Eargasm, walk outside, walk around. Imagine you’re in your own futuristic movie. Go out of your way to stand on metal grills, walk past people talking, a busker if you can manage it and near people talking, oh and near people talking. Eargasm only works well outside, Echolon is better in the office, imho.

I’ve been doing this walking to and from work for about 2 weeks now and have gotten used to hearing in this new way, it’s both exciting and calming. And I consider this augmented reality because the earphones I use blockout virtually all noise, if I’m wearing them with no music going on I hear just my own breathing. When RjDj is running the sounds I hear are totally passed through software and processed, I’m still aware of what’s going on around me, it’s just different, more enveloped in textures and so on. Eno, Eno, Eno.

You should really try it!

Now for the ramble part …

On my old laptop (and backup drives) I have all my music, purchased over the years, ripped to mp3s. iTunes tells me I have something like 60 days worth of music. Given that I can listen to around 6 hours worth a day, it means that if I play a track twice there must be another track that I can’t possibly have time to listen to this year.

So I bought an iPod touch and didn’t put all my music on it, I created smart playlists that’d pick 60 tracks I’d rated highly but hadn’t listened to for a while, mixed with other unrated tracks. A bit Genius before Genius came out. I thought that was neat, going from half a gahbillion tracks to just 60 at a time.

Then I bought a new laptop and figured I’d have to get round to copying all my music over. But I just haven’t done it yet, now with the power of last.fm I’ve, ummm, transcended the need to own albums and tracks and music and stuff.

I feel as though I’ve invested enough time in listening, rating and so on music that last.fm plays my music collection back to me pretty well. If I need something new I just listen to the radio station of one of my contacts, or my neighborhood and so on. Loving or Banning tracks as I go.

(Apparently I like female vocalists and electronic)

Curiously listening to neighborhood radio, or radio from my contacts, always ends up at Jefferson Airplane, no matter how many times I ban it. Maybe it’s a function of my age, the age of the people I know, and where I live. Could be worse I guess, could be Starship.

Last.fm generally covers me for music in 3G saturated San Francisco, but I still found myself in situations where I’ve had no coverage to pick up last.fm and no music on my iPhone :( Just Melvyn Bragg and In Our Time to keep me going. And at this point, I’m stubbornly not putting any music on my laptop or iPhone. I am now Post-Album.

And this is where RjDj fits in. It creates musical compositions on the fly and fortunately I happen to really enjoy ambient soundscape, other people I’m sure would totally hate it.

The only thing that would improve it for me, is if analyzed the current tempo, pitch, overall level and activity of the sounds, then based on my listening habits on last.fm, pull in snippets of music I tend to like, little echos of tracks I remember played here or there.

It’d be like your own personal version of the best album on earth ever; Chill Out by the KLF.

What does this mean for photos?

This is a bit of a jump, but here goes. I take a lot of photos, not as many as some people, and way more than others. Sets of photos are like Albums and one off shots like Singles. Just like last.fm they have views, tags, favs and so on. Just like my music collection I have more photos than I can possible look at, realistically anyway.

Now I’m not going to stop taking photos any time soon, but …

In the same way RjDj samples the sounds around me, and delivers them back remixed and processed, and heck at the top of this post I even recorded one so it can be played back later … old habits die hard it seems. What if the same happened with vision?

Here’s a 3D(ish) model of the City above Montgomery Muni Station …

My iPhone has GPS, it knows, sort-of, where I am, and which way I’m heading … with a little of a delay. But enough to give me a wireframe of what I’m looking at based on the 3D data it can grab, with at least the augmentation level that RjDj gives me with sound.

More mood board stuff …

Google Earth, with it’s 3D models and Street View Bubbles …

Rez (HD xbox) …

(images CC gamescoreblog)

flickr.photos.search API for finding photos within a radius of a point …

“Buttons” the Blind Camera … Read More “The camera memorizes only the time and starts to continuously search on the net for other photos that have been taken in the very same moment” …

Myvu Crystal Personal Media Viewers for iPod/iPhone etc (640×480 resolution, apparently not as awful as the older models) …

Does this mean that I’m nearly at the point where I’ll just be able to walk around, with my augmented sound and augmented vision? A HUD that superimposes a wireframe of where I am, resamples and processes what I see (I happen to like film effects, Black & White and soft vingnetting please) and mixes in my own memories of older photos I’ve taken at that point, while sampling and saving other views for the future and pulling in my contacts, friends and strangers photos?

