Science Library Pad

Helsinki University Main Library

I was fortunate to have a tour of the new Helsinki University Main Library (City Centre Campus).  Matti Hjerppe, Project Manager, gave me the tour.

The library opened September 3, 2012.

The design, with enormous specially-engineered glass walls on both street sides of the building, and open space with a central lightwell and staircase underneath a skylight, is very open and bright.  It was also packed with students.  There are interesting furniture designs (which I didn't photograph due to them being filled with the aforementioned students).  They have lots of open stacks, with various collections brought from several different source libraries.  If you have a chance, I recommend going up to the top floor patio.

The library is integrated with the city, with a department store and book cafe in the building.

The complete photo set is available on Flickr.

 

Previously:
September 12, 2012  OKFestival - tour the new City Centre Library
June 16, 2007  Stockholm City Library

metadata implicit and explicit in Tumblr

I wrote previously about Tumblr as a sharing-driven site, primarily used for photos.

Now that my Tumblr has been up for a while (it holds images I have licensed in the Creative Commons), I have more information about how Tumblr is used to share and tag photos.

You can think of Tumblr as a giant exercise in the crowdsourced assembly of photo collections.  People extract features that interest them, grouping photos in their own Tumblr streams.

So Tumblr has both explicit metadata, implicit metadata, official & unofficial collections, and social mechanisms for description and discovery.

For explicit metadata, Tumblr allows tags, creating a folksonomy of tags about an image (when you reblog an image, you can add your own tags).  You can also attach descriptive text to an image.

You can see both per-Tumblr tag views, e.g. http://rakerman.tumblr.com/tagged/books
as well as Tumblr-global tag views http://www.tumblr.com/tagged/books.  (Be aware that Tumblr has basically no concept of separating adult content, so take care when browsing even the most innocuous of tags.)  Search is entirely tag-based, e.g. when you enter "books" into the search box, it will return the tagged/books page.  It doesn't search the text in descriptions.  UPDATE 2011-06-23: Upon further examination it is not entirely clear how the search works.  Sometimes it returns hits that appear to be on description text, sometimes it returns hits for photos that don't appear to have any metadata at all.  ENDUPDATE

(Google does index the descriptive text, so you could search e.g. site:rakerman.tumblr.com reading.)

Tumblr also has (I presume manually-assembled) official collections for topics, e.g. http://www.tumblr.com/spotlight/books however these collections are not surfaced automatically in tag-based search (that is, if you search on books, it won't highlight the fact that there is also a books spotlight topic).

Where there is an additional layer of implict metadata is through the collections that people assemble themselves (to some extent using Tumblr to reblog photos in this way is one of the main use cases for the site).  For example, when I posted a picture of the Uppsala University Library it was discovered and reblogged by aveclivres, a Tumblr devoted to images with books in them.  (It was discovered even though I had no followers at the time, presumably by watching/searching the books tag.)

This particular image also gives a chance to see the "transclusion" reblogging effect, as a photo spreads in the Tumblrsphere.  It is last-in first-out, so it is essentially a most-recent-first activity stream specific to this photo (to this blog post, technically).

So in addition to the explicit metadata, we have the "collections" (aveclivres, bibliofila) that the post is in, which adds additional implicit metadata, "this is like these other objects in this collection".

"Reblogging" is like Twitter retweeting, and "liked"/favorites are similar to Twitter faves.  The reblogging mechanism is powerful as it lets the content spread, with popular images going viral in the same way that a popular tweet can go viral.

To some extent, this reblogging of images is a continuously running categorization "game" - more unstructured but also requiring less effort to create than a special online museum game site (see http://museumgames.pbworks.com/ for more information about this approach to online engagement).

Images present a special problem for categorization as unlike full-text it's much harder to use their contents for self-description except in a crude way ("mostly red", "lots of circles") - their "aboutness" requires human interpretation - interpretation which machines still struggle with, to the extent that image search mainly replies on surrounding context, user-supplied metadata, and image similarity.

The idea of posting images online for users to categorise is of course not new, it has happened through the Flickr Commons and other channels.  But Tumblr is a new way to tap into this user interest.

Tumblr has the concept of "following", which is also similar to Twitter - you see the stream of posts from people you follow on your dashboard, and it is one click from there to reblog or favourite a post you like.  In this way you can watch feeds of interest, giving a social channel for discovery of content.  In other ways Tumblr by default is not social in the way we think of traditional blogs - it doesn't have comments by default, and it has very limited mechanisms for feedback (the "ask me a question" option which allows for a question with a single response).

