information visualization

We still don't have a real time geotagged photo web in 2011. Even in 2011, where there are many more geo capable cameras and cameraphones than ever, people still wait hours, days, weeks or hours to upload their photos to places like flickr as evidenced by my video of the 276 (as of this writing) photos geotagged in Vancouver on flickr taken on the day the Vancouver Canucks beat San Jose Sharks to make it into the 2011 Stanley Cup finals.

My prediction: after a couple of months, we'll have about 500 photos (up from the 276 currently posted) from this day geotagged in Vancouver and uploaded to flickr.

Video of HTML5 mashup of Vancouver Beats San Jose May 24, 2011 which is currently 271 geotagged flickr photos

Far less then the approximately 2500 geotagged photos taken during the 2010 Olympic Gold Men's Hockey day in 2010 when there were far less geo-capable phones and cameras.

Code

github.com/rtanglao/rth5/blob/master/vancouver-beats-san-...

Try it out yourself (you get to see my cool reverse fade :-) !)

dl.dropbox.com/u/361757/CCC/vancouver-beats-san-jose-24ma...

Compare and Contrast with 2010 Olympics Men's Gold Medal Hockey Game

dl.dropbox.com/u/361757/CCC/mens-gold-medal-hockey-game28...

As promised, videos of my San Francisco and Vancouver real-time HTML5 geotagged photo mashups driven by the great flickr and CloudMadeAPIs (each time a geotagged photo to the city is uploaded to flickr, a dot is posted on the map; the dot does a reverse blue fade-in and then alternates between green and red and the map alternates between orange and pink). Next up, add music driven by the neighbourhood (i.e. a different tune for each woeid, which means 26 different tunes for Vancouver).

Vancouver real-time flickr cloudmade html5 mashup:

Code:

github.com/rtanglao/rth5/blob/master/vancouver-emerges...

Try it out yourself! (may take some time for photos to appear since dots are only added when photos are uploaded to flickr geotagged in the city of vancouver):

dl.dropbox.com/u/361757/CCC/vancouver-emerges-d3.html

San Francisco real-time flickr cloudmade html5 mashup:

Code:

github.com/rtanglao/rth5/blob/master/sanfrancisco-emerges...

Try it out yourself (may take some time for photos to appear since dots are only added when photos are uploaded to flickr geotagged in the city of san francisco):

dl.dropbox.com/u/361757/CCC/sanfrancisco-emerges-d3.html

To the three :-) people in the world who care about blinking lights on a CloudMade Map : Evidently CloudMade and the web browsers can't handle  large amount of overlays i.e. 1000s of them :-). So the solution is to map.removeOverlay() before map.addOverlay(). If you don't remove the overlay before you addOverlay() then the browser slows down and leaks a large amount of memory.

I'll post a video later of the incredible Das Blinkenlights :-) but you can try it yourself. Just click on one of the following URLs to try it yourself (the map will be all black until somebody uploads some geotagged photos which could be anywhere from 1 second from now until an hour from now):

• Vancouver Das Blinkenlights (source code on github:vancouver-emerges-d.html)
• San Francisco Das Blinkenlights (source code on github:sanfrancisco-emerges-d.html)

tl;dr: Surprised by the paucity of real-time geotagged photos on flickr. People seem to upload in batches many hours after the fact. Still looking for a cool real-time geotagged picture feed so I can do some Blinkenlights info visualizations in a web browser near you!

Real Time Average Colour of Geotagged photos of 18 cities after a few minutes

Real Time Average Colour Geotagged photos of 18 cities after a few hours

Since 2007, I have over 50000 21000 (29000 non geotagged) geotagged photos uploaded on flickr from cameras most in real-time or near real time (a few minutes to a few hours after they were taken). I expected in 2010 that there would be many real-time geo tagged obsessive :-) photo uploaders like me. Enough to power a cool Blinkenlights info visualization.

Well I was wrong :-) Based on the info viz (geoTaggedAvg18.html ; github source - tested Firefox 4, Chrome, iPhone 4, Android 2.1 - each dot is the average colour of a geotagged photo uploaded to 1 of 18 cities, there are 24 dots per row and then it wraps around after over 24) that I did in Javascript and HTML5 even in geo-tagging mad cities like New York and San Francisco and Vancouver, people don't upload geotagged photos in real-time to flickr (and I doubt elsewhere but love to be proven wrong, if anybody has a real-time updated photo stream with lat/long and an API that has more photos than flickr, please let me know:roland AT rolandtanglao.com twitter:@rtanglao). They do it after the fact and they don't do many.

Probably because:

• people are concerned about loss of privacy
• uploading with GPS coordinates is too hard
• GPSes are unreliable but getting more reliable every day
• most people upload to social media ghettos like Facebook and Twitpic where most of their metadata including latitude and longitude is lost and/or not available via API instead of "full photos as social object with full-meta-data-preservation-and-APIs-to-get-the-meta-data" services like flickr