Geography and all that Jazz

A team from Cornell University has been mapping the location of the most photographed places on earth. The team of David Crandall, Lars Backstrom, Dan Huttenlocher and Jon Kleinberg used a data set of 35 million images taken from Flickr. Download the GOOGLE EARTH KML file to check them out... Check the website for some MAPS SHOWING LOCATIONS of the most photographed sites. Thanks to DavidBittern777 from SLN Forum for the tipoff... Also featured on the WIRED UK website - keep an eye out for the magazine... Images courtesy of http://www.cs.cornell.edu/~crandall/photomap/

An excellent audio-visual SLIDESHOW of a High Street, part of an excellent resource (try the tabs) on the BBC Magazine page. Living Geography is happening on your High Street right now. Why not go down there and come back with a photostory: no more than 5 images, capture your High Street, before it disappears .... I've set up a FLICKR GROUP called " The Disappearing High Street " , and kick started it with a few images from HUNSTANTON. Add your pictures...

Enjoy my new FLICKR set for those needing some shop images, or doing coastal resorts. How many of these shops are designed for tourists rather than residents ? You might be surprised...

Just renewed my FLICKR pro-account. This website has to be in the top 10 of any geography teacher's bookmarks. Over 2 billion images, many of them Creative Commons licensed... Feel free to use MY IMAGES. Don't forget you can put 200 images up for free and share them....

FLICKR is in my top 10 most useful websites: perhaps I should do my Top 10 Websites in a future post... A relatively new feature which people may not be aware of is the PLACES feature... This maps images that have been added to a map using the sites ORGANISE page. Below are some examples that I have just done: I added some images of Scarborough (and also of Hunstanton) - see if you can find them... Another search, this time for Rotherham, shows the way the PLACES pages look, and there is also a link to relevant groups. This will all lead to some excellent images for use in the classroom, which are often licensed for non-commercial use, with the correct attribution to the photographer. Have an explore and see what you come up with...

Flickr Update Flickr : one of my favourite websites has had an update...

Geography and Google Earth (Cont.) Sniffing and sneezing away as I write this. It's a good job you can't get a virus from your computer - well not that kind anyway. Anyway, this post contains a few things which I need to host on BLOGGER and FLICKR so that I can link to them from elsewhere (though you might find them useful anyway...) Also, here is an image which I need to host here as an example of how to add images to Google Earth placemarks. The image is of the favela of Rocinha in Rio de Janeiro and is one of hundreds of similar accumulations of housing and basic services. Marie Hart from Barnwell School in Stevenage sent me the image, and it is one of many which I shall shortly host on GeographyPages. Many thanks to Marie for sharing the images... The poster at the top was made at FLAGRANT DISREGARD's Flickr Tools site, which I've mentioned before. Technorati Tags: SAGT06

Geography and Photos Flickr is one of my crucial sites. It is a fantastic source of images for use in the classroom, although you may find that you need to source them at home as many schools filter out Flickr because not all of the images are SFW as they say (suitable for work) Try a search on TAGS which are relevant to your topic and you'll find lots of fodder for desktops, Powerpoints and PhotoJams. You can also bookmark your favourite FLICKR photographers. In the last few days I've searched for Svalbard, Beijing, Food, Lahars and Population. http://www.flickr.com Lots of tools for altering the images too. Check out one of my top five sites: the wonderfully named Flagrant Disregard's FlickrToys http://flagrantdisregard.com/flickr/ Geography and Japan Just watching fantastic "Journeys into the Ring of Fire" with Iain Stewart visiting Japan. It shows in a clear and well illustrated fashion how the Japanese have had to cope with extremes of climate and a lack of s...