Each one of those illustrations represents the boundaries of a particular place whose outline was generated using nothing but the latitudes and longitudes of the geotagged photos associated with that location’s WOE ID.
Correct. But where does the WOE ID come from? Are people manually typing those in or they are using something like http://developer.yahoo.com/geo/ to come up with the WOE ID? If WOE ID is generated based on latitude/longitude of a place, then all they are doing is a plotting data originally retrieved from their own DB.
Say I have a table of 40,000 zipcodes in US. You take a picture in zipcode 33708 and ask me for WOE ID / state and I say "Florida" and then you upload the picture. Now do this ten million times for every zipcode. Now I will look at every picture with WOE ID / state = Florida and find a list of zipcodes and map them. Obviously they will map out the entire state of Florida. After all I gave you all the state names.
Not that this isn't cool or anything. Just trying to determine how cool it is. If they had used latitude/longitude + tags to generate this, then it would be super-cool indeed. But if they did it by the method above that I described, it is cool but it's also a big "duh."
That's because the submission title is misleading (the blog post says nothing about "reverse engineering" anything.)
Here is what flickr actually did:
"Over time this got us wondering: If we plotted all the geotagged photos associated with a particular WOE ID, would we have enough data to generate a mostly accurate contour of that place? Not a perfect representation, perhaps, but something more fine-grained than a bounding box. It turns out we can."
So yes, they're just tracing around the points in their database to see what kind of shapes they will get, for the experiment of seeing how well they could represent a given (country, state, town) by connecting coordinates of photos taken closest to the real borders of those actual regions.
If they had used latitude/longitude + tags to generate this, then it would be super-cool indeed.
This is what I thought about while reading the article, but it doesn't appear to be what they did. It would be fun to try this, though, and probably wouldn't be that hard, either.
I'd be more interested in seeing the cases where this kind of thing fails. Surely there must be some?
Does New York have an outpost in Las Vegas surrounding the New York New York casino? Is Venice a bi-lobed city spread between northern Italy and southern California? Does Sydney exist primarily in Australia, but have a lot of tiny outposts surrounding all the places where girls called Sydney have posed for photographs?
Flickr, or almost any social network site - particularly with an Amazon style "real name" option - would be in a great position to geotemporally track names.
As of Q4 2008, this is the worldwide distribution of Hugh's, and you can see that name changing in poularity around the world as you drag the visualisation back to Q1 2003...
What a load of hype about nothing. All they are trying to do is fool the uneducated into thinking they have actually done something special. A very cheap marketing ploy.
They are the ones who specify which location geo-coded photos fall in to, so it is no surprise that when they over lay them on a map, they match the borders of the actual locations....
Flickr have reverse-engineered the technology to physically locate states. This information is no longer limited to a few select vendors who've signed NDAs and non-compete clauses.
Finally people can develop their own mapping applications that work with the existing statename / location combos. This means you will be able to tell where you are. I thought I was in London, which coincidentally turned out to be right when I checked on Flickr's new reverse-engineered 'map' technology, but it could have totally gone the other way.
Another application could be to monitor the spreading of plants and animals, or other memes (fashion sense, cars, etc.).
When I wrote the blog article, it was difficult to get GeoTag information out of flickr (no search option for "images with GeoTags"). Anyway, I wish more data was freely accessible...
So? How did the photos get marked "Texas" in the first place?