earthalbum.com

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.

Just added the USA edition of earthalbum! It’s not perfect, but I still find it entertaining, and hope you do as well. Other editions are forthcoming. I’m considering using geotagging soon, which becomes increasingly useful at very high (intra-city) zoom levels. As always, suggestions are very welcome, and thanks to all who stop by!

Traffic continues to pour in. Most notably, earthalbum hit the front page of del.icio.us!

It also was the #4 most popular Google Maps mash-up this past week according to Google Maps Mania:

earthalbum also continues to draw traffic around the world. I’m not sure what kengo-preston.net is, but there have been a lot of hits from that page:

Finally, for what it’s worth– in the first 7 days of this month, earthalbum has received visits from over 9000 distinct IPs from stumbleupon.com.

Whew! Got so much traffic yesterday that the site started to really seriously bog down; apologies to anyone visiting during that time! In the meantime, I’ve implemented caching in Rails, which should help tremendously. On a technical note, I still have a love/hate relationship with mime types. Why doesn’t apache respect the DefaultType mime-type option if it doesn’t have an html extension? I don’t know. On the bright side, things really should be much faster now.

Traffic continues to pick up! 2178 unique visitors so far today. Most importantly, a new feed picked up earthalbum today: googlemapsmania.blogspot.com, which I’ve followed for a while. It’s an honor to be written up. Thanks, Mike!

Meanwhile, the thumbs keep coming on stumbleupon.com– up to 7390:

Also, a new site showed up big in the weblogs today: retecool, which appears to be a Web 2.0 Dutch site:

Finally, earthalbum has shown up on del.icio.us, saved by 24 people so far:

Thanks again for all the support so far! If I get a bit of time, I really do want to do local (i.e. country/region-specific) versions of this… stay tuned!

Just hit 5000 thumbs-ups on stumbleupon!

In other news, I made it so that when you click on a location, the map smooth-pans to that location. I’m not sure whether it’ll give folks too much of a sense of vertigo, but initial checks of the logs indicate that people are actually clicking more– i.e., the panning effect appears to make the site more enjoyable.

Also, I’m trying a different google ads layout (along the right-hand edge of the screen) to see whether it’ll make much of a difference. I think that it may be a good deal more annoying than a strip along the bottom, though, so I don’t know whether I’ll stick with it. We’ll see.

earthalbum.com has received a tremendous number of hits for the YouTube edition– in particular, for the Saskatchewan area, due to stumbleupon.com review by Gemma.

However, it hasn’t received a lot of thumbs-ups, most likely because YouTube’s API is terrible. For the Flickr version of earthalbum.com, the pictures are ordered by “interestingness-desc”; i.e., Flickr has some internal algorithm that determines interestingness, and folks who use the API are allowed to sort by this. This is why most of the pictures in the Flickr version are so beautiful, and why the Flickr edition has received well over 4000 thumbs-ups to date.

With YouTube, on the other hand, the “list-by-tag” function returns a number of videos in what appears to be a random order. I’m therefore trying to establish some level of quality ordering by bringing back the top 100 and manually ordering them by a combination of rating_count and rating_avg. We’ll see how it works, but it seems much better so far.

I hope that YouTube changes their API to allow for something akin to “interestingness-desc” at some point. In the meantime, I’ll keep experimenting with algorithms.