Blog: Geotagging

A Glimpse at how Geocoding Helps Identify Stories in Managing News

I first noticed the trend at 4:00 pm yesterday afternoon when I was testing Managing News - it looked like something was going on in the Caribbean. I jumped over to CNN to see what was happening and saw that a major earthquake hit the Caribbean yesterday two hours before.

This morning I went back to Managing News to check out the earthquake coverage and checked out the geocoded map that Jeff talked about yesterday. The Caribbean earthquake news really jumps out.

Two Widgets We Used to Show Off Photos on StandAgainstPoverty.org

At the height of the UN Millennium Campaign's Stand Up Speak Out campaign last week, a ton of photos were uploaded to StandAgainstPoverty.org in just one day. So many in fact, that at least one photo from the campaign’s account made it into the photos featured on Flickr under “everyone’s photos.” That’s hard to do and shows the fast rate people were uploading photos through the Flickrup module that Jose built (more on that later in the week).

With so many photos being uploaded and with so many of these photos containing important metadata like the location where the photos were taken, we really wanted to display the photos in an organized way that took advantage of all available data. So we started brainstorming. 

Flickr.com lets you make a Flickr map of your photos, but photos can only be mapped if they've been geotagged using a special machine tag that includes latitude and longitude of where the picture was taken.  This is limiting, and unless you do the geocoding yourself (which can be a little hairy but not too bad), you need a way to geocode the pictures when pulling them back out of Flickr. With such a fast paced campaign like this one, we wanted to use a more straightforward approach. 

That’s when Trippermap came in. Trippermap is a flash widget that gets around the need to tag your photos with latitude and longitude. If there are other location tags on a photo like the name of a country, city, and state or a country and state/province, then Trippermap uses this information to geocode the photo itself and place it on a flash map that you can then embed in your site.  Check out this one from the Stand Up Speak Out campaign:

This is a test of a way to see where our users of the blog are coming from. This is free... I guess we will see if it really begins tomorrow. For more information go to http://kmi.open.ac.uk/projects/hitmaps/ Where are visitors to this page?