My greyhound can run faster than your honor student.

Friday, July 08, 2005

I just found the most amazing thing. First you have to install the free and amazing in itself Google Earth. This program alone will keep you entertained for hours. It lets you "fly" all over the world and zoom in and out of satellite and aerial images.

After you do that, right click on this link and select "Save Target As…" and save the small file to your desktop. When you double click it from your desktop, it will start Google Earth. What it does is link to any picture posted at Flickr.com that is within 100 km of where you are currently zoomed in on with Google Earth! It puts a little thumbnail image of that picture directly on the aerial photograph you are looking at. If you want to see the picture you just click on it.

For the pictures to show up the person that posts the picture has to geotag the image with its latitude and longitude, so not every picture will show up. More and more people are beginning to do this though, especially as more and more devices like cell phones have GPS receivers embedded. Eventually cameras will have GPS receivers installed and will automatically tag each picture with the exact location it was taken.

I predict this will be really big with current events. Local people at the scene of something, like the bombings in London, will snap pictures and post them at Flickr.com with the lat and longs in almost real-time. You will see events happen this way faster than by watching the news.

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