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Flickr Commons vs Google Streetview

http://www.flickr.com/photos/george/501205386
It would be wrong tonight if I didn’t give credit to George. George worked at Flickr and founded the Commons.

I want to just briefly talk about the commounty that surrounds Flickr. I had never met George. I saw her present at a conference I
attended.

Naturally I took a photo & posted it to Flickr.

And of course she commented on the photo (and we had a fairly superficial conversation). But it did lead to me getting in contact
with her and chatting some more. I mentioned I worked at the National Library & how we used Flickr photos to enhance our
collection. She said that something ‘really’ cool was about to happen in this area...

And this was The Commons.

Traditionally the entry points for our collections are buried away behind a search box. It’s a fairly sterile environment and it’s
limited to the audience that our institutions can get in touch with

Flickr Commons is for institutions to post no known copyright images in the Flickr infrastructure and social network where the
number of users is much larger than what our institutions could ever achieve. The Powerhouse Museum joined and started
posting these images to Flickr, where people could do the normal things you do in Flickr, add tags, comments etc.

When the Powerhouse has catalogued their images they’ve added in location metadata - a latitude and longitude.

Once images have been geocoded, you can extract an RSS feed or a KML file of the images for use in another application like
Google Earth.

Displaying the images in Google Earth allows you give some form of modern day context to the images. You can relate to a
location and imagine how it compares to the old image.

In the middle of 2008, Google introduced their street view service to Australia. This is where they drove around the streets with
a camera on the roof of the car taking photos. This ties in with google maps, so what you can do is pick a point on the map and
obtain a panoramic image of that location.

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maps
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street view
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All of these services have API’s (or hooks into their systems) that allow you to import & export data. By using a combination of
API’s from Flickr, Google Maps and Google street view we can mash up lots of data and convert it into something really
interesting.

Now we can export the images from Flickr, plot their locations on a map to give them the modern day context and...

Also automatically provide a modern day view from the same location using Google Streetview.

Shortly after the Powerhouse Museum, the State Library of New South Wales also joined Flickr Commons and started posting
geocoded images. It was easy to incorporate their images to the application.

Just before Christmas 2008, the New York Public Library joined Flickr commons. A set of photos they released were a series of
around 160 photos of New York from the 1930’s.

Unlike the images on Flickr from the Powerhouse Museum, New York Public Library haven’t added any geotagged metadata with
the image. But what the images generally have is very good street addresses. That’s enough for me to use another API to get
some valuable information

Pike and Henry Streets, Manhattan
geocoder API
Latitude: 40.713183
Longitude: -73.992395
By passing a human readable address through a geocoder API, we obtain a latitude and longitude. This is the exact same
process you use when you type a street address into a service like Google Maps.

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geocoder
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maps
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street view
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By using a combination of API’s from Flickr, Google Maps geocoding API, more Google Maps and Google street view...

We can create the same experience without the institution having to add in geocoded information. By enhancing the data, this
can be passed back into the community. The application is relying on Google to keep expanding Streetview. I’m excited at the
upcoming expansion in Europe. Tests with European institutions in the Commons have been fairly unreliable.

I’ll come back to my initial point about the community that Flickr forms. There are a series of developers from all over the world
that are doing things to enrich the Commons community, and in turn we are influencing what the institutions do.

Thanks!
www.paulhagon.com/thenandnow
Thanks!