Archive: December 12th, 2007

At this year’s dConstruct, George treated us all to a sneak peak of a new location-based feature on Flickr designed to solve the sunset problem with Interestingness®. It’s launched a few weeks ago. It’s called Places and it’s basically a mashup of location and interestingness®. Kellan has written about it—revealing a nice secret feature—and Dan has given us an insight into the design of the URLs.

Like most people, the first thing I did was to look at my own town. I really like the “Featured Photographers” bit. That turns out to be especially useful or those places that bear watching for topical, rather than personal, reasons. Take a look at the page for Baghdad. It’s not quite citizen journalism—soldiers belong to a narrow band of citizenry—but it’s a great way of seeing pictures from the ground without the intervention of a media filter.

Speaking of interesting locations, Dopplr has now officially left Beta and opened up its doors to everyone. Like Tom, I’ve found it to be surprisingly useful. It’s already got some nice Flickr integration and Aaron has been playing around with some automated tagging between the two sites.