bob-ak.com

This is how mashups can make a difference!

http://iran.twazzup.com/

I got most of these ideas from trippermap.com and earthalbum.com:

Some cameras and phones set the geo data in the EXIF part of a JPEG photo. This is very handy but far from common. To get around this Flickr have developed their own mapping tool (go to the Organizer and select the map tab). This tool will allow you to drop your images anywhere on the world map. It’ll then obtain the geo data of the point dropped and adds it as a tag to your photo.

Once your photo has this information in it, you can submit it to various sites (or build you own) to place it in its correct location in the world map (can use Google or Yahoo maps who provide APIs for this).

In Flickr you can also add geo data tags manually provided you know the location yourself. Simply add the following tags to your photo:

geotagged
geo:lon=xxx.xxx
geo:lat=xxx.xxx

Another way to get geo data is to look up the location the photo was taken in a database (try Google maps or geonames.org). This is a little harder as you need programming knowledge on how to get the info back from these sources.

Finally you can use a host of desktop tools which will allow you to write EXIF data directly into your image.

Here’s a list from trippermap.com:
WMMX Location Stamper (Win)
GPSPhoto (Linux)
GPSPhotoLinker (MacOSX)
iMagine Photo (MacOSX)
EXIFutils (Command line)
itag (Win)

1. What people are watching RIGHT NOW on YouTube – link
2. What people are posting on flickr in 3D – link
3. What people are posting on youtube in 3D – link
4. And posts on good old twitter – link (this is the newest one I think)

This is not exactly a big achievement – although it took a while to build (worked late on a number of occasions), I’m quite proud of it! I had to get familiar with Google Map’s API and understand the basics of screen (or data) scraping. For this I found a very good web site (oooff.com) which had great examples. If you know PHP you can pick this up very quickly. If you don’t know PHP, do not worry as you can either learn the basics of it pretty quickly or you can buy an already made data scraping too (search the web – don’t forget Yahoo!).

Here’s in my first mashup application – the flights information data is taken from BAA’s web site. Good luck!