While Tumblr does provide powerful "Twitter for photography" features, its important to recognize that it is not a fully-featured photo management platform.  Here are some feature comparisons between Flickr and Tumblr.

Flickr has a multi-level access rights scheme per-photo (public, private, friends, family).  Tumblr is mainly for public blogging.

Flickr has a concept of adult ("unsafe") photos and "safe" public photos, with options to flag images.  Tumblr does not.  Tumblr has no advanced searching that will let you search only "safe" images.

Flickr records and exposes rich photo metadata, from date taken and location (if available) to the EXIF details about what camera was used, the exposure settings etc.  Tumblr does not surface any of these details, not even the date the image was taken.

Flickr has detailed per-photo rights information, including standard copyright and Creative Commons notices.  Tumblr does not.  You could apply a license to your entire Tumblr feed, but there are no built-in mechanisms to do so easily.

So be aware that in posting images to Tumblr you're moving from a personal photo collection environment where you have a lot of control about the individual photos and there is rich metadata, to basically a pure image sharing environment in Tumblr, where most if not all metadata is lost from the photo.

Tumblr is also about more than photos, it's a full microblogging environment where you can post text and video, but I've only looked at the photo aspect because its a common use of Tumblr.  There are lots of hybrid approaches as well, for example the US State Department Tumblr always features a prominent photo at the top, but has explanatory text as well.

UPDATE: Another great example of how Tumblr can provide infrastructure and a collection idea can go viral is http://dearphotograph.com/ -  the idea of overlaying old photos on top of current scenes.  A June 20, 2011 Globe and Mail article discusses how the idea started and the sudden spike of popularity for the site.  ENDUPDATE

UPDATE 2011-06-22: http://www.tumblr.com/explore is another way to discover top tags and content.  ENDUPDATE

UPDATE 2011-06-28: Tumblr has added the option to display basic photo EXIF metadata (and presumably could support richer EXIF metadata).  ENDUPDATE

Previously:
November 8, 2008  billions of photos

Tumblr photo blogs - transclusion goes mainstream

Tumblr is a quick way to set up a blog, particularly an image-based blog (one that is mostly photo posts).

Ted Nelson's vision of hypertext (Xanadu) included the concept of transclusion - everything would be linked back to an original source, with a full citation trail, rather than copy & pasted.  Transclusion turns out to be hard to do for complex things, so we basically didn't do it.  Even a block quote is just copy & pasted text, with the onus on the author of the HTML page to embed the correct links back to the source.

Tumblr gets you to transclusion quickly without knowing you are doing it.  In some ways this is an extension of the retweet and modified tweet (RT and MT) that we see in Twitter - trails of pointers back to the original source.  As with the new style Twitter, the metadata is created automatically when you click (Retweet for Twitter, Reblog for Tumblr).

Tumblr does a much better job of explicitly surfacing this metadata however, leading to popular photos that have incredibly long chains back to the source, showing the originator (at the very bottom), and crediting the secondary sources that it was picked up from.

So you start out with e.g.

* scilib posted this

and then it builds

* Bob reblogged this from scilib
* Sue reblogged this from Bob
* Alice liked this

all in one long unbroken chain (assuming everyone is using the Reblog or Favorite button)

Tumblr as a whole (all *.tumblr.com sites or custom-domain sites backended by Tumblr) surpassed 250 million page views per day (reported on May 17, 2011). 

It's easy to use with a particular emphasis on sharing, which tends to reach better the majority of people who like to share but don't necessarily create many images themselves.  Its focus on easy sharing (and good viewing experience e.g. on the iPad) make it a much more powerful sharing platform than Flickr.

Flickr is really focused on helping you maintain and tag your own gallery of photos, but pretty poor at helping you to share them or discover others (within the site).  Flickr does now let you easily link images to a Tumblr blog though.

These various characteristics (along with many other features I haven't covered) have led to Tumblr being adopted by some government organisations.  You can find some here

http://www.tumblr.com/spotlight/politics

mixed in with other political opinion tumblrs.  A few key ones are:

• http://blog.usa.gov/
• http://statedept.tumblr.com/ (official US State Department presence)
• http://todaysdocument.tumblr.com/ (from the US National Archives)

I think experimenting in this space is entirely appropriate - the nature of the web continues to evolve.  The current engagement levels with content appear to be low though (you can see the number of "notes", which combines reblogs and faves, on each posting).

To better understand some of the context around using Tumblr in the government, read Measured Voice's post Why We Recommended Tumblr for the New USA.gov Blog.  Their core point was "an interface that encourages sharing and interaction".

