Prototypes
Photographic Portrait of the UK
[Made by BBC Staff]
Okay, so this is a prototype I built a while ago and doesn't currently use any BBC feeds. However, it could certainly be integrated with postcoder, and just seems to me to be the sort of thing the BBC should be doing.
So, why? Digital photography is hugely popular, and there are already many sites out there that allow you to organise your photos in all sorts of clever ways, but none that I've seen geographically.
On the other hand, there's the Degree Confluence Project, which gives a fascinating picture of the globe, but can only really be contributed to by a few people and all the easy confluence points are long gone.
So the idea was, reduce the scale, remove the need for expensive GPS hardware, and let everyone out there contribute to a photographic portrait of the UK with all those photographs being presented geographically with a fancy zoomable interactive map thingy. The scale would be much finer than shown in the prototype, I was originally thinking you'd need two different scales, one for 'countryside' and another for towns/cities, though this could be a challenge in the interface.
There are different angles that could be taken - an artistic one with photos being rated by users and maybe prizes for the best, or a more practical one, say you wanted to move house, you could explore photos people have taken of the areas you were interested in them to get a flavour before having to actually travel (which is where integration with postcoder could come in very handy). I'm sure there's more.
Of course the main feed needed here is geographic map data which is not something I'm aware of the BBC having. It'd be nice if it did though.
- 15 Apr 2005 10:31 AM
Nice idea, we've got a very similar slant on it here http://www.geograph.co.uk - open source, open content (nearly 9000 pics and growing). If you want to get involved in a development capacity, get in touch.