In the same way that I no longer bother to carry around Albums of music, and listen to Tracks. Will I no longer need to actively record new photos, Have I invested enough time and source material for a system to recommend images to me and sample new ones for me. It’s not quite here yet, in-fact as I say this stuff, I can feel myself thinking “But I’ll always need to take photos, what about those special moments of the children growing up” and so on …

… but at the same time, there was a point when I though it was very important to keep all my music forever, for all time, to never loose a single mp3 in a drive failure. Yet now, I’m happy to not have even one on my mp3 player. I’ve reached the point where I’m no longer interested in cataloging, keeping and finding missing tracks, I have a soundscape that could feasibly play at me 24 hours a day. Even with access to my old laptop and music library, I just fire up last.fm and type in an artist or tag for the mood I’m in and let it go, banning or loving tracks if I really need to.

On the vision/photo front, this isn’t supposed to be useful by the way, in the same way that I use RjDj to make a walk more interesting or immersive. This is augmenting reality for passive/interactive immersive experiences to make walking to and from work (or for the joy of it) more entertainingly enveloping.

What I’d like, is to be able to walk along the beachfront from my childhood and be played snippets of sounds from when I was young, superimposed with old family photos, mixed in with music generated from the sounds of the waves, and my own and other peoples photos being pulled in from having been taken at the same point, but in a style I happen to like. All on top of what I can actually see, I mean, I still don’t want to be knocked down while crossing the road.

This is unlikely to happen for me now … going that far back, as I don’t have easy access to all those old sounds and pictures. But a lot of us are recording them for the future. When Modesty, Zachary and Isobel grow up, there’ll be more photos of them and events than they can possible get through. I suspect taking photos to keep as personal memories and sharing in the way we currently do will be terribly old fashioned.

But just because I no longer buy Albums, I still need musicians to make some music to feed the machine. And that’s the way I’ll be taking photos and videos and sounds and stories, and I hope other people will, so there’s enough to feed the realtime vision/sounds/mood processing machines of the future. It will, however, be very different, and probably fairly soon, and hopefully I’ll have something to do with it if I can :)

The lovely as ever We Make Money Not Art drew my eye to this piece by David Adjaye at Manifesta 7…

… the premise being “If Europe were condensed into one piece and combined as one cell, what would be left behind as residue? Two extremes: a very dense condition and a big void.” using a process of “… extract[ing] information from the capital cities of the European Union and condensed [them] into a single entity”.

I like the idea behind taking cities and trying to smoosh them together, joining them up in non-accidental ways. I’m sure there are other examples of fitting various maps together to form a whole, but they’re escaping me at the moment.

Regardless, photo attribution-share alike by we-make-money-not-art, [Via: The unusual suspects of Manifesta: Pirate Bay and David Adjaye]

It’s a little odd posting over there but now that Flickr does have a Dev Blog, it kinda makes sense to mostly post Flickr related geo-stuff there. And more comment here, even if I’m still stuck with an utterly dorky theme.

Anyway, recently I made a few posts about our new “corrections” stuff, you can read about it in more general terms on the main Flickr Blog: Introducing a new way to geotag and nerdy terms in the dev blog: Location, keeping it real on the streets, yo! with the first follow up here; Defining the boundaries we are all within.

In the Location, keeping it real on the streets, yo! post there’s a couple of paragraphs where I manage to nearly sum up why I think it’s important …

“For us, it’s a first small step into an experiment, and actually a pretty big experiment as we’re potentially accepting “corrections” from our millions and millions of users. We’re not quite sure how it’ll all turn out, but we’re armed with Maths, Algorithms and kitten photos.”

