Flickr has collected almost ninety million geotagged photos, and for every geotagged photo they have up to six Where On Earth IDs, which are unique numeric identifiers that correspond to the hierarchy of places where a photo was take: the neighborhood, the town, the country, and so on up to the continent in a process called reverse-geocoding.
Eventually they got to thinking: If they plotted all of the geotagged photos associated with a particular WOE ID, would there be enough data to generate a mostly accurate contour of that place?
Apparently the answer is yes, and though it’s not a perfect representation of the place, it’s definitely getting pretty close.
As a gift to the Flickr community, they’ve even made these 150,000 (and counting) WOE IDs with proper (-ish) shape data available via the Flickr API.
It might be a fun toy right now, but give it a few years and add in all of the data from geocoded cell phone photos, and this just might be the future of cartography as we know it.
Didn’t get enough Steve Jobs in your life yesterday?
Then make your own!
Toy-A-Day is a year-long project where the creator will be constructing and posting a new paper toy from a basic template each day for one year, and to help celebrate iDay, he created a little Steve Jobs that comes with his own iPhone and iPod.
Simple print it out, fold it up, and display it for all your friends to see.
A lack of a neck makes it difficult to show off the trademark turtleneck in this mini mock-up, but considering the fact that this is an accurate representation of his Steviness, you can trust that it’s in there somewhere.
Ten Thousand Cents is a digital artwork that created a representation of the $100 bill using 10,000 anonymous artists, each paid one cent per contribution.
By using Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, the two main artists (Aaron Koblin and Takashi Kawashima) were able to enlist the help of thousands of other people/artists to recreate the bill. Each person was given a small area to draw, and was paid one cent to do so, though they were never told the overall goal.
Thus, the total labor cost to create the bill, the artwork being created, and the reproductions available for purchase are all $100.
The project explores the circumstances we live in, a new and uncharted combination of digital labor markets, “crowdsourcing,” “virtual economies,” and digital reproduction.
In all, it took almost five months to complete, and the result is surprisingly accurate.
Be sure to visit the site for a clickable pic that lets you view a movie of each image that went into the final piece.
Didn’t get enough Steve Jobs in your life yesterday?