In general reblog & like tend to be the main methods of engagement, as they are built-in.  Beyond that Tumblr has very minimal communications features, with an asked-answered single question system.  There is no commenting by default - you can add a comment when you reblog something, but there is no discussion thread attached to a post, although one can be added, as blog.usa.gov does.

When everything is working well, you see both traditional network behavior, in which a posting may stumble along with a few hits until it gets reblogged by a supernode, followed by a flood of likes and reblogs, as well as global attention behavior, where the reblogs and likes sweep around the globe from east to west as parts of the world awake and fall asleep.

In case you're wondering how the discovery takes place, the Tumblr dashboard is sort of like a tweetstream - it shows postings from people you follow, updated continuously.  Your Tumblr dashboard becomes a bit like an RSS reader for the Tumblogs you follow, except with much more emphasis on the streaming nature, rather than trying to make sure you don't miss a single post.

I'm doing simple experiment just to see whether using Tumblr helps photos circulate more widely, by starting to post my Flickr Creative Commons licensed images to http://rakerman.tumblr.com/

As you can imagine, there are lots of potential issues with copyrighted images being endlessly reproduced, although at least as long as the original source is the creator (which is not always the case) there is an advantage in that the endless reproductions are tracked in detail.

billions of photos

Facebook says

we've added 20% more photo servers and 50% more upload servers to process this year's Halloween traffic. We've also packed in 40 terabytes of additional storage (that's 40,000,000,000,000 bytes). By comparison, the words of all 20 million books in the Library of Congress could be digitized in about 20 terabytes of text. So we're making room for the equivalent of two Libraries of Congress.

The popularity of Facebook's photo application, home of more than 10 billion photos, has compelled us to think big for a while.

Click or Treat: Halloween Photo Bonanza - Facebook blog - October 31, 2008

Wow, that's a lot of photos of drunk college students...

It's also an order of magnitude increase from last year.  In an infrastructure posting from 2007, they said

We have:

    * 1.7 billion user photos
    * 2.2 billion friends tagged in user photos
    * 160 terabytes of photo storage used with an extra 60 terabytes available
    * 60+ million photos added each week which take up 5 terabytes of disk space
    * 3+ billion photo images served to users every day
    * 100,000+ images served per second during our peak traffic windows

Facebook Photos Infrastructure - Facebook blog - May 21, 2007

I discovered the Facebook has a Statistics page in its press area

* More than 120 million active users

* More than 10 billion photos uploaded to the site
* More than 30 million photos uploaded daily

Let's see 30x30 = almost a billion photos a month, so yeah, the math works out.

Flickr, photo-sharing darling (which always has had a buzz disproportionate to its actual number of users and photos, due its "look, folksonomy stuff" usefulness for the technorati), Flickr reports its 3 billionth photo.

Take the pinky of either your left or right hand, hold it next to the corner of your mouth and say “3 beelleeeeon photos…”

3 Billion! - Flickr blog - November 3, 2008

I don't think any of us quite know what it means to have photos at the giga-scale, using storage in the tera- and peta-scale.  (It's quite possible evolution has not equipped us to think at such scales, although it appears the Maya were quite comfortable thinking about time at the mega- and even giga-year scales.)

UPDATE: As libraries, we also need to think about what this means in terms of our position as information managers.  Pre-digital, the central library in your town or city probably did contain the largest (or nearly the largest) collection and concentration of information available to you.  My organisation has millions of items (articles mostly) that it can make available to thousands of patrons.  But compare that to billions of items and tens or hundreds of millions of patrons.  Or compare that to home users who may have terabytes of storage and tens of thousands of photos.  Can libraries still claim to be the centre of knowledge management expertise when they are tiny players in the digital environment?

Photosynth is next photo revolution

It's not often that I'm impressed by new things that my computer can do - Google Earth was the last application I considered truly revolutionary.

However, Microsoft's Photosynth is to me the next groundbreaking application.  It takes photos taken at all different angles and levels of zoom, and reconstructs a complete three-dimensional scene.  It does this through local computation - I can't imagine how complex the algorithms must be.  And it works amazingly well - I uploaded a set of photos of a building viewed from street level, looking up, and from building-top level, looking down, and it integrated them correctly.  For a 30-photo set, it didn't even take very long, just a few minutes to process the entire "Synth".

There are some caveats: Windows only for now (unsurprisingly), XP and Vista.  This includes the viewer.  (The software does, however, run fine in Firefox 3 on Windows).  You can't view the scenes locally, the only option is to upload to the Photosynth site.

