MapMixr
| Wednesday, August 27th, 2008 | --Sean |
I've got a MapMixer t-shirt, but it's hard to tell what else quantifiable has come out of the project. Not saying that it's not a super-cool idea and implementation, but that's sort of the problem -- I haven't seen it really getting integrated anywhere else across the network, and that's a shame.
As usual, Flickr comes charging to the rescue! I can't exactly tell if it's the same technology, but Flickr's custom tiling is at least a close spiritual successor. For big events like the Burning Man (previous link) or the Beijing Olympics, which are magnets for interesting geotagged photos but which take place in locales for which we don't have exceptional map coverage, the Flickr team can overlay Creative Commons licensed maps and add those critical visual cues to make it simple for users to place photos at the right spot. Again, I don't know how it's done on the backend, but it's still hugely gratifying to see such a good mapping idea finally getting into the mix.