earthalbum.com

Not the most exciting development, but scroll-wheel zooming now works! You can now easily zoom in and out of any part of the world.

As of yesterday night, users can create their own earthalbum URLs by going to www.earthalbum.com/keyword/(keyword), www.earthalbum.com/country/(country), city, address, or flickr groupid.

You can see some of my personal favorites by clicking the “editions” link on the earthalbum homepage– e.g., you can see the sunsets of Thailand, the snows of Japan, or explore the world in the particular aesthetic that only black and white photos can give you.

I’d be interested in any other suggestions folks might have!

I’ve been on hiatus for several months, but I spent the better part of the long Thanksgiving weekend trying to make earthalbum better.

For the most part, new users aren’t going to notice anything different when they hit the main page. However, there are a lot of little things that have been redone that were meant to improve the experience:

• If you zoom in a bit (use the slider) and start clicking, you’ll start seeing yellow bounding boxes. This shows the top-rated Flickr photos that have been geotagged within that area.
• The geography database and algorithms have been completely redone; while it’s still far from perfect, areas should be far easier to click on.
• You can now type an address directly into the bar at the top of the screen.

Hopefully, these changes will make the site more interesting for you; it certainly continues to be a lot of fun for me.

A few technical notes: I’m moving earthalbum.com from westhost, where I have been overloading my tiny $5.95 per month account, to slicehost, which has been getting rave reviews in the development community. I must say that so far, slicehost has been outstanding.

On another note, I also migrated the entire site from Ruby on Rails to straight PHP. Why did I do this? Several reasons ranging from administration to performance to library support to a growing distaste for object-relational mapping layers; but at the end of the day, the reason I switched was because contrary to what everyone else is saying, Ruby on Rails made everything just a bit harder than it had to be. I’m probably in the minority here, and I could still imagine some projects I’d use Ruby on Rails for, but just goes to show that there aren’t any universal hammers in web development .

Anyways, I hope you like the new earthalbum as much as I do!

Telus is one of Canada’s leading telecommunications companies, and they picked earthalbum.com in their online March newsletter. In the process, they are generating one of the biggest-ever days for earthalbum.com– fun!

Just found this today– a pretty extensive walk-through of earthalbum on a fun shockfly video. It shows screenshots of earthalbum starting about halfway through the video. Check it out; I especially like how she snaps her fingers at the end and mysteriously disappears.

Along with sites such as Google Calendar and Newsvine, earthalbum made it onto Time Magazine’s Top 10 websites of the year! I’m not sure it’s deserving of the honor, but I’ll take it.

Browsing through the weblogs this evening, I noticed a gaggle of hits from http://www.laurenceschool.com/page.php?id=13&title=Links, which turns out to be a K-6 school in California. I’m pretty happy about this because it is directly in line with why I built earthalbum to begin with– to give myself and others a fun way to educate ourselves about the world. I honestly didn’t know exactly where Kenya was within Africa, or where Malaysia was within southeast Asia; what’s more, I only had the foggiest notions of what life in those countries looked like. I definitely did not know that Pakistan was so beautiful, or that Norwegians called their own country Norge, or that the temples in Cambodia were real and not simply a set piece from a Tomb Raider movie.

In any case, if you’re from an educational institution– a special welcome to you!

I’ve been investigating adding geotagging search capabilities to this site, and I must say that at this point I’m unconvinced that it would add much depth. Actually, I’m convinced that it would make this site much worse.

Flickr only recently added the capability to geotag photos in a way that would allow you to search by, say, a (minlat,maxlat,minlong,maxlong) bounding-box; most photos currently geotagged on Flickr use a hacked-up tag convention (”geolong:78.5″,”geolat:43.2″) to record spatial information. Furthermore, most photos on Flickr are not geotagged using either the new method or the tag-convention method.

This has a few ramifications. First, if you really want to search for pictures via geotagging, you should create your own local geolong/geolat cache for all the Flickr photos that use the hacked-up tag convention so that you can search for the largest possible universe of photos. Again, this is because Flickr does not allow you to do a proximity search on photos that were tagged using the hacked-up tag convention. Creating a local longitude/latitude cache is possible, and what the World In Pictures does.

Secondly, though, and more importantly: if you want to try to limit your search to a certain geotagged bounding-box, you eliminate a massive percentage of many of the most interesting Flickr pictures. I think that what’s fun about earthalbum is how nice the pictures are. I can’t take any credit for that– credit really goes to the flickr interestingness crowdsourcing algorithms that allow me to sort the nicest pictures to the top of the pile. If I were to limit the searches to only the subset that were geotagged, earthalbum would be a very different experience. I know because I tried a version of a geotagged earthalbum on my development server, and the small number of pictures that came up were of substantially lower quality.

This is not to say that this will be the case forever. Someday, perhaps soon, built-in GPS will be a common feature of digital cameras, and location data will become a generally expected part of the metadata in digital photographs. When that day comes, I think that changing the search to one that is geotag-based rather than searchword-based will be a good idea. Until then, you can try www.flickr.com/map, which allows you to see all images currently geotagged in Flickr using Yahoo maps. Personally– and I know I’m biased– I find that site as it currently exists to be difficult to use and not particularly interesting.

In the meantime, I’m going to continue to pursue the idea of tag-based maps and see where that leads me.

As always, abouts and comments are welcome.

Interesting to see how earthalbum is being received throughout the world… it’s at least as popular in other countries as it is in the U.S. Thanks to all for the mentions! It’s been fun developing it.

Anyways, here are some screenshots–

France:

Spain:

Germany:

Italy:

Japan:

I just added earth album: Japan Edition. Honestly, I can’t read Kanji myself, but I’m guessing that some of you out there might be able to. If anyone wants to take a shot at giving me the UTF-8 Kanji for the Anglicized names, I’d appreciate it (epark at earthalbum.com); Flickr happily accepts Kanji. Actually, for anyone from any country: if you want to provide a list of area/city names and corresponding latitude/longitude coordinates, I can wrap that into a new version of Earth Album.

Hm; maybe I’ll create an earth album: local edition where folks can create their own earth albums by specifying a list of coordinates, a default center, a zoom level, and a map name. Now that the framework is in place, there really isn’t a whole lot more to it.