Also, Photosynth was massively overloaded yesterday and had to shut down, it will be interesting to see how they handle the load in the days and weeks to come.

But enough about that, here are a couple Synths I made

A simple panorama of Florence (Firenze) - not much different than existing pano software can produce

http://photosynth.net/view.aspx?cid=647b73f0-9549-4fa3-adc7-93e509517ffc

A Synth built from 30 photos of the Duomo - it didn't quite manage to connect the Campanile with the rest of the building, but otherwise quite impressive.  Use "play" (the standard play arrow, in the bottom "leaf" of the interface in the upper right of the Synth) to get the full tour through the scene it built.

http://photosynth.net/view.aspx?cid=9cb03c3e-3c57-4fbb-8b52-c83afedaa294

UPDATE: You can also imagine where this starts to go - there are already multiple synths of Florence and the Duomo - you can imagine making a metaSynth by combining them all.  Eventually, you would end up with a complete 3D model for any heavily photographed area, and in fact probably for most urban areas in the world.  It could become sort of like a crowdsourced version of Google's Street View.  (Currently the geotagging abilities of Photosynth are quite rudimentary, but with some minor enhancements you can see it would save a lot of compute time in terms of finding overlapping and adjacent synths.)

Previously:
November 11, 2006  3D photo environment - MS Photosynth Tech Preview

citizen science: camera in space

Some amazing images from a $1000 consumer camera sent 30+ km up into space on a sounding balloon as part of a Oklahoma State University project.  (Can't show the images here as they are all rights reserved.)

Check out Pentax k10d in Space - Flickr Blog - July 28, 2008

Previously:
September 05, 2007  schoolteacher's balloon photographs edge of the earth (unrelated project)

tagcloud on your cellphone

All About Symbian showing the new tag cloud in the Photos app on the Nokia N96.

i need that stat: Flickr adds stats, Google Analytics updates

Flickr has added stats for Pro Accounts with pretty charts and whatnot, you have to activate it though.

Google Analytics has also updated their stats charting abilities.  You'll have to update the JavaScript they provide (on your pages) in order to get the increased capabilities.

Great, more statscrack for hit addicts.

What do you mean, I have to wait until tomorrow for my Flickrstats to be processed?  I need my fix now...

Whew, nevermind, trembling madness averted:

In addition to hit stats, Flickr also provides a nice breakdown of photo attributes (tagged/not tagged, geocoded/not geocoded, etc.) - it doesn't show photo vs. screenshot through, which would be a useful one.

Since the new stats provide time-based analysis (including down to the individual photo level - just click on  "Photo stats" on a photo's page), it will be a lot easier to get a sense of the changing popularity of your photos - just the raw numbers tended to distort things, as you may get photos that are popular for a couple days and then never clicked on again.

It occurs to me another interesting breakdown would be to see where your Creative Commons photos have been linked / blogged from (and where your fully copyrighted, no public rights photos have been posted, if you're into laying on the smackdown).  As well it would be interesting to be able to see whether CC-licensed photos get more traffic on average than no rights ones.

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.

schmappy travels

Schmap has an interesting approach to getting photos for their online travel guides: they have a nice online permissions system where they send you a message along the lines of "we'd like to use your photo with permission" and you go and click yes or no.  It's something that wouldn't have been possible without the current wealth of online content.  They've used three of my photos (with permission):

http://www.schmap.com/newyork/sights_brooklyn/#p=38513&i=38513_1.jpg

http://www.schmap.com/copenhagen/tours_tour3/#p=58898&i=58898.jpg

http://www.schmap.com/toronto/tours_tour1/#p=19510&i=19510_3.jpg

schoolteacher's balloon photographs edge of the earth

While surfing the net two years ago, the 41-year-old Albertan came across some visually stunning photographs of the Earth from way, way up that a man from California had captured in the 1990s, all with a big balloon and a "regular old" camera.

Mr. Rafaat's imagination soared.

...

Using a Kaysam weather balloon (bought as part of six-pack from New Jersey), a used Nikon Coolpix P2 digital camera purchased off eBay, and a global positioning system tracking device, Mr. Rafaat and two of his balloon-enthusiast friends, Barry Sloan and James Ewen, released SABLE-3 (Southern Alberta Balloon Launch Experiment) at 9:31 a.m. on Aug. 11. The camera - set to take photos at one-minute intervals - and the GPS were put into a Styrofoam box. That payload, built by Mr. Rafaat's Grade 7 science class, was affixed to a parachute, the parachute to the helium-filled balloon.

