Stuck on Earth? What a Nice Place to Be

Flickr maps are probably one of the most overdone types of Google Maps mashup. Therefore I very rarely post them on Google Maps Mania any more. Stuck on Earth, however, is a thing of great beauty and deserves an honourable mention.

Stuck on You is an iPad travel guide application. The app itself works on the simple premise that most users of travel guides mostly look at the photographs and think 'I want to go there". The app therefore allows the user to explore the world through beautiful photography.

Stuck On Earth uses photography shared on Flickr. You can follow individual photographers that you like via the app and you can even submit your own photographs. Whilst browsing the app you can create individual trips based on your favourite locations and all saved trips can be accessed even when offline.

Via: TNW

Create a Real-Time Flickr Google Map

.net magazine has published a great tutorial on how to create a real-time animated Flickr map. The tutorial was written by James Christian and Ben Gannaway the creators of the excellent Net-a-Porter Live Google Map.

The tutorial explains how to create a Google Map that animates in near real-time through images posted on Flickr. The tutorial includes how to work with the Flickr API and how to customise the look of your map.

Alongside the tutorial is a demo map and a link to download the full source code.

Integrate Google Maps and Flickr into a Real-Time App

________________

Flickr Boundaries on Google Maps

Boundaries

This Google Map of Flickr's crowdsourced boundaries is great fun as it allows you to check your notion of area boundaries with Flickr's crowdsourced definition.

Photo sharing website Flickr suggests a selection of place names when users geotag their pictures. These place names are used by Flickr to compute the shape of geographical areas. These area boundaries are then feedback into Flickr to help suggest those place names to users when they geo-tag their photographs.

Tom Taylor has created a Google Map that users can search to view Flickr's area boundaries anywhere in the world. Tom says that "whilst the shapes of places and neighbour results can be inaccurate, in areas of dense Flickr activity such as urban city centres, the results are often excellent."

As Tom points out on his site geographic identifiers are often very fluid. People often have different ideas about the boundary of areas than that held by local and national government, postal agencies and other parties. Using Boundaries you can compare your ideas of an area to those held by 'the cloud'.

_______________________

The Elephant Parade on Google Maps

The Elephant Parade

It's not often I get the chance to post a map showing the location of 250 elephants.

In London, a conservation campaign called Elephant Parade from www.elephantfamily.org, has enlisted 250 artists and celebrities to decorate 250 elephants and then place them all around the city. The aim of the campaign it to help raise awareness of the plight of the Asian elephant.

The murphyzVille blog has gone all big game hunter and has managed to track down the location of all 250 elephants, captured the elephant's digital image and posted the geo-tagged photograph on this Google My Map.

If you want, you can also view the photographs without the map in this Flickr set.

________________

Flickr Time-Line Google Map

Flickr Time Photolayer

This is an interesting mashup of Google Maps and Flickr using the SIMILE Widgets Timeline component.

The map allows the user to view Flickr images for any location in the world. If you don't like the latest photographs for your location then you can use the time-line above the map to view Flickr photographs uploaded on different dates.

This addition of the time-line means that you can search for photographs for particular locations on specific dates, such as Washington on the day of President Obama's inauguration or Greenwich Park on the day of the London Marathon.

________________