I’ve got a billion things to do before giving a workshop on digital photography and Flickr this evening at the Biblioteca Publica Piloto (come by if you’re around!), but this is way too cool to not comment on.
So, Dunstan Orchard, an avid Faceballer originally from England, but now living in San Francisco and working at Flickr, is walking down 16th street in the Mission neighborhood of San Francisco when he sees a note on the sidewalk which reads:
Ms Bradley,
I really do love you
—-. I need, I must
rest my —– sometime.you, STUPID
BITCH!?
Mr. Orchard photographs the note with his Blackberry RIM 8100 and sends it into Flickr.
Because Mr. Orchard’s Blackberry records geographic information about where the picture was taken, it automatically appears on Flickr’s map:
It also automatically appears on a new aggregator of local information called EveryBlock, which is how I first found it.
Along with much more: Lost & Found, Business Reviews, News Articles, Crimes, even Zoning agenda items. (Hell, you can even see a map of the graffiti that was recently cleaned in Brooklyn.
So far EveryBlock is available in Chicago, New York, and San Francisco.
When will it arrive to your city? Depends on where you live. If you’re in a major American city, probably soon. If you live here in Medellín, Colombia, who knows if ever. There are other hyperlocal geo aggregators like Outside.in, Yahoo’s OurCity (based in India), and YourStreet. There is also OpenStreetMap, a wikified map of the entire world led by my friend Mikel Maron.
But if you play around with all of those, I think it is undebatable that EveryBlock has the cleanest and most intuitive interface.
Like Rising Voices, EveryBlock is supported by a (much larger) grant from the Knight Foundation. Congratulations Adrian, Paul, Wilson, and Daniel. You guys have pulled off something beautiful and important.