… and …

“On a slightly more philosophical level, it’s a never ending process. We’ll never reach a point where we can say “Right that’s in, all borders between places have been decided”. But what we should end up with are boundaries as defined by Flickr users.”

But what does it all really mean (to me)? Well, at a very basic level it means we’ve taken the descriptive geo-data on Flickr down to the next granular level. Instead of only going down to Town and City levels, we now go down to neighborhoods, and this is now reflected in the API.

Rereading Yahoo Woe (Where On Earth, that is) IDs but imagine it talks about going down to the next level will do the trick.

Before if you used flickr.photos.getInfo on a photo that had location information you’d get something like this …

<location latitude="37.772156" longitude="-122.430726" accuracy="14" place_id="kH8dLOubBZRvX_YZ" woeid="2487956">
	<locality place_id="kH8dLOubBZRvX_YZ" woeid="2487956">San Francisco</locality>
	<county place_id="hCca8XSYA5nn0X1Sfw" woeid="12587707">San Francisco</county>
	<region place_id="SVrAMtCbAphCLAtP" woeid="2347563">California</region>
	<country place_id="4KO02SibApitvSBieQ" woeid="23424977">United States</country>
</location>

… but now you get (scroll right if you’re viewing this on the web) …

<location latitude="37.772156" longitude="-122.430726" accuracy="14" place_id="69uQyQCbCZ5svKzBvA" woeid="28288710">
	<neighbourhood place_id="69uQyQCbCZ5svKzBvA" woeid="28288710">Lower Haight</neighbourhood>
	<locality place_id="kH8dLOubBZRvX_YZ" woeid="2487956">San Francisco</locality>
	<county place_id="hCca8XSYA5nn0X1Sfw" woeid="12587707">San Francisco</county>
	<region place_id="SVrAMtCbAphCLAtP" woeid="2347563">California</region>
	<country place_id="4KO02SibApitvSBieQ" woeid="23424977">United States</country>
</location>

The neighborhood node thingy being the new bit.

How’s this useful? Well in a hacky kind of way you can now pair up a couple of flickr api calls to do reverse geocoding …

• flickr.photos.geo.setLocation
• flickr.photos.getInfo

Use the first one with a sacrificial photo you have write permission on (i.e. your own). Set it’s location with a Lat/Long and then go get the information for that photo to find out where Flickr thinks that photo was taken. There’s a couple of other ways of doing it, but that’s probably the easiest to understand.

The advantage to Flickr and the whole ecosystem that builds up around it of doing this is, as we feed back user submitted corrections into the backend, the neighborhoods Flickr assigns to a Lat/Long will slowly evolve over time to our user’s view of the world … and we have quite a lot of them, so in major cities this should be quite good.

This is hopefully converting a “database” view of an area (for want of a better term) into how real people on the ground view of an area.

On that subject, it’s also possible that users of FireEagle (now public), websites that integrate with FireEagle and users of websites that intergrate with FireEagle will also gain the benefit of potentially millions of people make updates to location, depending on how far back into WOE we can roll the data.

That to me is the magic part, people taking photos over here and saying “Oh no, that photo wasn’t taken in such-and-such, but actually here” can have a positive effect on someone’s experience with a totally unrelated website who happens to be using FireEagle to update their location. Suddenly that website gains the local knowledge from thousands of photographers :)

Well, that’s kinda the theory anyway, but it’s always interesting being able to take that kind of theory and attempt to put it into practice.

When I first saw that Zazzle were doing shoes my first thought was, obviously, ‘Quick, stick a map on them’ …

And since then I’ve been doing nothing but messing around with the designer and making map shoes of San Francisco (just north of Golden Gate Bridge)

Sadly they only do Womens and Kids shoes at the moment, and Modesty says she’d much rather have Kittens on her shoes than maps … so I guess it’s just me who finds them fantastic.

I was trying to think of something We Make Money Not Artsy about putting the streets your shoes pace along each day onto your shoes, or taking a little bit of home with you where-ever you go … but frankly I don’t have the prose for it.

My vote, Awesome!
My daughter’s vote: Meh.