Flickr Places launches

Flickr has launched Places where, if I can borrow a term from Lorcan, they are making their data work hard, providing a (dare I say it) portal to each location, with a map, temperature, time, popular tags, groups, and "interesting" photos (where photos are selected with a fairly complicated algorithm including explicitly mapped photos, along with photos that just have been tagged e.g. "ottawa", with interestingness metrics mixed in).

You can see this evolving in various fairly obvious social networking, travel, and discussion directions.

Check it out:

http://flickr.com/places/Canada/Ontario/Ottawa

They've also changed the map display for photos, the default global view now shows tags placed at locations, rather than just dots

http://www.flickr.com/map

Personally I find it's actually less intuitive to navigate their new interface than the all-dots one.