Globe and Mail - A view from the stratosphere - September 5, 2007

SABLE-3 (Note: site is slow)

For electronics they're using a Byonics Micro-Trak 300 transmitter (it's not a data logger).  Presumably attached to one of the Byonics GPS modules.  UPDATE 2007-11-10: In the comments they indicate the GPS is from SparkFun.

GPS loggers and Macs: why can't we all get along?

The state of the union between inexpensive GPS loggers and the Mac is not so good improving.

As far as I know:

• The AMOD AGL3080 mounts as a USB drive on Mac, Windows, and Linux, and is therefore fully compatible.
• The Sony GPS-CS1 / GPS-CS1KA will mount as a USB drive but only on Intel Macs running OS X 10.4.9 and 10.4.10 (it doesn't work under Leopard 10.5 or 10.5.1) and is fully supported under Mac OS X 10.5.3 ONLY
  • However note: the GPS-CS1 is obsolete.  The new model that replaces it, the Sony GPS-CS3KA mounts as a USB drive under Mac OS X without any problems.  Tested with OS X 10.4.11
• The Globalsat DG-100 uses a serial interface protocol and only works on Windows
  • there is an initiative to get it to work using gpsbabel
  • there is an initiative to get it to work using LoadMyTracks
  • a combination of C code and a USB driver is reported to work on a Mac
• The Qstarz BT Q-1000 only works on Windows is supported on Windows, and on Mac using BT747.  (I have reviewed this GPS logger.)
• The Holux M-241 also works on a Mac using BT747, including over Bluetooth.  (I have reviewed the M-241.)
• The Wintec WBT-201 / 200 / 100 is supported via gpsbabel on a Mac.  This support is also incorporated into HoudahGeo for the Mac.
• The GISTEQ PhotoTrackr and PhotoTrackr Lite only work on Windows is supported on Windows with GISTEQ's own software, and on Mac with a version of JetPhoto.  (I have reviewed this GPS logger.)

Support efforts:

• Sony GPS-CS1 for Mac
• Boris Mann wants to use used Crowd Clout to buy at least 5 Globalsat DG-100s and (I think) gave one to the LoadMyTracks developers so they can make the software compatible.
• Hexten has info about the WBT-201 compatibility developed for gpsbabel.
• gpsbabel is also working on DG-100 support
• BT747 supports i-Blue, iTrek, and Qstarz, and the Holux M-241 GPS loggers on the Mac and other platforms (note: I have only tested Qstarz BT-Q1000 and Holux M-241 compatibility)
• Kevin Jaako has modified Mirko Parthey's dg100.c code, and successfully compiled and run it on a Mac (using a Prolific USB driver from SourceForge)

I suggest:
* Get Semsons connected with Mac GPS driver developers, in particular, free units to gpsbabel developers (which has the advantage of being cross-platform, so many users benefit, not just Mac users).

* Someone buy Steve Jobs a GPS and get him into geocoding photos.  Or convince him to put GPS-compatible mapping in the next generation of iPhone / iPhoto / MacBook / OS X and his reality-distortion strange attractor field will have developers clambering over one another to make their devices compatible.

UPDATE 2007-08-15: A question from me about Mac support for GPS loggers has now been posted to Macintouch

Also as you can see in the comments below, Mac support for the DG-100 in gpsbabel may be coming.  Please lend your support to these efforts if you can.

UPDATE 2007-11-20:  Updated info above based on Sony GPS-CS1 for Mac blog (Leopard and 10.4.11) and additional comments.

UPDATE 2007-11-23: See Sony GPS Logger On The Go - bridge to your Mac for one possiblity to use the Sony GPS-CS1 with a Mac or any other device that supports USB storage.

UPDATE 2007-12-21: It is reported that new versions of the Amod AGL3080 GPS Data Logger (SiRF III, Driverless, 128MB, Push to Log) (Windows and Mac Image Software included) are working well (there had been some GPS sensitivity issues as reported in a number of reviews).  It supports Windows and Mac out of the box, it works like a USB memory key (the same as the Sony GPS-CS1).

UPDATE 2008-01-03: AMOD is offering 4 AGL3080s for review by Mac users only.  First come, first serve.

UPDATE 2008-01-08: All four AMOD units have now been sent, the offer is now closed.

UPDATE 2009-02-16: Apple did in fact add GPS-compatible mapping to iPhoto 09.

manually geocoding photos on a Mac with GraphicConverter 6 and Google Earth

The new GraphicConverter 6 ($35 new or $20 upgrade for this venerable and invaluable Mac app) has an option to manually geocode photos, but it is so well-hidden I suspect few people will find it.

