Google map of London with Flickr shape data overlaid

    Flickr place info now includes shape data for many places. See code.flickr.com/blog/2008/10/30/the-shape-of-alpha/

    We've correlated most of Dopplr's places with Yahoo WOE IDs using Flickr's reverse geocoder, so we can use this data too. As an experiment, I wrote some clientside code to overlay this shape data onto the maps we use on Dopplr. Help yourself to the code if you want it: gist.github.com/25502

    Comments and faves

    1. ★

      andyp uk, Preoccupations, and Rev Dan Catt added this photo to their favorites.

    2. moleitau (55 months ago | reply)

      Nice.

    3. George (55 months ago | reply)

      Woo!

    4. ★

      Steve Bowbrick added this photo to his favorites. (55 months ago)

    5. Tom T (55 months ago | reply)

      Good work Matt... I had a poke around with the code and plotted out some of the neighbourhoods near where I live in east Hackney.

    6. straup (55 months ago | reply)

      Someone remind me why we can't favourite comments yet...

    7. ★

      earth2marsh added this photo to his favorites. (55 months ago)

    8. antimega (55 months ago | reply)

      mattb++ & tomt++

      Now if someone could automate using WOE neighbors... ;)

    9. Tom T (55 months ago | reply)

      Yeah, I'm on it :)

    10. Tom T (55 months ago | reply)

      There you go. It's a bit of a work in progress, but for certain places it works quite well.

      I've discovered quite a lot about the limitations of the WOE database, namely, the neighbour results aren't very good.

    11. straup (55 months ago | reply)

      tomt - Lovely! What are you using to fetch the list of neighbourhoods? Poking around a few known places I'd expect more shapes returned by the flickr.places.getChildrenWithPhotosPublic method.

      But yes, many shapes will be straight-up weird for the near-term. Our hope is that as the people become aware of the data and visualizations like yours they will start to tidy things up using corrections.

    12. Tom T (55 months ago | reply)

      I need to write it up and fix some of the bugs, but basically I'm using Yahoo GeoPlanet to find neighbours.

      For London, the shapes seem pretty good, it's the neighbours results which are a bit weird sometimes.

    13. ★

      iamdanw and trumpetflickr added this photo to their favorites.

    14. trumpetflickr (55 months ago | reply)

      Very cool potential!

    15. ★

      osde8info and meneertuur added this photo to their favorites.

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