Geo-Tagging the Planet, Now with Flickr
This is an update to the GeoLocation Globe Application. I’ve made some updates to the RSS reading so that the updates come in more automatically. It now auto-subscribes to several Yahoo feeds and auto-updates every minute. This means you can just sit back and watch the news happen throughout the day, and how it changes across the globe.
RSS Feeds geo-located on the earth
You can browse the news stories by hovering over the little pins sticking out of the earth. The information will pop-up in a tooltip. This gives you the title of the story, its source, category, and a brief description/summary if it is available.
Browsing an news story's information
As you explore the earth, blue pins will start to pop in around you. These blue pins are discovered geo-located Flickr images. The application crawls through Flickr, finding those images that have been geo-tagged. It then populate the area around where your looking with those images. If you roll over those pins, a thumbnail of the image dynamically downloaded from Flickr will float beside your cursor.
Viewing the thumbnail of a geo-located Flickr image
Nighttime across the US overlayed with its new stories
By clicking the blue pins, the full-resolution image will be downloaded from Flickr and shown in a pop-up.
The high-res image of a geo-located Flickr image
You can dynamically filter the data by checking RSS feeds or Flickr on or off. In the future you will be able to filter both news and images by category or tag. In the image below the RSS feed has been turned off, leaving just the blue Flickr pins.
RSS feeds turned off, just viewing Flickr images
Pure globe with all geo-located data flitered off
[...] I’ve been working on new stuff for our earth application. Tweaked how the RSS reading works and finally got some Flickr integration happening. It is all still very early, but I’m pretty happy with how things are falling together. I find it pretty fun to explore the data in this way, which was very much the point. You can find the update here: http://darkwindmedia.com/blog/2009/08/28/geo-tagging-the-planet-now-with-flickr/ [...]