UPDATE 2009-01-06: The geotagging interface and capabilities of GraphicConverter 6.2 are considerably different, I will post an updated review.  The new version includes the ability to automatically geotag photos using a GPX track.  ENDUPDATE

1. Download GraphicConverter 6 and Google Earth Mac

2. Install the GraphicConverter Contextual Menu (this will come up as an install option, or you can do it from the menu GraphicConverter->Preferences... Plugins

You have to logout and back in, or reboot, for the contextual menu to activate the first time.
As far as I can tell, the Contextual Menu only appears in the GraphicConverter browser
File->Browse Folder...

3. Launch GraphicConverter browser.
Launch Google Earth and position your cursor at the precise location you want to geocode.
Switch back to GraphicConverter (e.g. using Apple key and Tab to switch applications).
Select photo(s) to geocode.
Select terribly-named menu item (right button contextual menu) "Set GPS from current Google Earth position" (it really should say "Set GPS-EXIF ...").

(You'll probably need to click through the above screen capture and look at the large image to read the menu clearly.)

Photos with GPS-EXIF have a little world icon in the upper right of their browser thumbnail.
You're supposed to be able to view geocoded photos in Google Earth using menu item "Show Position in Google Earth"

but I couldn't get it to work.

I know there are other tools out there (it would be nice if this was built-in to iPhoto 08, but I haven't seen any info about that).  You're welcome to list other Mac or web tools in the comments, I also have some of them listed on my geocoding photos page.  I thought it was worthwhile going through GraphicConverter since it's a very common/popular Mac image editor and the GPS-EXIF feature is really buried and obscured.

For Windows, there is a much nicer and easier manual workflow using Picasa and Google Earth.

UPDATE 2008-01-10: I have reviewed the Mac program HoudahGeo, as suggested in the comments.

linking Flickr to Upcoming - SciFoo 2007 example

If you add the magic tag

upcoming:event=202683

to your Science Foo Camp photos, Flickr will automatically show a link that says

    Taken at Science Foo Camp.

and the photo will appear on the Upcoming event page as well.

I guess you just grab the number from the Upcoming page URL - in my case, I just noticed this feature and copied the info from Duncan Hull.

GPS on a plane 2: San Francisco - Toronto - Ottawa

I have been interested in small, inexpensive GPS loggers mainly for geocoding photos.
My current fave is the Globalsat DG-100, despite its terrible software.
(It has the SIRFstar III chipset, which is sensitive enough to do this.  SIRFstar II may not be able to, at least I've never been able to get a lock on a plane using my Sony GPS.)

I have been interested to see if I can capture entire plane flights, including geocoding photos that I take in the air.  This is possible.

Please note however:
1) Ask the flight crew for permission (well, at least once per airline, anyway)
2) The logger I use is self-contained.  If you have a Bluetooth logger, or some other kind with some transmission facility, you may not be allowed to use it.  Only a few airlines permit Bluetooth, and I don't think any of them permit it during takeoff and landing

You have to be next to a window, the GPS needs a good sky view.  I usually hold it in my hand about 10-15 cm below and to an angle to the window during takeoff and landing, the rest of the time it can just sit on your seat tray.  You can see examples of the positioning at the bottom of this post.

So, what do you get?

Google Earth can read GPX files directly, this is the result of loading San Francisco to Toronto.
Just to emphasize, this is real data from my GPS.  There's a little leg there on the SF side which is my taxi ride from Mountain View.

If you want to get fancier, GPS Visualizer.com can take GPX files and do all sorts of cool things with them, including colouring by altitude or by speed, as well as making time-based tracks for Google Earth to play.

People often complain about GPS altitude estimation, but it looks fairly reasonable to me, 11000 metres.  The speed estimates on the other hand were way off, it estimated the plane was going like mach 3 if I read the numbers right.

I imagine the relative speed information is correct though.

Here's a view of my Toronto to Ottawa flight coloured by speed

And here's the same flight with Google Earth tilted, with a track produced using GPS Vis setting "Altitude: Absolute (flight)"

How accurate is it?  Well here's me landing in Toronto (cyan line)

And here's what I think is an amazingly cool comparison of a view in Google Earth compared with a photo whose geocoding tells me it was taken in the same spot

Google Earth, with geoposition of photo taken indicated within the screen cap, full photo below.  The zigzag road makes it pretty obvious they are images of the same location, one (probably) satellite, the other taken by me this morning

Positioning of GPS:

I will upload the GPX and KMZ track info later, so you can load the tracks into Google Earth yourself if you want.

