Ho John Lee's Weblog

These are my links for April 24th through April 27th:

• Gallery: Flickr users make accidental maps – tech – 27 April 2009 – New Scientist – Building map visualizations using geotagged photos from Flickr.
• Does Hewlett-Packard Need a Dose of Anarchy? – NYTimes.com – When your organization is built on lean, predictable operating excellence (cost cutting, procurement, scale), where do speculative, high risk, growth opportunities come from?
• JavaScript for hackers – Opera Developer Community – On Javascript parser and some eval examples that lead to XSS vulnerabilities
• Processing.js – Javascript port of Processing graphics library, requires Canvas.
• Pittsburgh Pattern Recognition – Face recognition technology startup from CMU, with a demo of tagging faces in video of all episodes of Star Trek (the original series).

A first version of Amazon A9’s photo mapping project is open for business at maps.a9.com.

The block-by-block view is available for selected US metro areas, and provides a street-level view of storefronts, houses, parks, and whatever else happened to be in view when they drove by.

Here are a few sample locations to try:

Unfortunately, there’s no easy way to bookmark a location yet, so saving a particular location requires a bit of trial and error on the street address once you come across an interesting view.

via Batelle’s Searchblog

Also, at Search Engine Watch Gary Price comments on the early coverage of Fargo, North Dakota:

So, why Fargo? A couple of weeks ago A9’s CEO, Udi Manber, told Danny:

“The reason we have Fargo is one of the engineers lives there. He took the equipment home and did the whole place in a day.”

So, I’m thinking that if you don’t have an A9 engineer living in your small town, don’t expect to see Block View imagery anytime soon. (-:

Today I saw a demo of Andy Fitzhugh’s Virgil software. He is combining GPS trackpoint logs with digital photos to generate metadata which can be used to group photos together by date/time, physical proximity, and also to prepare queries to various search engines based on location.

He uses a Garmin Geko clipped to his camera bag to generate a track log, and then uses the EXIF time stamp to match photos to locations. He also has a method for tagging existing photos with a location. The mapping display is generated by queries to the Microsoft MapPoint service, which also returns a vicinity-based list of points of interest.