Previously:
June 24, 2007  GPS on a plane

in the age of geoinformation

You may wonder what interests me about automated geotagging of photos using a GPS.
There are a couple things.
One is that I can see the tracks of where I've walked (or ridden on the train, or flown).
The other is that I can learn more about what I photographed.

I'm walking around Paris, I see a church with a motto GLORIA DEO * PAX TERRAE

That's cool.  Snap a photo.

I have no idea what church it is.

Get home, georeference it automatically, and now I'm in Google Earth

So that's cool, now I know where I was, and I can see the beautiful cross-shape of the church.
But what church?
Turn on Geographic Web... no help.
Turn on Google Earth Community... aha!

It's the E‰glise Saint-Nicolas-du-Chardonnet (website, Wikipedia).

In a sense, physical objects can now tell you about themselves, as in Vinge's Rainbows End.

But it's quite a delayed process.
What I should be able to do is load my phone or camera's multi-gig memory up with map info (or download live info, if I didn't have outrageous data charges) and do this in real time.  But unfortunately Google Maps Mobile seems to have no concept of running as a nice generic Java mobile app that can talk to my GPS (e.g. on my K790 phone using Bluetooth GPS), Google Maps Mobile instead is all locked up with specific carriers and phones, and I don't think it will let you download maps in advance.  j2memap for some reason only pulls in satellite views, not street name views or enhanced geographic info.  Hmm, if only I had a chance to talk to someone at Google...

(This posting for Colin, geothinking author.)

More info and thoughts along these lines in my Mapping category and on my geocoding photos page.

the New York Times also gets it wrong on photo geocoding

The Nikon D2X, the company’s current top-of-the-line SLR model ($5,100), works with an optional MC-35 GPS Adapter cord ($139) that connects with a standard G.P.S. receiver (which you must also buy) to automatically save location coordinates with each photograph.

But G.P.S. is starting to show up among lower-priced cameras. The new Ricoh 500SE (about $1,000), a point-and-shoot model aimed at outdoor enthusiasts, has a built-in G.P.S. device. It’s even showing up on camera phones, including the Nokia N95, though the $749 price is still a bit steep.

New York Times - Snapshots That Do More Than Bore Friends - June 10, 2007

via EveryTrail Blog

Yes, to be fair, in various places I have written about or linked to these high-end products, but I have also tried repeatedly to emphasize that for those of us without thousands of dollars to spare you can accomplish great automatic photo geocoding with a $100 GPS logger.  I think maybe I need to emphasize that point more.

Previously:
June 28, 2007  Wired gets it wrong on geocoding photos

news video on photo geocoding

CBS 5 KPIX San Francisco has a video report on photo geocoding (there's a brief ad at the beginning).

via EveryTrail Blog

all Linnaeus, all the time

This year somehow has had threads of Linnaeus, Lamarck and the Jardin des Plantes (botanical garden) running through it.

When I was visiting the Jardin in 2004, the rather grand building at the end of the promenade was of course unmissable

but I have to say I didn't really think about what it might be.

I made a point of returning to the garden in April of 2007 but I still only used the building as a photo backdrop

It wasn't until I read Paris to the Moon in May, post-visit, that I realized there were exhibits in the grand buildings, and it wasn't until later that month when I read Everything is Miscellaneous that I discovered that Lamarck had been a professor at the institution that includes the grand garden buildings, the Muséum national d'histoire naturelle.

A week after that, at the very end of May, I pointed to Linnaeus and his passion for order, in National Geographic.

Then in June I found myself at the IATUL conference in Sweden, with a day-trip to Uppsala, and of course, having not really paid attention to the details of the excursion and the location beforehand, it wasn't until I got there that I realized there would be a great deal about Linnaeus, since he was Chair of Botany at Uppsala University (Uppsala universitet), plus which it's the 300th anniversary of his birth.  He's buried in Uppsala Cathedral (Uppsala domkyrka) - the tomb, inset in the floor, is surrounded by small plants and flowers.  There was also an exhibit at Carolina Rediviva, the main building of the Uppsala University library.

Although there weren't many display cases, the exhibit was most ably described by our guide, who if I understood correctly also happens to be the head of the library.  I learned that as part of his system of the world, Linn had also had a classsification for minerals, but it didn't catch on.

Then we went to Linnaeus' Hammarby, which was his summer cottage.  Unless you are particularly fascinated by rooms in a cottage, there's not that much to see there, although the grounds are pleasant.

You can read more about the Swedish celebrations of his life and work at

http://www.linnaeus2007.se/

And as the conclusion of my Swedish Linnaeus thread, I received the book Carl Linnaeus as a speaker gift.

Back in Paris for a day, I walked to the Jardin des Plantes, determined to finally explore the natural history museum.  To my surprise, I found myself on Linnaeus Street

The Grande Galerie de l'Évolution really is quite grand

You can see the Minerology Museum just to the left of it.

Inside the Gallery is a large open space, dimly lit, with animal reconstructions as its main focus.

The centre of the Gallery is given over to a grand procession of African animals.

There are also book displays (I don't know if they are the original books) of the writings of Lamarck (first, naturally) and then Darwin.

It's hard to convey a good sense of the interior, but I can at least say that on a warm day where tourists were presumably clambering over themselves at the main Parisian attractions, the gallery was cool and (perhaps sadly) quiet.

Wired gets it wrong on geocoding photos

Wired's otherwise admirable piece on Google Maps/Earth

Google Maps Is Changing the Way We See the World

has this oddly misleading sidebar:

Pinpointed Photography

Organizing vacation pics would be so much easier if you could remember exactly where you took each one. The Ricoh 500SE can help: This 8-megapixel digicam comes with a built-in GPS receiver that notes longitude and latitude in the file every time you fire up the shutter. (Programs like Google Maps can decode them.) Not ready to drop $1,100? Try a lower-tech workaround: Follow your photos with snapshots of the readout from a cheap GPS unit and type in the coordinates later as tags on Flickr. As GPS becomes more of a must-have feature, you'll see this kind of kung fu embedded in all your gadgets. Imagine checking your computer to see exactly where you left your glasses.

Now I know sidebars can never fit in all you want, but giving as the two options a $1000 camera and a manual process seem to have left out a more practical middle ground, the one I use: a $100 GPS logger plus some software.  See my geocoding photos page for more info.

Maybe I should take Polaroids and stick them on a map with pushpins and string, a la Heros.
Actually, come to think of it, that would be kind of cool.

EXPIRED - Writing photo location in pen on the back of the print

TIRED - Typing coordinates into Flickr

WIRED - automatic geocoding with inexpensive GPS loggers and timestamp matching

geocoded photos now in PicasaWeb

PicasaWeb, the Google web photo gallery, has now got improved metadata features, including supporting geocoded photos (although it is not clear from their blog posting, it will read the EXIF-GPS for the exact location, if available).

See e.g. a photo I took in Regent's Park

http://picasaweb.google.com/scilib/2007_06_19/photo#map

There is also a one-click link to view the photos in Google Earth.

via Flickr Geotagging group

If you want more info about this topic, I have a page on geocoding photos.

A couple notes:

• you can upload to PicasaWeb directly from inside Picasa
• You can manually geocode from within Picasa and PicasaWeb

Stockholm City Library (photo)

Another pic I have just placed in the Creative Commons

Uppsala University Library / Carolina Rediviva (photo)

Today's donation to the Commons

National Library of Sweden (photo)

Here's my contribution to the Commons for today:

Personally I think they should still call it the Royal Library, but I suppose that's up to, you know, the entire nation of Sweden.

JetBlue airline seatback Google Maps and photo contest

JetBlue Airways Corporation (Nasdaq:JBLU) today announces a partnership with Google Maps to provide customers with a real-time flight tracking channel on its signature seatback televisions to map the aircraft's route. To celebrate, the low-fare, high-frills airline is launching a "JetBlue Point of View" photo contest(a), inviting customers to share their own summer travel routes on a Google Maps mash-up on www.jetblue.com/google

...

The moving map feature will be located on channel 13 of JetBlue's in-seat satellite television system, provided by LiveTV. In addition to in-flight tracking, customers can also refer their friends, family and loved ones to www.jetblue.com, where their flights can be tracked live using Google's technology online, including the flight's estimated departure and arrival times.

investor.jetblue.com - JetBlue Airways Announces Partnership With Google Maps to Provide Real-Time Flight Tracking Feature

how to enter:

       1. Take photos from the window of any JetBlue flight (when advised by your Inflight Crew that it’s okay to use electronic devices) between June 4 and September 3 [2007]. Please amateur photographers only

(residents of the continental US only)

I always feel a bit awkward taking photos through my airplane window, like I'm breaking some rule - this is the first time I've heard of an airline specifically requesting it.  I'd really like to capture some GPS tracks on a plane as well, but I always imagine trying to explain to the airplane staff something like "I'm holding this small plastic box with flashing LEDs up to the fragile window of the plane to communicate with satellites in order to determine our exact position" and I can never come up with a scenario in which it turns out well.

via gadling
via Digg